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…Second verse … same as the first … [Darleen Click]

Barry and his Mighty Pen have struck again!

The Obama administration announced another delay Monday in the requirement on businesses to provide health coverage to workers, giving some employers a reprieve next year while phasing in the mandate for others.

The administration had already delayed the implementation of the so-called employer mandate by a year, initially pushing the requirements off until 2015 — past the midterm elections. In a concession to business, though, Treasury Department officials announced Monday that the administration would not enforce the rules across the board next year.

Instead, the administration will let employers with 50 to 99 employees off the hook in 2015. They’ll be required to report on how many workers are covered but will have until 2016 before being required to cover full-time staff or pay a penalty.

Unambiguous language” of the law doesn’t apply to Dear Leader.

After all …

Forward!

37 Replies to “…Second verse … same as the first … [Darleen Click]”

  1. newrouter says:

    In societies under the post-totalitarian system, all political life in the traditional sense has been eliminated. People have no opportunity to express themselves politically in public, let alone to organize politically. The gap that results is filled by ideological ritual. In such a situation, people’s interest in political matters naturally dwindles and independent political thought, in so far as it exists at all, is seen by the majority as unrealistic, far-fetched, a kind of self-indulgent game, hopelessly distant from their everyday concerns; something admirable, perhaps, but quite pointless, because it is on the one hand entirely utopian and on the other hand extraordinarily dangerous, in view of the unusual vigour with which any move in that direction is persecuted by the regime.
    Yet even in such societies, individuals and groups of people exist
    who do not abandon politics as a vocation and who, in one way or
    another, strive to think independently, to express themselves and in some cases even to organize politically, because that is a part of their attempt to live within the truth.

    @havel potpl page #49

  2. Blake says:

    I’m a peaceful man. Law abiding? Considering law is based on the whim of the moment these days, it’s safe to say I’m no longer “law-abiding.”

  3. serr8d says:

    Another Executive Order. But no hue and cry from any of our Loyal Opposition.

    Where’s the cowering GOP leadership? And not even a raised brow from the oh-so-proud Democratic Party leaders who railed and chafed about far less dramatic departure from strict legality during the Bush years?

    There’s nothing more pathetic than a whipped mongrel dog whining under a front porch. Wait! that’s not just one mutt whimpering, it’s the collective membership of the U.S. House and Senate, afraid to intervene whilst a rabid radical skunk runs wild over our political processes.

    There’s no real fight or gamesmanship going on in DC anymore. These two Parties are one and the same, and their theater is getting harder and harder to watch.

  4. geoffb says:

    Survival as an exile requires ready adaptation to a new and grim situation. Many victims of Soviet oppression in all of its forms have been able to survive, but many more have gone under.

    After months or a year or more of adapting, a new groove; a way of living a little above survival, is established in the village. A better place to live is found, or even, built with help from the villagers. A small garden is planted, bringing a modest food supply — potatoes, cabbage, little else; but still, something to be put aside for the long Siberian winter.

    A routine closely in harmony with the Siberian seasons develops. In Siberia, the weather rules. It dictates a long semi-hibernation through the worst parts of the winter, almost sealed in the hut, close to the stove. The deep and heavy mud of the spring and fall cause a different kind of isolation. And then there is the short Siberian summer, with its long, warm days and twilight. through the night. A life very close to the primitive rhythms of nature.

    I’m not much more than an animal. the exile thinks to himself. But it’s not really a bad life-I eat and sleep and work-and I’m alive! This last point was heavily underscored one day deep in the forest. While doing a survey line with a team, well beyond their own working area, they came on another large crew cutting timber. But these men were different-a slave gang from a forced-labor camp. He had heard talk in the village about such a camp some kilometers away, but it was a shock, when he actually saw them. They like himself, were “political prisoners” but they had been sentenced to long .years at hard labor rather than exile. With each working team of ten or so, there were two well-armed guards and two savage watchdogs. The guards, alerted by the dogs’ barking, waved his crew away, but he had been close enough to see the prisoners’ thin, haggard faces; eyes without hope, and bodies emaciated from overwork and hunger. These men were working out their lives, and for most of them there was no hope, no prospect of a tomorrow when their sentences might end and they might be allowed to lead the relatively free life of an exile.

