Almost Five Years Later, The Obama Presidency Is Still A Failure

A few years ago we did a series of posts that summarized the dozens and dozens of failures of the Obama administration. The failures include law breaking, lies, unConstitutional actions, and many other screw ups. In our opinion. Obama oversaw one of the worst Presidential administrations in recent time, getting nothing accomplished except to get his massive ego stroked for eight years. During that time, the lives and financial conditions for ordinary Americans went downhill the whole time.

We called this series of posts “The End Of An Error…”. Place that phrase in the search box above and you can review all of the failures that Obama accomplished.

The American Freedom Fighters website recently reviewed this failed administration and listed out many of those failures and scandals:

• Mexican gun running to drug cartels
• The purposeful slaughtering of Seal Team 6.
• The Obama State Department and Hillary Clinton lying about Benghazi.
• Voter fraud when military personnel did not get their votes counted and some counties where more votes were cast than there were registered voters.
• The NSA monitoring the phone calls, emails, and other communications of journalists and millions and millions of ordinary Americans, violating their First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights.
• Giving a private company, 123 Technologies, $300 million of taxpayer money right before the company went bankrupt and was sold to the Chinese, giving the American taxpayer no return on the $300 million.
• Giving weapons to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
• Using the IRS to target and harass his political enemies.
• Using Kathleen Sebelius, the head of the HHS agency under him, to illegally shake down health insurance companies.
• Giving Solyndra $500 million of taxpayer wealth, a company that declared bankruptcy just three months later and which was sold to, wait for it, the Chinese, wasting half a billion dollars of taxpayer wealth.
• Ordering the release of almost 10,000 illegal immigrants and lying about it, blaming the budget sequester.
• The President’s repeated violation of Federal law by not providing Congress a budget in the legal timeline required by law.
• The purposeful and illegal recess appointments to Federal government jobs, an effort that the Supreme Court ruled illegal.
• His State Department’s interfering with the inspector general’s investigation into a sexual misconduct situation in the State Department.
• Facilitating the lying of Hillary Clinton, IRS executives, James Clapper, and Eric Holder to Congress and the American people.

Quite a list of failures and only a partial list. This listing does not include his multiple, annual trillion dollar Federal budget deficits. Adding almost as much debt to the nation’s debt load as all other previous Presidents combined. The failure of Obama Care along so many dimensions. Playing over 300 rounds of golf, more rounds than any other President over the previous 60 years.

You get the idea. Eight years of a Presidency and nothing to show for it. Sometimes you think that Washington politicians must be fooling with us, nobody can be that inept. Or as Groucho Marx once said: “Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” It is almost as if Groucho knew Obama personally.

Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at:

https://www.amazon.com/Love-My-Country-Loathe-Government/dp/1604942789/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=love+my+country%2C+loathe+my+government&qid=1607716020&sr=8-1

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

http://www.reason.com

http://www.cato.org

http://www.openthebooks.com

http://www.conventionofstates.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w

 

 

What's A Week Without Another Weekly Obama Care Calamity? Or Three?

Another week, another Obama Care calamity. Last Friday, we  reviewed the totality of the calamities from this horrid piece of legislation. But, another week, another calamity. In fact, this week we have a three calamities for the price of one:

- Calamity #1 - Let's start with the easiest one. Several months ago we reported and discussed the fact that within a year of passing the Obama Care legislation, the Health and Human Services Department within the Federal government had already allowed over 1,000 waivers to the early requirements of Obama Care. We made the case then, and still do, that this could not have been a well written and well researched piece of legislation if the government was issuing about three exemptions or waivers everyday to its requirements.

Well, its a few months later and recent news reports indicate that the number of exemptions being issued has not slowed down as some supporters of the legislation predicted it would. The news reports indicate that the number of company waivers and exemptions is fast approaching 1,500, keeping it on track for the same daily rate as of a few months ago. Again, how good is this piece of legislation if nearly 1,500 companies and other entities have already been exempted from its requirements, at least temporarily? If 1,500 exemptions have been granted, I cannot imagine the number that have been applied for in order to get out from under Obama Care's requirements.

