La Loi, C’est Obama

My article from the Dec. 24, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

La Loi, C’est Obama

By Matthew Vadum

In a move worthy of a Third World banana republic, President Obama used his extraconstitutional lawmaking wand and secretly extended the Dec. 23 Obamacare enrollment cutoff by 24 hours, usurping the authority of Congress.

This is only the latest in a long series of capricious, imperial, impeachable, ad hoc adjustments that the 44th president has made to his creation. Each and every unilateral abridgment or abrogation of the Affordable Care Act, as monstrous as the statute may be, is an affront to the rule of law that is supposed to prevail in our constitutional republic. This rule by presidential decree creates legal and business uncertainty for insurers and the insured, as well as for employers and all health care market participants.

Not surprisingly, public support for Obamacare continues to fall, dropping five whole percentage points in a month to a new record low, according to a CNN/ORC poll. Barely a third of the public — 35 percent – now supports the law, down from 40 percent late last month, and just 16 percent of respondents said they expect their families will be better off when most of the law takes effect in 2014.

The completely unnecessary, mandated chaos of the Obamacare rollout is business as usual for embattled Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, who continues struggling to put out fire after fire in what seems destined to be a futile effort to make an unworkable program somehow work.

The Washington Post reports that

“Over the weekend, government officials and outside IT contractors working on the online marketplace’s computer system made a software change that automatically gives people a Jan. 1 start date for their new coverage as long as they enroll by 11:59 p.m. on Christmas Eve.”

The Obama administration apparently rationalized the one-day extension away, claiming it was needed in case the perpetually malfunctioning website strains under the weight of a sudden traffic boost from last-minute enrollees.

“Anticipating high demand and the fact that consumers may be enrolling from multiple time zones, we have taken steps to make sure that those who select a plan through tomorrow will get coverage for Jan. 1,” an HHS spokeswoman said yesterday.

In the nightmarish swirl of Kafkaesque arbitrariness that surrounds President Obama’s much touted signature legislative achievement, insurance companies reportedly won’t be able to refuse late registrants. Last week the administration decreed that individuals whose insurance plans were canceled may receive an exemption from the individual mandate imposed by the Affordable Care Act.

ObamaCare: A Christmas Gift from the Poor to the Rich

My article from the Dec. 20, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

ObamaCare: A Christmas Gift from the Poor to the Rich

By Matthew Vadum

The increasingly desperate Obama White House is encouraging Obamacare supporters to make Christmas a living hell for those Americans still not convinced that putting the federal government in charge of health care is a good idea.

Because Obamacare will go into an actuarial death spiral if enough young people refuse to enroll, and because it’s a day ending in a “Y,” it’s time for yet another sleazy, lowbrow attempt to strong-arm young, healthy Americans into buying overpriced Affordable Care Act-compliant insurance that they don’t need and in many cases can’t afford. And why is such health insurance unaffordable to the young and the poor? Because Obamacare imposes ridiculous, expensive mandates, for example, forcing old men to cover women’s birth control while forcing young people to cover geriatric medical care.

To trick young, poor, healthy people into subsidizing older, sicker, wealthier people, the Obama administration wheeled out First Lady Michelle Obama, America’s flamboyant answer to the shopping-crazed kleptocrat Imelda Marcos, to sell Obamacare coverage to those who don’t want it or need it.

And to appeal to the young “hipster” community, Obama’s stormtroopers at Organizing for Action (OfA) posted an ad on Twitter showing a young bespectacled man in one-piece pajamas, sitting on a comfortable couch with a warm drink. “Wear pajamas. Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance,” reads the accompanying ad copy.

It might be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.

But to the incorrigible, true-believing leftists of the Obama administration, everything is political and nothing is sacred. Precious family time must give way for the good of the all-important state. In a spine-tinglingly creepy scene that might have come out of totalitarian East Germany or the Soviet Union, the Obamas lectured assembled mothers on the need to indoctrinate their children into embracing the three-year-old health care law that is tearing America apart.

Microsoft Hacks Into HealthCare.gov

My article from the Dec. 19, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Microsoft Hacks Into HealthCare.gov

By Matthew Vadum

As part of the continuing charade that Obamacare can actually be fixed, the Obama administration is hiring Microsoft Corp. executive Kurt DelBene to revamp the super-expensive, taxpayer-funded vortex of malware that is the HealthCare.gov website.

It is all part of the White House’s unrelenting drive to reinforce the left-wing narrative that the misnamed Affordable Care Act can succeed without dramatically disrupting society.

Americans increasingly understand that Obamacare is a deliberately cruel, cynical, Machiavellian vehicle to redistribute wealth, cripple private-sector insurance companies, and open the door to the future imposition of a sclerotic, bureaucrat-dominated, single-payer system on the United States of America. 

