Obamacare, Benghazi, IRS, NSA, race baiting, Solyndra, moral preening, Fast and Furious, Pigford, etc., ad nauseum. President Transparency, Moral Preener in Chief, Victim in Chief, President Asterisk, etc., ad nasueum.

The U.S. individual health insurance market currently totals about 19 million people. Because the Obama administration’s regulations on grandfathering existing plans were so stringent about 85% of those, 16 million, are not grandfathered and must comply with Obamacare at their next renewal. The rules are very complex. For example, if you had an individual plan in March of 2010 when the law was passed and you only increased the deductible from $1,000 to $1,500 in the years since, your plan has lost its grandfather status and it will no longer be available to you when it would have renewed in 2014.

These 16 million people are now receiving letters from their carriers saying they are losing their current coverage and must re-enroll in order to avoid a break in coverage and comply with the new health law’s benefit mandates––the vast majority by January 1. Most of these will be seeing some pretty big rate increases.

Week Two of the Obamacare Federal Health Insurance Exchange Rollout––No Improvement

Rubes who idolize the state. Statolatry.

President Obama claims that Republicans are busy probing “phony scandals.” But the sheer number of scandals suggests that misbehavior, abuse of power, and possibly corruption are not something being dreamed up by the GOP, but a defining characteristic of the Obama administration.

Obama is at Two Dozen Scandals and Counting

President Obama (in)famously said, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” under the Affordable Care Act. As it turns out, not so much. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, it turns out, are receiving letters telling them that their existing coverage just isn’t good enough to satisfy the strict rquirements of the Obamacare law, and that they’ll have to sign up for new policies. Those new policies come with new stipulations, and new price tags. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter if you like your health care plan, since you probably can’t keep it.

You Can Keep Your Health Insurance Under Obamacare? Not So Much.

Obviously, those people losing their health insurance must not have liked what they had. It’s the only explanation.

Continue reading ‘Rubes, you did build that.’ »

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The First Amendment

It requires a perverse genius to construct a “health” “care” “reform” that destroys everything from religious liberty to full-time employment, while requiring multitudes of new tax collectors and other bureaucrats and ever fewer doctors and nurses.

Obamacare’s Hierarchy of Privilege: No one who favors the law wants to be bound by it.

Continue reading ‘The “health care reform” that ate everything’ »

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I thought it was a sin to take the name of God in vain?

Universities are citadels of blue model thinking and most faculty members are relentlessly liberal in their politics. But the reality is that these same universities are some of the nastiest and most exploitative employers in America. The exploitation of adjuncts is an ugly feature of contemporary American academic life, and the smug complacency about it among many beneficiaries of the two tier system should remind us all that moral hypocrisy can co-exist with impressive degrees.

Universities Bludgeon Adjuncts With Obamacare Loophole

If you’re so smart….

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People who live and work outside Washington, D.C., say their way of life and values have not changed. But they think those who live, work and legislate inside the Beltway have, frankly, gone bonkers about everything.
. . .
The president’s victory gave the Democrats’ party mechanism a sense of immense power and a desire to build on his urban brand — so much so that, every time he speaks, his organization emails backers to sign up in support of his agenda. That party-building mechanism is intended to inflate his influence on politics beyond Washington and to create a dynasty built on his brand.

Not unlike Andrew Jackson — the first president elected on personality, who invented the politics of us-versus-them — leading Democrats plan to use the influence of today‘s progressive-majority culture for generations, by mining support through technology.

No trust, no solutions

Matthew Continetti, one of my favorite writers, wrote an eye opener last week, “‘A Conspiracy so Immense’: ideological commitment and the timidity of pragmatic politics”, too late for me to discuss in my column. It is one of the most important stories you’ll ever read anywhere and shows how far behind conservatives are in the fight against “progressive ” ideologues.