- Calamity #2: About two years ago, Obama spoke to a joint meeting of Congress to press for the passage of Obama Care. During a particular part the President's speech, Congressman Joe Wilson  shouted out "You lie," an outburst that he quickly apologized for and an apology that was quickly and graciously accepted by the President. However, then Speaker of The House, Nancy Pelosi, was to have none of this apology business and prompted House Of Representative action against Wilson for his behavior.

However, it turns out that Wilson may have actually been right and Pelosi may have moved for sanctions against him under false pretenses. Wilson yelled out "you lie" when the President stated: "The reforms I am proposing would not apply to those what are here illegally." In other words, no part of Obama Care would use American taxpayer money to support the health care needs of illegal aliens in the country.

Turns out, this is not the case. Recent news reports and statements from Wilson's office assert that over $8 million of Obama Care funding, which is within a larger budget of a $28.8 million budget given to community health care centers, has been specially set aside to help seasonal and migrant farm workers. These heath care centers/clinics have been explicitly told not to ask for immigration status when serving these workers.

Thus, was it a lie when the President stated two years ago that no part of Obama Care funding would be used for "those that are here illegally" or did the situation change and no one in the White House got around to updating the country on this change? In either case it looks like Wilson was right, although his venue and approach for pointing out this potential lie was not appropriate.

The Congressman makes a good point when discussing this calamity. The country is going broke, the country has a mountain of national debt, our limited funds need to be used to support Americans' health care needs, not the health care needs of illegal aliens. At the very least, Pelosi owes the Congressman an apology since the basis for forcing sanctions on Congressman Wilson was baseless.

- Calamity #3: Yesterday, over 409,000 Americans filed for first time unemployment claims, continuing a 400,000 weekly trend that seems to have been going on forever. Unemployment is still stuck around 9% or so. Recent testimony in front of Congress by Andy Puzder, the CEO of CKE restaurants (CKE operates or franchises almost 3,200 Carl's Jr. and Hardee restaurants around the world), described how some of the requirements of Obama Care is putting the brakes on his company's abilities to hire more unemployed Americans:

• Obama Care requires restaurants such as CKE's to post the caloric content of their food on menu boards in all of their restaurants. Puzder testified that this new requirement will cost $1.5 million to implement. He did not discuss how much it would cost to change the signage everytime the menu changed. This $1.5 million is about 17% of what CKE invested in new restaurants last year.
• Thus, as a result of this sign requirement, fewer restaurants will be opened and fewer new people will be hired since the mandatory expense of $1.5 million has to come from somewhere. The saddest part of this whole story is that this component of Obama Care is unlikely to have any positive impact on America. Market research that was carried out on people who ate at similar restaurants New York City after the city implemented the same menu board requirement found that very few people noticed the caloric signs, even fewer people read the signs, and even fewer people, a very, very small percentage, changed their eating habits as a result of the signs.

Conclusion: needless expense for no benefit, expense that could have been used to grow the business and the economy while reducing unemployment. According to Mr. Puzder's testimony: "The money to comply with the AVA (Obama Care) must come from somewhere. We use our revenue to pay our bills and expenses, to pay down our debt, and we reinvest what's left in our business. That's how we create jobs." The obvious conclusion: less to reinvest means fewer jobs created.

His views are consistent with others in the food industry. Scott Womack, who operates a company that owns 12 IHOP restaurants in Indiana and Ohio, testified that the legislation will have dramatically negative effects on his business. By the beginning of 2014, he believes that he will have to provide health insurance coverage for all of his full time employees.

Given the relatively thin business margins in the food industry, he does not know how he will be able to comply. He estimates the cost of complying will be 50 percent greater than his company's earnings. Even if he finds a way to comply with these additional costs, it will certainly hinder his ability to expand, adding new restaurants, hiring more people, paying contractors and builders to construct his new restaurants, pay advertising people to promote his new locations, and purchasing products to serve at his new locations. Many of these latter functions provide employment beyond his direct hiring of people for his company.

Adding insult to injury, Puzder and Womack have not been able to obtain waivers to Obama Care requirements while their competitors, McDonalds and Jack-In-The-Box have received waivers. Not only is Obama Care adding a heavy cost burden to their operations, it is unfairly tilting the competitive playing field by providing a large cost advantage to their competitors. Thus, Obama Care supporters can not even make the claim that all parts of America and the businesses within America will be playing under the same rules under Obama Care. Pathetic.

