How did we survive all this time without the progressives running our life?

Recently Daniel Henninger wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal that really hit the nail on the head not only about this administration but about the whole progressive movement in general.  Mr. Henninger labeled it “the politics of cram down”.  Whether it is forcing people to purchase a product they don’t want, like Obamcare, or suing Boeing for opening a plant in South Carolina, that will employee thousands of workers, the progressives motto appears to be “you will do as you are told”.

The article also points out that unlike the liberal policies in the past that merely attempted to redistribute wealth through a host of taxes and social programs, the progressive policy is the government knows better and you will like it no matter how much it hurts. Mandates are for you own good say the progressives, but I wonder, if it is such a good idea, why it would need to be mandatory in the first place?.

The true progressive is so arrogant that he truly believes that he knows better. They also believe they must force change on us non-progressives because we are just too ignorant to make our own decisions or know what is for our own good. Their underlying belief is some people will just have to be sacrificed for the common good with common good defined by them. One of the statistics used by the progressives to force Obamcare down our throats is the fact that the United States spends more on health care than the rest of the world. Well, we also spend more on housing, cars, food, and TV sets. Are they all in a crisis also?  So the fact that Americans have access to more medical care than the rest of the world and are wealthy enough to take advantage of this benefit, has now become a problem to the progressives. Who do these self-appointed saviors think they are to tell me when I have spent too much?  And what is too much?  If I want to have an MRI done every day and I can pay for it, who are they to say this is a problem?

Progressives feel the need to control every aspect of your life and Obamcare is just the biggest example. Progressives are waging a war against ever American who works in the coal industry. They believe that coal miners and workers must be sacrificed on the altar of global warming, The same policy not only cost the workers who would build and operate XL pipeline but cost Americans in the form of higher energy cost. None of this is a concern for the progressives for they know what is best.

Progressives, supporting the failed public school system in New York State, needed to kill the school voucher program.  This lead to thousands of parents protesting on the Brooklyn bridge because it was a chance for their children to escape the failed schools, “sorry folks, you just think your children being able to go to a better school is a good idea”. In Louisiana the federal administration is actually suing the state for providing vouchers that help poor families escape their failed progressive schools. In the progressive mind it’s better to have predominately minority children go to run down, crime ridden, underperforming schools than let the racial mix of the progressive schools change, the progressives will desire what is really important.

Of course, it might be hard for the progressives to force all the changes you “need” on a well armed populace.  So now, nothing is more important to a progressive that seizing your weapons. Removing a citizen’s ability to defend themself is for their own good and only the people in the government can be trusted with firearms. I recently heard the ambassador from Australia point out that one of the main points of their gun confiscation law was to make sure “the police are never out gunned”, he forgot to add the average citizen always will be. Self-protection is another thing that needs to be removed to promote “the common good”

The IRS, FDA, SEC, EPA, DHS, Department of Education and Department of Commerce are attacking Americans at record rates all under of the guise of “for the common good”. And the parameters of what classifies as the common good will once again be defined by the progressives. The founding father’s ideas of individual liberty limited not only the federal government’s ability to hurt the individual citizen but also to help the individual citizen. In the progressive version of America, it is difficult to tell the difference and the progressive helping looks an awful lot like hurting to most Americans.

But then again, how would we know without a progressive telling us?

How good is a law if you have to lie about it in order to get it to pass?

 "If you had one of these substandard plans before the Affordable Care Act became law and you really liked that plan, you're able to keep it. That's what I said when I was running for office. That was part of the promise we made." -  President Obama 11/2013

The following week reports surfaced that as many as 90 million people might lose their existing policies.

"I want to speak plainly, clearly, honestly, about what the Affordable Care Act means for you and for the people you care about. Let's start with a fact. About 85% of Americans already have health insurance. If you're one of these folks, it's reasonable that you might worry that health care reform includes changes that are a problem for you, especially when you're bombarded with all sorts of fear mongering. So the first thing you need to know is this. If you already have health care you don't have to do anything."           - President Obama Sept 26 2013.

So less than one month later at the small company I work for we received notice that our existing health insurance policy was no longer available and the replacement plan will cost us 142% more. Yes you read that correctly 142%.

In defense of the Obama lies about keeping your insurance,   Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer said "If the president were to allow people to have those [insurance] plans be downgraded, or insurance companies to keep selling barebones plans ... he'd be violating [an] even more important promise to the American people -- that everyone would have a guarantee to access of quality affordable health insurance."

