Category: Barack Obama

by Smitty

So, after all the Individual Mandate faffing about, Hot Air reports that as many as 90% may not get nicked with a penalty (for now):

The Obama administration has provided 14 ways people can avoid the fine based on hardships, including suffering domestic violence, experiencing substantial property damage from a fire or flood, and having a canceled insurance plan. Those come on top of exemptions carved out under the 2010 law for groups including illegal immigrants, members of Native American tribes and certain religious sects…
. . .
Critics have assailed one exemption for people who “experienced another hardship obtaining health insurance” as too broad. That exemption asks for documentation if possible but doesn’t require it.

To summarize, Obama is taking your liberty and training you to accept being spared the whip as an ersatz liberty substitute.
In defense of Obama, if the American people are retarded enough to stand for this, then DOOM ON US.

by Smitty

Pres’ent Obama has simply carried through:
In the pre-transformed America, it was understood that the Commies had infiltrated Hollywood and academia. No one really expected subversion of the IRS:

To summarize: The IRS (famed for nitpicking and prosecuting the tax law), chose to authorize hundreds of billions of illegal subsidies without having performed a smidgen of legal due diligence, and did so at the direction of political taskmasters. The agency’s actions provided aid and comfort to elected Democrats, even as it disenfranchised millions of Americans who voted in their states to reject state-run exchanges. And Treasury knows how ugly this looks, which is why it initially stonewalled Congress in its investigation—at first refusing to give documents to investigators, and redacting large portions of the information.

These dots on the financial rigging side connect just as we hear that, on the drafting side, the shenanigans were just as wretched:

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn reached out to Jonathan Gruber to get his reaction to the emergence of the Nobilis video in which the architect of ObamaCare explains that the restriction of subsidies to states with their own exchanges was a rational attempt to coerce states into creating those exchanges, rather than shifting the burden back to the federal government. Gruber calls that “a speak-o — you know, like a typo”

In defense of the Democrats, we have tolerated and permitted our politics to reach this sordid state. The sovereignty of We the People is being migrated over to the executive branch in two ways:

• initially burying decision making in a series of multi-ream legislative reamings, of which the Affordable Care Act is merely the most infamous example, and,
• subsequently rewriting those words as required either through regulation or, in the unusual case of the ACA, at the SCOTUS.

It’s a cliché to say that the impending election is the most important of our lifetimes. It’s no longer about avoiding the disaster; it’s about mitigating the effects and minimizing the recover time.