In other words, with this latest hire Obama and company are even more aggressively pretending that their hated through-the-looking-glass health care system can work without causing painful, debilitating socioeconomic upheaval.

As a senior adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, DelBene, who was president of the Microsoft Office division, will oversee repairs to the perpetually malfunctioning, insecure HHS website and health-insurance exchanges.

Sebelius: Above the Law?

My article from the Dec. 13, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Sebelius: Above the Law?

By Matthew Vadum

Top congressional watchdog Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) had to warn Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius this week that obstructing a congressional investigation is a federal crime.

Sadly, we have reached the point in America at which members of President Obama’s cabinet aren’t even squeamish anymore about flouting court orders and legally enforceable congressional directives because they feel secure in the expectation that they will never be held to account. These Democrats know that their misdeeds will not see the light of day because the Obama-worshipping media and opposition party lawmakers are either unduly, unprofessionally sympathetic to Obama’s agenda or are too afraid to confront the president out of fear of being tarred as a racist.

Lying and stonewalling have served the Obama administration well so far.

In June 2012, Eric Holder was held in criminal contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives in a 255-67 vote for refusing to turn over documents tied to the bungled Fast and Furious gun-running operation. That was the first time a U.S. attorney general had ever been held in criminal contempt by the House. Legal proceedings against Holder, arguably the most corrupt U.S. attorney general of all time, could be initiated after he leaves office. Impeachment and removal from office following a trial in the Senate are also possibilities that are now being discussed on Capitol Hill.

In light of Sebelius’s failure to cooperate with congressional investigators regarding obstruction allegations, Issa, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, felt it necessary to remind the Obama cabinet member that her refusal to produce documents demanded by lawmakers is punishable according to law.

The panel has been looking into the badly botched implementation of Obamacare as well as the persistent problems with the horrendously expensive, near-useless Healthcare.gov website that the nation’s uninsured are supposed to use to sign up for health insurance coverage. Issa has demanded documents and HHS hasn’t handed them over.

Specifically, Issa is calling into question legally dubious actions taken by the HHS. The department has allegedly been interfering with a congressional investigation by instructing various businesses to ignore information requests made by his committee.

The Handshake Heard ‘Round the World

My article from the Dec. 11, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

The Handshake Heard 'Round the World

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama’s distressing rejection of American exceptionalism was on display for the whole world to see yesterday when he shamed his country by lowering himself to shake the blood-stained hand of Cuba’s Communist dictator.

In a brief but cordial encounter in a funeral receiving line at the southern tip of the African continent, Obama shook the hand of Cuba’s octogenarian tyrant, President Raul Castro, granting a kind of legitimacy to the caudillo who leads America’s Cold War enemy 90 miles from the Florida coast. In so doing Obama demonstrated his weakness and emboldened America’s enemies.

The occasion was a memorial service in South Africa for that country’s former president, Nelson Mandela, a Communist terrorist who, like Obama’s close personal friend Bill Ayers, used explosives to express himself politically.

Mandela, who died last week at age 95 long after serving a quarter-century in prison and helping to slay apartheid, has a few things in common with Obama.

Mandela, who routinely denounced the United States and Israel, set in motion the transformation of his once-prosperous nation into the community organizer’s paradise that is modern South Africa, complete with mob rule, mob justice, racial tension, and epidemic levels of violence. Mandela’s Marxist colleagues are continuing his work, community organizing that nation into Third World kleptocracy status.

Obama conspicuously ordered American flags flown at half-staff throughout the U.S. in honor of Mandela, an unusual tribute for the United States to afford a non-American, and in this case, a former foreign head of state. It is all part of Obama’s racial presidency in which he plays off racial and ethnic groups against each other, no matter what lasting harm it does to society. The flag-lowering is better treatment than he gave the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a far more consequential world leader whom he snubbed by skipping her funeral.

Food Stamps Fund Left-Wing Media

My article from the Dec. 5, 2013 issue of American Thinker:

Food Stamps Fund Left-Wing Media

By Matthew Vadum

The hippy-fueled magazine Mother Jones that helped torpedo Mitt Romney's campaign wants your tax dollars to fund its crusade for the radical transformation of American society.


Specifically, the extremist, George Soros-funded rag that published the story of Romney's ill-received "47 percent" comments is counseling its interns to apply for taxpayer-funded food stamps so they can survive their voluntary servitude in ultra-expensive San Francisco.  The locus of latte liberalism where the muckraking publication is headquartered has the highest rents in the nation.


In a feature story about how rotten left-of-center magazines are to their interns, left-winger Charles Davis reports at Vice:

One former MJ intern who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity told me they "slept on an air mattress for six months while I worked there because I couldn't afford a real one."  Another former intern said, "During our first meeting with HR at Mother Jones, we were advised to sign up for food stamps."
Of course they were.