It might justify all of these calamities if Obama Care had a chance at working. However, more times then I care to remember, we have gone through the myriad of reasons in this blog why this legislation is doomed to failure. The writers and supporters never understood the root causes of our escalating health care costs and without understanding those root causes, our political class has virtually no chance of solving the problem.

Obama tried to solve a public health crisis (i.e. Americans eat too much, Americans eat too much of the wrong kind of food, Americans smoke too much, Americans on average are getting older), a legal crisis (our health care industry needs signficant tort reform and a lack of competition crisis (our health care industry needs to allow cross state lines competition between health care insurers), by developing a huge, expensive, cumbersome and unfair monstrosity that deals with virtually none of these root causes/crises. As a result, we see restaurants cutting back on expansion and hiring, large companies (e.g. AT&T, John Deere, and others looking to eliminate their health insurance programs because Obama Care makes it less expensive to NOT offer health care than to offer it), and the national debt exploding under Obama Care because of its poor planning and understanding of the problem.

Groucho Marx said it best many decades ago when explaining how Obama Care came into being: "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." I could not have said it better when it comes to this legislative disaster. I can hardly wait to see what falls apart next week.






Our book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at http://www.loathemygovernment.com/. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respect freedom for both yourselves and others everyday.
Please visit the following sites for freedom:
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http://www.cato.org/
http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.flipcongress2010.com/
http://www.reason.com/
http://www.repealamendment.com/

Retro #6: Historical Politica Quotes, Contemporary Political Crises

Due to massive family obligations in the short term, time will be at a premium for the next few days. Thus, rather than rush through new posts, I am taking the opportunity to do a "best of" series of past posts. These "retro posts" have been the most popular posts in this blog from the past year or so. All of them have been viewed hundreds of times and seem to have made a connection to our readers vs. other posts and topics. Please enjoy them again or for the first time.


A little quiz on quotes relating to politics in America, try to figure out who said it and when they said it:


1) In reference to why political parties have lost the confidence of the public: "Their machinery of intrigue, their shuffling evasions, the dodges. the chicanery, and the deception of their leaders have excited universal disgust, and have created a general readiness in the public mind for any new organization that shall promise to shun their vices."

2) Also in reference to why political parties have lost the confidence of the public: people "saw parties without any...difference contending for power, for the sake of power. They saw politics made a profession, and public plunder an employment. They beheld our public works the plaything of a rotten dynasty, enriching gamblers, and purchasing power at our expense."

3) "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except for Congress."

4) "The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employees, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy."

5) "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies."

6) "An election cannot give the country a firm sense of direction if it has two or more national parties which merely have different names but are as alike in their principles and aims as two peas in a pod."

Great quotes, all of them. Unfortunately, it seems as if we are living everyone one of them today. The interesting thing is that these quotes are quite historical, not contemporary:

1) According to the Real Politics website, this quote was from the book, "The Origins of the Republican Party" by William E. Gienapp and the quote is dated from 1855. The New York Times called it "dodges", today we call it "spin doctoring." The Times called it "universal disgust," we call it having Congressional approval ratings around only 20%. The Times called it "chicanery", we call it a variety of names including earmarks and outright corruption. It is remarkable how closely a quote from 155 years ago captures the nightmare we are living through today with our political class.

2) This quote is also from Gienapp, also from 1855, and it appeared in the New York Evening Post. This also captures our current state of political affairs. We also see most of our politicians vying only for power, not for the opportunity to make the country better. With their high salaries, great benefits, many, many perks, our current day politicians fit the Post's description that politicians "saw politics made a profession, and public plunder an employment."

Without term limits, our politicians see being elected not as a service to the nation but as a life time job. And their gerrymandering Congressional districts, rigging campaign finance laws, and handing out taxpayer dollars as earmarks allows them to ensure perpetual re-election, regardless of the quality of their work.

3) This third quote is from Mark Twain and is obviously well over a hundred years old. However, even back then he realized that the power allocated to politicians many times results in outright criminal behavior. Congressmen Traficant, Jefferson, Cunningham and other Congressional politicians have served time due to their corrupt and unlawful behavior while in office. How many former Illinois governors have either served prison time, are currently serving time, or are aggressively trying not to serve prison time?