    There, he thought, but for the grace of God, go I. And for a moment, he was grateful to the Communist Party for giving him such a light sentence.

    Some time later, as he lay on his warm stove, he realized that he was no longer thinking like a dissident. He had become an exile, a Siberian working out his sentence, with few thoughts about anything except his very simple and uncomplicated routine existence. Nothing else really mattered. He realized he thought less and less about his family, and indeed he rarely heard from them now. There was almost no communication from his old friends, the handful of dissidents he had known, the old group.

    And rarely, anymore, did he think about any future beyond the years of his exile, which still stretched out before him. Returning to home and to do his old job – if he could get it back, which was unlikely-seemed so remote he could hardly even imagine it. And he knew that Moscow and Leningrad and the other big cities would undoubtedly be off-limits for him the rest of his life.

    He was, in a way, shocked by the nature and level of his thoughts. No longer the bright intellectual who had thought to change the Soviet system-the system that now provided him with the simple necessities of his life. But he was intelligent enough to know what had happened to him over the months and years of his exile. He had been beaten by the Soviet system.

    He was no longer a dissident. He was not even against the regime anymore. They had beaten him, as they had beaten countless others before him. He could not admit, even to himself, that he had been broken by the system. That would be too much for the small part of his mind which still thought within the old frame of reference. It wouldn’t allow him to admit final defeat. To be broken would be degrading.

    And he was still a man in spite of every thing that had been done to him. There was still some pride. He had not been broken by the system. And he, a soft city-dweller with smooth pale hands, had beaten the forest and the trees. He felt his rough, calloused hands, with their broken, dirty, untrimmed nails. By God, those hands could work!

    As he drifted off to sleep, he thought only that tomorrow was another day. But he was content. and knew he would never go back.

    He was home.

    Once again, the Soviet system had won over the dissident. They had stilled a dissident voice and gained a docile worker, willing to produce and live at a bare subsistence level. He needed no guards, no dogs. and no expensive non-productive apparatus. After all, he was “free”!

    Unless the prisoner was to be worked to death, the exile system was better and cheaper than slave labor.

    And in the outside world. almost no one knew or cared.

    Why should they change such an effective system?

    From “The True Horror of Soviet Internal Exile”

    “From Dissent to Docility”

    by Victor Herman and Fred E. Dohrs

  5. McGehee says:

    “He loved Big Brother.”

  6. palaeomerus says:

    http://mediatrackers.org/ohio/2014/02/10/ohio-national-guard-training-envisions-right-wing-terrorism

    “The ONG 52nd Civil Support Team training scenario involved a plot from local school district employees to use biological weapons in order to advance their beliefs about “protecting Gun Rights and Second Amendment rights.”

    Portsmouth Chief of Police Bill Raisin told NBC 3 WSAZ-TV in Huntington, West Virginia that the drill accurately represented “the reality of the world we live in,” adding that such training “helps us all be prepared.””

    That’s completely fucking stupid.

  7. palaeomerus says:

    “In the disaster-preparedness scenario, two Portsmouth Junior High School employees poisoned school lunches with mustard gas, acting on orders from white-nationalist leader William Pierce.”

    So a neo-nazi ,ex Oregon State physics professor, who wrote the Turner Diaries under a pseudonym, and died in 2002, has presumably returned from the undiscovered country and is giving somebody in Ohio orders to poison school lunches with mustard gas to protect gun rights and 2nd amendment rights…

    Since we are dealing with a supernatural threat, does he also shit helicopters or something? Is mustard gas really a bio-weapon? How does this even work? You poke your fork in the chimichanga and suddenly your lungs begin to blister? Do these 2nd amendment types have ghost guns with thirty clip caliber clips and bayonet lugs? What if the late William Pierce AKA Andrew Macdonald harms a wetland or gives a kid an incandescent light bulb or a big soda?

    Shit.

  8. palaeomerus says:

    “He loved Big Brother.”