This idea of using government money to fund political assaults on the American system and foment civil unrest has a long pedigree, as I wrote in my book, Subversion Inc.


More than four decades ago, when community organizer Wade Rathke landed a job at ACORN's parent nonprofit group, he discovered that the National Welfare Rights Organization had no intention of paying him for his work.  NWRO was one of many rabble-rousing leftist groups across the nation feeding at the public trough, receiving funding through the federal government's Office of Economic Opportunity.  The generously funded OEO was created to underwrite destructive left-wing "community" activism in the mid-1960s as part of the "War on Poverty."


Rathke, who was hired by NWRO to create what would become the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), learned he would have to bum money off friends working in the federally funded anti-poverty effort.


This brutal exploitation of workers was typical of NWRO and, later, of Rathke's ACORN, which went so far as to go to court to seek exemption from California's minimum wage laws.  (ACORN lost.)  NWRO head George Wiley "would pay the telephone bill rather than the staff -- even though the employees complained that they couldn't pay their rent," according to Wiley's biographers, Nick and Mary Lynn Kotz.


Wiley expected his employees to "live off the land," like an invading army.  They were encouraged to pool resources, get free meals and accommodation, or get onto another organization's payroll while still working at NWRO.


Not surprisingly, in recent months Mother Jones has published several odes to food stamps.  One, "The Hidden Benefits of Food Stamps," makes the preposterous claim that food stamps improve the health of Americans and the U.S. economy.  The article cites the discredited Keynesian "multiplier" effect, arguing that every $5 in food stamps generates $9 in economic activity.  By this reasoning, America should be able to spend itself into prosperity if governments add a few more trillion dollars to their welfare programs.


Mother Jones is only doing what its Saul Alinsky-inspired idols in the Progressive movement have been doing for nearly a half century.


As Davis reports, many employees of the magazine belong to a union.  Editors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery each bring in more than $167,000 annually.

Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (died 1930) would probably not have looked kindly on the exploitation of young interns by the publication that bears her name.  The fiery, pistol-packing labor leader, whose grim visage is enshrined alongside that of Alinsky-trained organizer Cesar Chavez in the U.S. Department of Labor's "Labor Hall of Fame," campaigned against child labor, a fact Mother Jones even acknowledges on its own website.


Jones herself was a kind of proto-Alinsky who delighted in demonizing her adversaries and no doubt would have loudly approved of the idea of expending U.S. taxpayers' money to campaign for ever-expanding government.  The very notion of using food stamps to subsidize attempts to smash the eeevil capitalist system would have sent tingles of joy up the spines of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. 


And if the proceeds from the crime-ridden welfare program, whose recipients routinely commit fraud by selling their food stamps for cash, end up covering poorly paid interns' booze binges and lap dances, well, that's just a bonus.


Matthew Vadum (website) is a conservative investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., as well as author of the ACORN/Obama exposé Subversion Inc.  

Labor Storms the Golden Arches

My article from the Dec. 6, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Labor Storms the Golden Arches

By Matthew Vadum

Urged on by a failing left-wing president, labor unions are laying siege to America’s fast food restaurants in a desperate bid to stay relevant in the twenty-first century.

They say they want to double the national minimum wage, raising it to $15 an hour, in the misguided pursuit of improving the lot of low-wage employees. As the Washington Free Beacon notes, President Obama called for a $9 an hour national minimum wage in his State of the Union address earlier this year and Democratic lawmakers in the Senate responded by proposing to raise the rate to $10.10.

In embracing the anti-fast food campaign, Obama is engaging in the politics of distraction, misdirecting public attention, trying to change the national political conversation, moving it away from the stagnant economy, the failing Obamacare program, the political scandals that are becoming too numerous to count, and the other grave problems in American society that he has either exacerbated or caused outright.

The Saul Alinsky devotee who lied and cheated his way into the Oval Office is paying back the empurpled thugs of the Service Employees International Union whose crimson-clad members did so much to get him elected in 2008.

Arguments for doubling the minimum wage are utter nonsense, argues libertarian commentator Nick Gillespie: “Even economists who question whether hiking the minimum wage causes significant unemployment for low-skilled workers tend to agree that doubling wages will reduce jobs.”

These protests are about boosting the labor movement’s sagging fortunes and helping President Obama and have little to do with actually helping workers given that boosting the hourly rate will discourage hiring, especially the hiring of less skilled workers.

Far-left groups such as Fast Food Forward, Fight for 15, and the in-your-face ACORN-like Restaurant Opportunities Center, that are backed by MoveOn and big labor outfits like the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers, are behind the effort endorsed by President Obama.