He picks up on a report by Andy Kroll in Mother Jones about a coordinated effort by about 36 different interest groups with reported revenues of no less than $1.69 billion, pledging millions of dollars to work together to attack conservative supporters and organizations, to intervene directly in Democratic politics, to push for filibuster reform to better enable a push through their agenda without any input from the opposition, and expanding “voting rights” and fighting voter registration laws to further grease the skids for their legislative agenda.

The Democracy Initiative: a Coup in Plain Sight

There’s just too much (of the wrong kind of) money in politics. Free speech for me but not for thee.

Kerry first became nationally famous as an opponent of the Cambodia bombings and the Vietnam War generally in the early 1970s.

Kerry’s efforts to distinguish the two cases are far from successful. He claims that the Libya intervention was legal because of the need for swift, decisive action. But of course Nixon could and did make the same argument. Paul correctly points out that the Constitution gives the power to declare war exclusively to Congress and does not create any exceptions for cases where presidents believe that they need to act quickly. Moreover, as Allahpundit points out, the president actually had plenty of time to seek and gain congressional approval before he started the bombing, as he spent weeks mobilizing support from the United Nations, our European allies, and others.

John Kerry Tries to Distinguish Obama’s Bombing of Libya from Richard Nixon’s Bombing of Cambodia

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Hahaha. Hypocrite.

Another excellent question raised by Paul: Why are we sending big fancy fighter jets to Egypt even as the leader of that country is going full Capt. Queeg, with a fixation on the Jews standing in for obsession about stolen strawberries?

This sort of common-sense exploration of the WTF that is U.S. foreign policy should be at the forefront of any American who gives a hell about limited, legitimate government and the Constitution.

Rand Paul to John Kerry: Why is it OK to bomb Libya but not Cambodia w/o Congress’s Approval?

Thank goodness our betters, philosopher kings all, are firmly in charge.

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Haha. He is such a card.

PhV9aZOqmz8 SLJ – what a tool.

Crony capitalism is a bipartisan corruption, and another reason why we need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT).

In praising Congress’s huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that “millionaires and billionaires” will finally “pay their fair share.” That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress’s New Year celebration.

There’s plenty to lament about the capital and income tax hikes, but the bill’s seedier underside is the $40 billion or so in tax payoffs to every crony capitalist and special pleader with a lobbyist worth his million-dollar salary. Congress and the White House want everyone to ignore this corporate-welfare blowout, so allow us to shine a light on the merriment.
. . .
The great joke here is that Washington pretends to want to pass “comprehensive tax reform,” even as each year it adds more tax giveaways that distort the tax code and keep tax rates higher than they have to be. Even as he praised the bill full of this stuff, Mr. Obama called Tuesday night for “further reforms to our tax code so that the wealthiest corporations and individuals can’t take advantage of loopholes and deductions that aren’t available to most Americans.”

One of Mr. Obama’s political gifts is that he can sound so plausible describing the opposite of his real intentions.

The costs of all this are far greater than the estimates conjured by the Joint Tax Committee. They include slower economic growth from misallocated capital, lower revenues for the Treasury and thus more pressure to raise rates on everyone, and greater public cynicism that government mainly serves the powerful.

Crony Capitalist Blowout: A tax increase for everyone but the favored wealthy few.

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The elephant in the room is the unconstitutional massive growth of the federal government. The power of the special interests grows as the federal government expands. The only way to eliminate their power is to drastically reduce the size of the federal state. Lobbyists never have a bad year. Three of the five richest counties in America border Washington, DC. There is a reason for this: It’s because our political classes have systematically arrogated themselves power and control beyond the worst nightmares of our founders.

Jack Abramoff on America’s bipartisan culture of corruption

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“The rich makers are redistributed to the rich takers. That’s basically what Obamanomics is all about.”
. . .
The problem today is not Congress and the administration taking money from you and giving it to shiftless lazy people who don’t work. The problem is Washington taking money from people who are creating value and redistributing it to companies that have the best lobbyist and the coziest connections to government.

Rich makers, corporate takers and Obamanomics

Ozymandias

Mockery, truculence, and minimalist living are best, then enjoy the decline. We also need a Revolving Door Tax (RDT).