    Until the goodies ran out. Then he slit a thought policeman’s throat and hung big brother from the old chestnut tree as the mob bayed and the party devoured itself seeking to avoid the inevitable (no, not Romney). He died eventually from a foot wound that lead to gangrene and septicemia because the new tribe had no antibiotics and that whole “heat up a piece of iron and burn the infection out” thing didn’t work out so well. They left him behind in the worst of their ersatz tents with some home-brewed liquor that helped him pass peacefully. In time, all of Earth looked like Zimbabwe with sad wretched ghouls dwelling in moldering ruins on the brink of starvation and always watching for the signs that raiders were near. For the mushrooms at least and the better class of rabbits it was a kind of utopia.

  9. serr8d says:

    OT…
    Seems the character of our good friend DA Patrick Frey is suffering legal disparagement.

    Funny how that ‘disparagement’ pretty much nails his various antics and attacks conducted on our host. I suppose those were just warm-ups for the ‘big leagues’ he’s now playing in..

  10. Pablo says:

    Surely, you’re not lending any sort of credibility to Brett Kimberlin.

  11. I thought that Nancy Pelosi (D-Botox) put on a marvelous display of abysmal stupidity with her “we have to pass it to see what’s in it” statement, but it is only now that we can see how truly stupid it was.

    “What’s in it” doesn’t amount to a sack of shit, because Obama is going to do whatever the hell he wants to anyway. Their 2,000+ pages of bureaucratese could have just been a single sheet of paper saying “Barry gets to fill in the blanks.”

    And the gormless GOP “leadership” [spit] thought that they should spend a bunch of time talking about immigration?

  12. RichardCranium says:

    There’s no real fight or gamesmanship going on in DC anymore.

    Just imagine the goodies that the NSA has on them.

  13. Dave J says:

    Yes this ACA is a classic, going from as TW above references; “pass it to see what’s in it” to deemed passed, to now – delay implementation of components until after elections to see how it works. Our Federal Government at “work”.

  14. George Orwell says:

    Their 2,000+ pages of bureaucratese could have just been a single sheet of paper saying “Barry gets to fill in the blanks.”

    Plus, he gets to use invisible ink.

  15. Squid says:

    I can’t believe that the president is such a racist anarchist anti-government woman-hating Hobbit. I mean, it was only a couple of months ago that his people were calling me those names for the crime of wanting to delay O-Care…

  16. George Orwell says:

    it was only a couple of months ago that his people were calling me those names for the crime of wanting to delay O-Care

    People like Boehner and McConnell. His people, too.

  17. Libby says:

    First, they pass an unread 2000+ page monstrosity that included no severability clause. So when challenged, the SCOTUS couldn’t strike down one part of it, such as the individual mandate, without striking down the entire bill (sort of a double-dog-dare that John Roberts didn’t want to take).

    Then, Lord Obama PBUH decides to implement only those parts that are convenient to him, and delay others that are not.

    It makes no sense. But then this is the crowd that said, “It’s a penalty. No it’s a tax! No it’s a shared responsibility fee!”….

  18. Libby says:

    They called Ted Cruz a “terrorist” for the government shutdown.

    And now the Ohio National Guard is doing practice drills in combatting right-wing, gun-loving terrorists. Just like DHS has been doing for years.

    You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to pick up on that “coincidence.”

  19. Economics 101: The more that government tries to run businesses, the more it fouls up.

    From The Wall Street Journal: Health-Law Mandate Put Off Again No Fines for Most Employers Until 2016 as Firms Pressure White House in Wake of Troubled Rollout By Louise Radnofsky and Theo Francis | Updated Feb. 10, 2014 8:53 p.m. ET The Wall Street Jo…

  20. Squid says:

    And now the Ohio National Guard is doing practice drills in combatting right-wing, gun-loving terrorists.

    Right wingers who work in the public school? I just can’t wrap my head around that.

  21. geoffb says:

    [L]ocal school district employees

    Janitors, maintenance men. Old white guys plotting revenge against the Hanna Rosin’s who work in the light of the overground.

    This is what they think of those “others” and what they see as how a “war” will go down against those macho brutes that they have imagined all men into being. Preparing to fight a strawman will not help if/when a real war happens.