 I guess that means it was OK that we were lied to because it was for our own good.

But our plan was not downgraded before it was canceled; it was eliminated because it now violated Obamacare rules. This was not a “barebones plan” but a HSA high deductible plan that everyone in the company loved. Our plan covered 100% of all medical expenses after you satisfied your deductible.    Prior to meeting your deductible, medical expenses were covered by the employees HSA plan that was 50% funded by the company.

The President at first acted surprised that plans were being canceled, but we now know that the President and Congress were warned a number of times that the ACA would result in millions of insurance policies being canceled.  

So the President lied that we could keep our plans, then the President lied again that he knew nothing about it. Then the President said that it was a good thing our plans are canceled because we will get better insurance after the ACA was enacted, which also is a lie.

And for our small company the biggest lie of all - Obama promised, "We're gonna lower your premiums by $2,500 per family per year."

Finally the President tells us that the number of people who had plans canceled was a “small minority” about 5% of the population. I guess that makes those 5% expendable for the common good. The ACA at best will provide insurance to 10% of the population who did not have insurance previously and even after the plan bill is fully implemented will still leave an estimated 5% of the population with no insurance.

So let’s look at what has happen since the Obamacare bill was voted on over 3 years ago:

·         The progressive speaker of the house first told us “we have to pass the bill to know what’s in it”. (Three years later the administration still does not know what is in the bill and a 600 billion dollar web site to explain it to us is a total failure.)

·         The President lied to us about the fate of existing polices

·         The President lied about not knowing there would be cancelations.

·         The President then told us it was OK he lied because it was for our own good and that it was really not a big deal because it only affected 5% of the population.

·         American citizens are forced to buy products they do not want at drastically inflated prices from what they had before the ACA was passed.

We fought and won WWII in less time than this administration has had to enact this law and they can’t even make a web site work.

Is this what a country based on individual liberty looks like? Is our national motto now “some must suffer so others gain, and the government will decide who suffers and who gains”?

Should the government of a free people lie to those people to get policy enacted and then tell them it is ok to lie as long as “it for your own good”?

Do you really want these people controlling your health care . . . . . . or anything else for that matter!

Is this the most ignorant President or just the most incompetent?

On Tuesday, a representative from the White House said that the President did not know that the NAS was spying on Allied world leaders.

Now, either the White House is lying or they are telling the truth. But if they truly did not have any knowledge of what was going on, then we have reached a tipping point and are now faced with the worst case scenario. If this was done without White House knowledge, then our government has gotten so big that our elected officials can no longer administer it. And the result is that we now have unelected bureaucrats making the decision to spy on foreign leaders. 

More proof of this is that we apparently have IRS officials selectively deciding to approve or reject                                                                                                     applications for tax-exempt corporations.  The White house denies knowing anything about this also.

We also have ATF officials running guns to Mexican drug gangs that the White House AND the Justice Department know nothing about.

Congress apparently is just as uninformed; Senator Dianne Feinstein, a member of the committee that oversees the NSA, insists that they (Congress) knew nothing about the spying on allies.

According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the President did not know about all the problems that had been identified with the Affordable Care Act website prior to its “rollout”. 

Allegedly, the President did not know the Department of Justice was seizing the phone records of Associated Press reporters or that General Petraeus was being investigated. No one in the government supposedly knew that the diplomatic mission in Libya had requested more security and no one in Congress knew exactly what was in the Affordable Care Act as speaker Pelosi informed us we had to pass the bill to know what was in it. The President must have been terribly ignorant of what was in the Affordable Care Act also because he assured us “if you like your health care you can keep it” and hundreds of thousands of Americans are finding out that was a lie, me being one of them.

So who IS running this country? Apparently not our elected officials. Congress works an average of 3 days a week and the President has managed to get 146 rounds of golf in since being elected. They have not apparently had time to keep track of the tens of thousands of federal bureaucrats that ARE making decisions that change and effect our lives.  So in the absence of anyone else in charge, we let some unsupervised bureaucrat at the NSA decide to offend world leaders who are supposed to be our allies? We will let some low level ATF officer decide to ship military grade weapons to drug dealers who then use those weapons to murder American border patrol officers? And who knows who is authorizing the drone strikes that are used to kill US citizens.

Is this the most ignorant President or just the most incompetent? Could Congress get any less effective at supervising the government?

Harry Truman one said “The buck stops here”. I would think our President, who is supposedly a history scholar, would have heard that.

Bu then, maybe it is just one more thing the President does not know.