Charles Rangel and Maxine Walters, two current members of Congress, are likely to face a House Of Representatives trial within the next few months on ethics and corruption charges. The House ethics office has investigated or is currently investigating potential crimes by other members of Congress. The more you list out what has happened to our contemporary politicians, you marvel at how right Mark Twain may have been way back when.

4) This quote is from Woodrow Wiilson who said it early in the last century. At that time, he realized the influence that non-voting entities can and do have on government functions and corruption. Wilson called them "special interests," we call them lobbyists.

5) My source attributed this quote to Groucho Marx and is likely more than fifty years old also. Back then, even comedians like Groucho recognized that politicians were not any good at identifying the root causes of problems, if a problem even existed, and then putting together a coherent, efficient and cost effective plan to solve that problem. Our politicians are no different:

- Nixon declared War On Drugs in the 1960s and we are no closer today to having a coherent national drug strategy and policy than the day he declared war.

- Carter muddled through the oil crises in the 1970s and we are no closer to having a coherent, national energy strategy and policy than we were when we waited in long lines at gas stations.

- Reagan identified the problems with public education with a Presidential Commission in 1983 and 27 years later, U.S. public schools badly trail many, many other nations in the education of their children.

- Clinton presided through numerous terrorist attacks including the first World Trade Center bombing and the African embassy bombings and never came up with a coherent terror defense policy and strategy, resulting in the death of almost 3,000 Americans on 9-11.

- Over the years over 10 million illegal aliens have come across our borders with no politician able to come up with a coherent immigration strategy and plan.

Unfortunately, Groucho was right back then and he would be right today if he saw the incompetence of today's politicians.

6) This last quote is from Franklin Delano Roosevelt and is at least 65 years old. When you really come down to it, are the Republican politicians much different from the Democrats? Sure they pick their friends and identify their enemies, e.g. Republicans are generally pro-life and pro-guns while Democrats are generally pro-choice and anti-guns. But when you look at their records, neither party has accomplished much of anything positive over the past fifty years. Just look at what we listed above under Groucho's quote: no solutions to the drug, immigration, terrorist, public school and energy problems. The only reason they pick their friends is to get money to finance their constant re-election, not to solve any meaningful problems.

While Obama the candidate promised change you can believe in, Obama the President is hardly any different than Bush. Obama drew down U.S. forces in Iraq but it was on the timetable Bush established. Bush set up the terrorist prison in Guantanamo and so far, Obama has kept it open. Our border still leaks illegal immigrants and we still have no new policy or plan for energy or public schooling. Bush enacted the Patriot Act and Obama basically rubber stamped its renewal.

Gay rights are no further along under Obama than under Bush and the amount of earmarks in our national budget is as high under Obama as under Bush. The only significant difference between Bush and Obama is that the Obama administration has run up spending deficits orders of magnitude higher than Bush.

This is why the whole area of U.S. politics can get so depressing. the incompetence and corruption we face today appears to have been going on for a long, long time. The only difference may be is that government is so much larger, wasteful, and intrusive then it was in 1855 or when Twain, Roosevelt, Marx, and Wilson spoke their quotes above. That is why we need to find a way to start shrinking the size of government immediately in order to start cutting back on the corruption and waste that apparently is inherent in the genes of all politicians:

- Step 1 from "Love My Country, Loathe My Government" would start the government shrinkage process by reducing all government functions and budgets by 10% a year for the next five years.

- Step 5 would step up fraud and corruption activities in all government areas, hopefully including the investigation of fraud and corruption form our elected officials.

- Step 39 would implement term limits for all politicians in order to avoid the problem discussed in the Post quote above, i.e. politics should not be a profession, it should be a temporary calling and service calling.

- Steps 23 to 29 provide a process for systematically attacking and solving the problems that politicians have been unable to solve with their own capabilities and intelligence including drugs, energy, schooling, and immigration.










Our new book, "Love My Country, Loathe My Government - Fifty First Steps To Restoring Our Freedom And Destroying The American Political Class" is now available at www.loathemygovernment.com. It is also available online at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Please pass our message of freedom onward. Let your friends and family know about our websites and blogs, ask your library to carry the book, and respectfreedom for both yourselves and others everyday.

Please visit the following sites for freedom:

www.cato.org
www.reason.com
www.robertringer.com
www.flipcongress2010.com
www.realpolichick.blogspot.com