  22. geoffb says:

    Some lawmakers, though, have claimed that the mere threat of the employer mandate is causing companies to shed full-time workers in the hope of keeping their staff size below 50 and avoiding the requirement.

    Administration officials dispute that this is happening on any large scale. Further, Treasury officials said Monday that businesses will be told to “certify” that they are not shedding full-time workers simply to avoid the mandate. Officials said employers will be told to sign a “self-attestation” on their tax forms affirming this, under penalty of perjury.

    Comrade, please sign this paper certifying that you are not a wrecker. Then we shall move on to the “struggle sessions” and the “self criticism” until you come to know that you are one and beg to be given your “just” punishment.

  23. serr8d says:

    Surely, you’re not lending any sort of credibility to Brett Kimberlin

    No. But his lawyer did a fine job discerning our friend’s off-the-clock prosecutorial-style overreach; recognizing and pointing out his character flaws and suggesting possible grounds for his immediate dismissal. He’s grasping incorrectly at motives, but for a thumbnail sketch of an out-of-control semi-public official who might well be out of line, he describes him remarkably well.

    That’s for others to judge, of course. A real Judge, who will likely rip the thing up and toss it out the window.

    But nonetheless, the writeup I linked to specifically, for a couple pages there, fit the earlier pattern of (mis)behavior many of us witnessed firsthand.

  24. McGehee says:

    Kimberlin’s representing himself. If he nailed Frey it was an accident of projection.

  25. geoffb says:

    The FCC looks as if they believe that “not just anybody can summarize the news” aka “critical information needs” of “underserved populations”.

    The purpose of the CIN, [Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs ed.] according to the FCC, is to ferret out information from television and radio broadcasters about “the process by which stories are selected” and how often stations cover “critical information needs,” along with “perceived station bias” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.”

    How does the FCC plan to dig up all that information? First, the agency selected eight categories of “critical information” such as the “environment” and “economic opportunities,” that it believes local newscasters should cover. It plans to ask station managers, news directors, journalists, television anchors and on-air reporters to tell the government about their “news philosophy” and how the station ensures that the community gets critical information.

    The FCC also wants to wade into office politics. One question for reporters is: “Have you ever suggested coverage of what you consider a story with critical information for your customers that was rejected by management?” Follow-up questions ask for specifics about how editorial discretion is exercised, as well as the reasoning behind the decisions.

  26. newrouter says:

    nice license you have there shame if sumthing happened to it

  27. The Latest News From The Stealth Coup Front

    or FASCISM! ON! THE! MARCH! This op-ed in The Wall Street Journal by FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai is worth quoting nearly in full [tip of the fedora to GeoffB]: News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, appar…

  28. BigBangHunter says:

    – With the latest raising of the debt ceiling with zero concessions on the part of the Democrats, Bonehead has shown hes basically a Dem mole posing as a Conservative. Repeal of OCare is probably never going to happen as long as him and his cohorts are sitting in Congress, but maybe theres another way.

    “The compact transfers health care decision-making authority and responsibility from the federal level to member states. Those member states are then free to implement their own health care systems without interference from federal bureaucrats, using federal health care funds already collected and spent in their state.”

  29. serr8d says:

    Kimberlin’s representing himself. If he nailed Frey it was an accident of projection a manifestation of karma.

    #FTFY

  30. Pablo says:

    The thing with Kimberlin is that even when he’s telling the truth, he’s lying. This is one of those situations where you wish they could both lose, but Frey’s co-defendants are largely a very good lot and will hopefully stomp The Bomber like the cockroach he is,

  31. geoffb says:

    Two nations underlaw?

  32. McGehee says:

    The thing with Kimberlin is that even when he’s telling the truth, he’s lying.

    Exactly. If he had known his description of Frey would turn out to be true he would have said something different instead.

  33. Pablo says:

    Two nations under “law?“

    Suckers!

  34. RI Red says:

    Pablo, apropos of nothing, have you seen the HealthSource RI billboards around town?
    “Freedom of Speech”
    “Freedom of Assembly”
    “Freedom of Healthcare”

    I almost drove off the road the first time I saw that.
    And the LIVs will nod in agreement.

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