As usual, these professional socialist agitators have been using paid rent-a-mobs to conduct actions against restaurant chains such as McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut, and Subway. A similar campaign was waged against Walmart stores across the country on Black Friday last week.

Obama’s Pointless Dog and Pony Show

My article from the Dec. 5, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Obama’s Pointless Dog and Pony Show

By Matthew Vadum

As the flaws inherent in Obamacare become increasingly difficult for even the most news-averse Americans to ignore, President Obama is embarking on a probably futile crusade to sell the public on his signature legislative monstrosity.

Obama seems destined to get an even less enthusiastic reception from the public than George W. Bush received during the 43rd president’s ill-fated and largely forgotten 2005 crusade to reform Social Security.

Although Obama announced he is embarking on a three-week tour to convince Americans that socialized medicine is the answer to their collective prayers, Americans are recoiling at the brazen incompetence of the Obamacare exchange rollout. They seem to know almost instinctively that Obama’s statement foreshadows the looming disaster that we know as later-stage implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

That horrendous legislation is throwing millions of Americans out of the health care plans that Obama promised again and again they would be able to keep. Citizens have learned not to trust government with their health. The government made virtually no effort to ensure the security of data entered into HealthCare.gov and as a result a large proportion of insurance applicants are now at an elevated risk of having their identities stolen. The Obama administration claims the website is improving, but there is no way to know if it is telling the truth given its persistent lying about the condition of the health care program.

“The next three weeks are just a propaganda campaign and the American people are going to see right through it,” David Hogberg, Ph.D., senior health care analyst at the National Center for Public Policy Research said in an interview following Obama’s speech.

Obama's New Imperial Decree

My article from the Nov. 29, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Obama's New Imperial Decree

By Matthew Vadum

For purely partisan reasons, the Obama administration cynically unveiled extra-legal plans on the eve of Thanksgiving to unilaterally delay the launch of a website for small businesses to select plans through federal health care insurance exchanges.

It’s just the latest sleazy political move by the Community-Organizer-in-Chief to salvage his party’s fading electoral prospects by delaying at least some of the approaching tens of millions of health insurance policy cancellations until after the national vote next November.

It is also a sign of the Obama White House’s growing desperation over the political ramifications surrounding the grotesque failings of Obamacare. The administration said Wednesday it will unilaterally delay the upcoming launch of the online portal for small businesses. The website, which would allow small businesses to window-shop plans through the federal health insurance exchanges, won’t be ready for another year.

President Obama, whose political stature seems to shrink almost hourly, is feverishly trying to keep congressional Democrats aboard his sinking political ship. On Capitol Hill, Democratic lawmakers are now openly panicking at the damage the growing public backlash over Obamacare is going to inflict on their standings in the next Congress. Recent developments suggest that an electoral tsunami is developing that threatens to drown Democrats and give Republicans a healthy majority in the Senate.

The new one-year small business signup delay is just the latest in a series of unilaterally imposed deadline changes. One allows consumers to enroll until Dec. 23 — instead of Dec. 15 — to get coverage in time for the new year. The president also announced plans to push back the beginning of individual enrollment next year from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, or after the 2014 midterm congressional elections. 

Obama has no legal authority to do this but he doesn’t care.

The Next Supreme Court Battle for ObamaCare

My article from the Nov. 27, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

The Next Supreme Court Battle for ObamaCare

By Matthew Vadum

The U.S. Supreme Court decided yesterday to review a particularly odious mandate in the Obamacare law that undermines the religious liberties guaranteed by the First Amendment by forcing companies to provide health care coverage for birth control.

Although a court ruling nixing the birth control mandate would not kill Obamacare, whose constitutionality was upheld 5 to 4 by the Supreme Court last year in a bizarre, internally contradictory opinion, every obstacle placed in front of Obama’s socialist juggernaut gives hope to those fighting to save the country from the president’s policies.

At issue is whether President Obama’s health care law may compel for-profit companies to include birth control coverage as part of their health plans, even when such coverage violates the owners’ religious beliefs. The businesses say they are faced with having to violate their beliefs by providing birth control or dropping health care coverage for their workers. (The issues are discussed in a powerful 2012 book, No Higher Power: Obama’s War on Religious Freedom, by Phyllis Schafly and George Neumayr.)

“I really don’t think they had any alternative than to take this up,” said Holly Lynch, a health policy and bioethics specialist at Harvard Law School, about the case brought by almost 40 companies.

Companies said in court filings that fines for violating the mandate would cripple their businesses.

“This legal challenge has always remained about one thing and one thing only: the right of our family businesses to live out our sincere and deeply held religious convictions as guaranteed by the law and the Constitution,” said David Green, CEO of the Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby crafts chain, which won a lower court challenge to the law.