Obamacare was supposed to be the capstone in the arch of a new progressive era. The Dems were going to show us all that government really does work. Smart government by smart people, using modern methods and the latest up to the minute research from carefully peer reviewed articles in well regarded social science journals can solve big social problems. Obamacare was going to be such a big hit that even the bitter clingers would have to put down their guns and their Bibles long enough to thank the Democrats for this wonderful new benefaction.
But even if the Supreme Court doesn’t pull the trigger and kill the law in June, the darn thing won’t fly. The public hates it, and the longer it’s on the books the less popular it gets. This isn’t like Social Security, a program the public fell in love with early on and still cherishes today. It isn’t like Head Start, which remains dearly beloved even though there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that it helps anybody other than the people it employs. Obamacare is only marginally more popular than the Afghan War; already its estimated cost has doubled and we all know these numbers are likely to continue to increase. Obamacare so far is a political flop and shows ominous early signs of being a policy misfire as well. The benefits don’t seem to measure up to the hype, more people are going to lose their existing insurance, premiums are going up and the impact on the deficit is going to be worse.
This is a horrible piece of legislation — as misbegotten and useless to its friends as it is menacing to its enemies. The question is: why? Why did the blues write such a bad law? Why, given a once in a lifetime chance to pass a program that Dems have longed to achieve ever since the New Deal, did they craft a sloppy mess that nobody understands and few admire, and then leave their law so unnecessarily vulnerable to constitutional challenge?
The answers tell us much about why blue progressive thinking is losing its hold on the body politic — and why blue methods generally aren’t working as well as they used to.
Race hustler. It’s what they do. It’s who they are. It wouldn’t even be surprising, if not for all of the fraud and lies about the “post-racial” president he would be four years ago.
Overall, oil and gas production on federally controlled land is down by 40% since Obama took office.
So how is it possible that oil production can increase when the Obama administration is so overtly anti-oil?
Easy. As Gerard explains, there’s nothing they can really do to stop it.
While oil production is up, the increase relates almost entirely to investment and leasing decisions made before, sometimes long before, this administration came into office. The increase is also due to oil and gas development on private and state lands over which the administration has little or no control at all.
…while it’s true oil production in America is up, this is clearly in spite of Team Obama’s best efforts. Because the Founding Fathers limited the authority the federal government has on private and state lands, hundreds of small oil companies — not “Big Oil,” as environmentalists want you to believe — are able to drill for oil on private and state land, unencumbered by the heavy hand of Obama’s anti-oil agenda.
For him to take credit for this is like the crowing rooster who thinks it made the sun rise.
Rarely has one law so exemplified the worst of the Leviathan state — grotesque cost, questionable constitutionality and arbitrary bureaucratic coerciveness. Little wonder the president barely mentioned it in his latest State of the Union address. He wants to be reelected. He’d rather talk about other things.
And no celebration of its two-year anniversary. I guess it wasn’t as much of a BFD as Joe Biden said it was. Or perhaps it is, but not in the way he thought.
