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Is political gridlock good for US healthcare stocks?Yes. It allows the big lobbying groups to essentially control what legislation is passed. Healthcare is one of the biggest lobbying groups in the US.In 2009, healthcare insurance, Big Pharma, the American Hospital Association, and the American Medical Association all lobbied for and supported Obamacare, which in and of itself should make Americans suspicious about what might be in it for the patient, given the more than 20,000 pages of rules and regulations that resulted and read by no one.Read this summary of the lobbying groups that supported Obamacare from the National Review. It’s ironic that the Democrats who passed this massive government bill now try to tell America how great it is, as if 20,000 pages are distilled just into a pre-existing conditions clause.Government today is far more powerful than ever before in US healthcare, which controls fully one sixth of the economy. The more powerful the US government is, the more influence major lobbying groups have,Who gave us Obamacare? The medical industry provided crucial support‘We can no longer afford to put health-care reform on hold.”It was on February 24, 2009, a little over a month after he assumed office, that President Obama spoke these words to a joint session of Congress. What happened next — behind the curtain, in the effort to pass Obamacare — is not pretty.Negotiations started almost immediately. In his speech, the president had promised to bring together “businesses and workers, doctors and health-care providers” in order to shape the massive legislation. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s attempt to remake the health-care sector was thought to have failed because of industry hostility to their efforts. The Obama administration, therefore, would welcome health-industry lobbyists to the White House with open arms.“After promising to conduct the health-care negotiations on C-SPAN,” a House Energy and Commerce Committee staffer tells National Review, “President Obama worked behind closed doors to cut deals with the various special-interest groups.” The health-care industry, for its part, was no longer focused on resisting a government intrusion into the private economy. It knew that an alliance between big business and big government could bear big fruits, so it loaded up with policy experts and lobbyists who would help it shape the legislation to its advantage. The American Hospital Association (AHA), the American Medical Association (AMA), and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) have their fingerprints all over Obamacare.On May 15, 2009, the AHA, the AMA, and PhRMA teamed up — along with the labor union SEIU, the insurance group AHIP, and the medical-device manufacturers’ association AdvaMed — to release a joint statement in support of the developing plan. “Health-care reform will not be sustainable,” it said, “unless the nation brings down the rate of growth of health-care spending. . . . To be successful, we must take action in a public-private partnership. We look forward to offering cost-savings recommendations in the weeks ahead.” What the public didn’t see was the furious wheeling and dealing between the industry and the Obama administration over these “cost-savings” recommendations. It was a “public-private partnership” that allowed both sides to get much of what they wanted from Congress.Earlier this year, the House Energy and Commerce Committee concluded an investigation that revealed a startling degree of coordination between the White House and health-industry groups in these efforts. Representative Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), vice chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, did a lot of the legwork on that investigation. She tells National Review that “throughout 2009 and early 2010, the White House did engage in these closed-door negotiations.”The key White House players were Nancy-Ann DeParle and Jim Messina. DeParle was head of the Office of Health Reform (which was created by President Obama) and was colloquially known as the “health-care czar.” Messina, a White House deputy chief of staff, acted as a liaison between health-industry groups and the president. DeParle and Messina were at the beck and call of lobbyists, working behind the scenes to secure the goodies that the groups wanted in exchange for their support.The White House held a series of meetings with the major groups in April and May 2009, trying to discern which concessions would win them over. While every group was opposed to the idea of a government-run insurance plan (a “public option”), they were all cautiously hopeful that they’d somehow be able to protect their interests. Cultivating this attitude was an important goal for the White House: If President Obama could convince people that health-care reform was inevitable, he would be able to peel off opposition groups by offering specific provisions they desired. The industry was being given a choice: Join the team and try to get something out of the legislation or stay on the sidelines and lose.The American Hospital Association was among the first to take the deal. In negotiations in late June and early July, the White House sought a $155 billion reduction in subsidies and payments to hospitals for Medicare, Medicaid, and uncompensated-care programs. The AHA agreed, but the sides soon began sniping at each other, and the AHA started separate negotiations on the same issues with the Senate Finance Committee. This caused Nancy-Ann DeParle to complain to Linda Fishman, one of the AHA’s top lobbyists. DeParle wrote: “We are taking all sorts of incoming from press about specific things you have sought in the [Senate Finance Committee] deal. . . . We are saying that we are not party to such an agreement — we agreed to a number, $155 billion. I know you understand that you are much more likely to end up where you want to be if you don’t box us in.” This veiled threat worked: The AHA suddenly insisted to the press that it wasn’t pushing for anything outside of the White House agreement and would continue to support the administration.What the AHA wanted most was to preserve the flow of government money to its member hospitals, especially through Medicare and Medicaid. In exchange, the AHA agreed to the $155 billion in payment cuts, spent incredible sums of money on