Unfortunately, this time the New York Times is cheering on Boss Tweed Obama and there is no Harper’s Weekly to oppose him.
If you have to keep it a secret, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.
But the California legislature and the new Covered California health insurance exchange are conspiring to keep secret how they will dole out more than half a billion dollars in taxpayer dollars to contractors. The lion’s share of the money is going for what the exchange budget terms “outreach.”
In truth, the money is going to build Democratic Party enrollment.
The Obama administration granted a whopping $910 million to California to set up its insurance exchange. That money is not for bandages, surgery, nurses and doctors to care for the sick. Nor is it for insurance plans, though $910 million could buy generous coverage for at least 113,000 people!
Shockingly, the $910 million is slated for bureaucracy, including rich compensation packages for exchange employees ($360,000 a year for the executive director) and contracts for computer equipment, public relations and “outreach.”
Outreach is the largest expenditure and where the real monkey business occurs.
Amazingly, California legislators passed a law that the exchange could keep secret for a year who received the contracts and indefinitely how much they were paid. California’s open-records laws would otherwise prohibit such secrecy. […]
What is known so far suggests that California politicians are exploiting health reform to enroll millions of the uninsured in the Democratic Party and fill the coffers of left-wing interest groups with taxpayer money.
Here are the facts to back up that cynical picture:
California lawmakers passed a law (Senate Bill 35) requiring that voter registration be part of the health insurance exchange.
Last month, Covered California announced $37 million in grants to 48 organizations to build public awareness about the opening of the health exchange on Oct. 1.
Of the 48 organizations that got grants, only a handful are health-care related. The California NAACP received $600,000 to do door-to-door canvassing and presentations at community organizations.
Service Employees International Union, which says its mission is “economic justice,” received two grants totaling $2 million to make phone calls, robo-calls and go door to door.
The Los Angeles County Federation of Labor AFL-CIO got $1 million for door-to-door, one-on-one education and social networking. It describes its role as “engaging in both organizing and political campaigns, electing pro-union and pro-worker candidates.”
Community Health Councils, a California organization with a long history of political activism against fracking, for-profit hospitals, state budget cuts and oil exploration, got $1 million to conduct presentations at community and neighborhood meetings and one-to-one sessions.
These organizations, closely allied with the Democratic Party, are being funded by your tax dollars to conduct “outreach,” meaning the kind of phone banking and door-to-door canvassing that activists do to turn out the vote. They will turn out the uninsured to enroll on the exchanges and in the Democratic Party.
As Obama pounds the table demanding amnesty “immigration reform”, remember that about 3 million of the estimated 12 million illegal aliens in the United States are in California.
3 million more bought and paid-for Democrat votes will keep California firmly in Leftist hands, and will serve as an example of the kind of patronage others can expect for falling in line.
We’ve already witnessed how shameless the Obamas are with spending taxpayer to lead a lavish, globetrotting lifestyle that puts even English Royalty to shame. This entitlement mentality coupled with a willingness to use the powers of The State to punish those that displease or oppose the White House signals more than just a 8 year jaunt within the Beltway.
The foundation has been laid and Obama is not interested in the jobs or foreign policy or even being CinC. He is working to build a permanent one-party rule of the United States and enjoying the perks of being First Boss.
h/t Donald Sensing
Ronald Reagan Speech – 1964 Republican National Convention
{14}Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth. . . .
{15}The bill is not long in coming. He will be relieved of his post as manager of the shop and transferred to the warehouse. His pay will be reduced. His hopes for a holiday in Bulgaria will evaporate. His children’s access to higher education will be threatened. His superiors will harass him and his fellow workers will wonder about him. Most of those who apply these sanctions, however, will not do so from any authentic inner conviction but simply under pressure from conditions, the same conditions that once pressured the greengrocer to display the official slogans. They will persecute the greengrocer either because it is expected of them, or to demonstrate their loyalty, or simply as part of the general panorama, to which belongs an awareness that this is how situations of this sort are dealt with, that this, in fact, is how things are always done, particularly if one is not to become suspect oneself. The executors, therefore, behave essentially like everyone else, to a greater or lesser degree: as components of the post-totalitarian system, as agents of its automatism, as petty instruments of the social auto-totality.
{16}Thus the power structure, through the agency of those who carry out the sanctions, those anonymous components of the system, will spew the greengrocer from its mouth. The system, through its alienating presence in people, will punish him for his rebellion. It must do so because the logic of its automatism and self-defense dictate it. The greengrocer has not committed a simple, individual offense, isolated in its own uniqueness, but something incomparably more serious. By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety. . .
give ’em civil rights
[…] Casino Crony Kickback – Reid, Heller Slip Las Vegas Tourism Handout Into Immigration Bill Protein Wisdom: California Is Obama’s Tammany Hall Rule 5 Monday will be up later […]
-Before The Civil War: ‘The United States are….’
-After The Civil War: ‘The United States is….’
-In 2013 A.D.: ‘The United States was….’
From the sidelines you’ll watch.
Oh the Splendor you’ll see.
At the Celestial Coronation,
Of GrandMassah B.
I suspect the awkwardness of that construction is why the U.S. side in that war chose to call itself “the Union.” Even now you’re more likely to hear substitutes for a singular “United States,” as in “the U.S. is…” or “the USA is…”
Even “America” serves to separate the concept of this country from the plurality implicit in its official name, even though it also evokes a more positive concept with highly patriotic associations, and is therefore one that I tend to favor…
Of course, those associations also create a connotation that transcends the government and diminishes it, at least in my mind, because it’s how Reagan used to refer to the people. And now, as Ken at Popehat has concluded, the government has declared the American people a hostile power.
-I favor the original because it stresses that the Several States are, in a sense, the fourth branch of government, and we must return to that concept.
-I also, by the way, refuse to call the deliberately treasonous Party, the ‘Democrat’ Party. They are the ‘Democratic’ Party – believers in mob rule [aka: Democracy].
-Though he’s a Libertarian, Popehat is dead-on-balls-accurate in his observation. Bravo to him for catching that.
As far as the national government is concerned, we are all Outlaws now.
As Chesty Puller said:
Let us act accordingly.
The Popehat link reminds me of yet another line from 1776:
Adams, of Congress: “Fat George has declared us in rebellion, why can’t they?”
[…] a post over at Protein Wisdom, entitled California Is Obama’s Tammany Hall, Darleen Click concluded […]
-Heh.
-The lyric that seems to constantly play in my head is:
Is anybody there?
Does anybody care?
Does anybody see what I see?