lobbying, and steered most of its campaign donations toward Democrats. Despite supporting the White House through the legislative process, the AHA never issued an official endorsement of the final Obamacare legislation, but two weeks after President Obama signed the bill, it unrolled an unusual million-dollar ad campaign in the districts of 16 Democratic House members, most of them in vulnerable seats in red states, thanking them for their “yes” votes.The American Medical Association also walked a tightrope. Like the other groups, it was steadfastly against a public option, but otherwise it tried to cast itself as a partner of the administration. And there was a laundry list of items it wanted in the bill. As outlined in a memo from Richard Deem, its head lobbyist, to DeParle, its priorities included medical-liability reform and the so-called doc fix, a permanent repeal of the payment structure under which doctors are underpaid for services to Medicare and Medicaid patients.The AMA was more trusting than other industry groups in the Obama administration’s willingness and ability to deliver what it promised. “It was a bit of naïvety on the part of the AMA,” Dr. Marcy Zwelling, an AMA member and former president of the Los Angeles County Medical Association, tells National Review. “They did not understand the politics. They did not understand that they were being used. And they were used.”Negotiations got off to a rocky start. In early May 2009, AMA representatives met with Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus but found him unhelpful. “[I] don’t think it went well from a health-sector-community perspective,” Deem wrote to DeParle. He also observed that “we are taking grief from our members because the perception is we are serving them up for payment cuts. . . . It seems like the goal posts are being moved.”AMA members were becoming uncomfortable with the direction their board of trustees was taking. The AMA’s position on Obamacare “was not representative of the AMA as a whole,” Dr. Zwelling says. Doctors were worried that their organization was being politicized in the White House’s push for health-care reform.#page#After its abortive talks with Baucus, the AMA turned to the White House. On July 7, they struck an informal deal, but secrecy was of the utmost importance. “There is some chatter in the health-policy world about a possible physician agreement [a deal under which the AMA would support Obamacare],” Deem wrote to DeParle. “We [are] treating our discussions with you as highly confidential. If asked by reporters we are providing low-key generic responses.” The way the AMA subsequently went about campaigning for Obamacare, however, was anything but low-key. In the following weeks and months, it funded ads explicitly backing President Obama. When the reform approached passage in October, the AMA helped the White House identify which senators were persuadable and deployed its lobbyists and members to influence them.But it also became clear in October that the AMA had been cheated on the doc fix. In order for Obamacare to receive a good score from the Congressional Budget Office, the fix — which would have added more than $200 billion to the deficit over the next ten years — would have to be removed. Privately, Democratic leaders were assuring the AMA that separate doc-fix legislation would still be passed, and the AMA took them at their word. But the Senate passed a provision that created the Independent Payment Advisory Board, an unelected commission that would have power over physician-payment rates for Medicare. IPAB would be empowered to cut doctors’ payments, and as the legislation was written, IPAB would be tasked with cutting them drastically.The AMA had a chance to stand up for its doctors as, after the IPAB provision was included in the Senate’s bill, it went back to the House for approval. In January 2010, however, Richard Deem wrote to DeParle, “We expected and are getting a lot of flak from individual physicians,” but “we do not totally reject the concept of an advisory board.” Publicly, the AMA was against the IPAB provision of Obamacare as written, but the organization was refusing to throw its weight behind the doctors’ opposition. AMA support for Obamacare would move forward.On March 19, 2010, two days before the final vote in Congress, the AMA reiterated its endorsement of the bill. James Rohack, the association’s president, expressed reservations about IPAB and hoped that a permanent doc fix could be agreed upon, but claimed that “this bill will help patients and physicians.” For its trouble, the AMA got a six-month doc fix in a separate piece of legislation. Another short-term fix was passed before the end of 2010, but it will expire this year. AMA lobbyists are still pushing for a permanent solution.Perhaps the biggest health-care prize for the White House was the support of the drug industry. PhRMA spends tens of millions of dollars on lobbying every year, and the administration knew that its support would be hugely influential.In the spring of 2009, the White House’s courtship of PhRMA began. After a meeting in May between Joel Johnson, a lobbyist who represents drug companies, and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, Johnson established the terms of their relationship in an e-mail: PhRMA needed “a direct line of communication, separate and apart from any other coalition.” The drug companies promised to work with the White House to control drug-price inflation, and in exchange they would have a seat at the table to help craft the legislation.It was a rocky road, but the White House would eventually deliver for PhRMA as it had not for the AMA. On June 22, 2009, President Obama announced that the White House had reached an agreement in which the drug industry would concede $80 billion in projected future revenues on drugs sold to the government (mostly for Medicare). What the president did not announce were the provisions that PhRMA demanded as a condition of its agreement.#page#The drug lobby had two main policy goals: It wanted to make sure that price controls and a “public option” were not forced onto Medicare Part D, and it wanted to make sure the bill didn’t include a provision allowing drug reimportation. Reimportation would allow health-care providers and consumers in the United States to bring in American pharmaceutical products from other countries — such as Canada — in which drugs are sold at lower prices. This would force pharmaceutical companies selling in the United States to compete with lower-priced versions of both foreign drugs and their own products. This was something that PhRMA obviously wanted to avoid.The fight over the public option was long and difficult. Liberal Democrats in the House worked tenaciously to get one into the bill, but lobbying by the AMA, PhRMA, and other health-care groups, combined with the White House’s hands-off approach, prevented them from succeeding. On reimportation, though, the Obama administration strongly backed the drug companies. DeParle wrote to PhRMA lobbyists that Obama’s policy would be, “based on how constructive you guys have been, to oppose importation on the bill.” The administration also supported PhRMA on price controls on Medicare Part D.In the weeks after the June 22 deal was announced, however, it seemed likely to fall apart. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, balked at the deal and claimed that the House’s developing version of the health-care legislation needn’t be bound by it. Waxman wanted more than the $80 billion in concessions that the drug industry had already made. He considered both drug reimportation and price controls to be on the table. And he claimed the White House didn’t feel particularly beholden to the deal either.Bryant Hall, one of PhRMA’s lead lobbyists, leapt into action and worked with Jim Messina to get the White House and PhRMA on the same page. Multiple media outlets had confirmed that President Obama had backed off of the previous PhRMA deal, but within hours the storyline changed again. Hall convinced Messina to tell both Politico and the New York Times that the White House was standing behind the deal and didn’t support Waxman’s attempt to push for more. It was an incredible display of PhRMA’s political clout, and even Hall’s colleagues were stunned after he bragged, “I pushed Jim Messina to do it.”Just when it seemed everything had been smoothed over, the Obama team muddied the waters. On July 21, 2009, President Obama read a speech off a teleprompter that implied that drug companies were part of a cabal of “special interests” working to delay or kill reform efforts. Messina, according to the congressional investigation, asked the president why he was suddenly hostile to PhRMA again, and Obama replied, “I was wondering the same.” It turned out that someone on the speechwriting team hadn’t gotten the memo that the White House and the drug companies were on the same side.“I guess we didn’t give enough in contributions and media ads,” read an internal e-mail from a drug-industry lobbyist at the time. “Perhaps no amount would suffice.” Messina and Emanuel reassured Hall that the president’s newest attack on drugmakers was merely a teleprompter mistake. Yet at the end of July, President Obama gave a speech implying that drug makers had gotten a sweetheart deal and that they might be asked to make additional concessions. Hall complained that the president “beat the piss out of us again” and worried that White House senior adviser David Axelrod was pushing a new, tougher line against the drug companies.His fears were confirmed as, in the first week in August, Bloomberg reported that Axelrod had told Democrats there was no deal between the White House and PhRMA. Afterward, a furious Hall had to be talked down by Messina once again. They then conducted a joint PR campaign, outflanking Axelrod.#page#Messina told a New York Times reporter to reiterate that the White House was standing behind the original deal, and Hall had a PhRMA spokesperson persuade CBS News not to run a story reporting that the White House wasn’t sticking by its end of the deal and drug reimportation would be back on the table. These efforts finally sealed the deal: While reimportation and the public option would continue to be mentioned occasionally, by the fall the White House had gotten PhRMA behind Obamacare.Now they just had to sell the thing to the American people.With the White House’s blessing, a 501(c)(4) organization was set up to run a pro-health-care-reform ad campaign in April 2009. Explicit in PhRMA’s deal with the White House was PhRMA’s promise to donate significant amounts of money to this organization, known as Healthy Economy Now. It received over $10 million from PhRMA, alongside smaller donations from the AMA, the Federation of American Hospitals, the AARP, and Blue Cross/Blue Shield. Throughout the spring and summer of 2009, Healthy Economy Now spent tens of millions on ads in states whose congressional representatives were thought to be persuadable.Another group, Americans for Stable Quality Care, was set up in a joint effort by health-industry groups and received and spent even more money than Healthy Economy Now had. PhRMA poured almost $60 million into it. Because the legislation had started to come together in its specifics, this group was even more explicit in its advocacy of particular measures in Obamacare, including the individual mandate, the Medicare expansion, and the requirement that insurers cover individuals with preexisting conditions.Part of PhRMA’s deal with the White House was that it would team up with Families USA, an SEIU-connected 501(c)(4) group, to bring back “Harry and Louise,” a series of advertisements run against the 1993–94 Clinton health-care plan. This time Harry and Louise would be staunchly pro-reform, and they would be supported by PhRMA and Families USA to the tune of $4 million.The American Medical Association, increasingly concerned that its doc fix wouldn’t make it into the final legislation, took to the airwaves with some major ad buys separate from the campaigns it helped run with Healthy Economy Now and Americans for Stable Quality Care. The AMA ran two multimillion-dollar campaigns, in October 2009 and January 2010, upping the pressure on Congress for the permanent doc fix. With no pressure from the White House, however, the campaigns failed, and the AMA was denied one of its key policy goals.President Obama signed his health-care legislation on March 23, 2010, 13 months after his address on the subject to the joint session of Congress. The process had been messy, but he had succeeded where President Clinton had failed, because he had learned the lessons of the 1990s reform fight. He bought off big business, he played the media, he demanded that the health-care industry pony up millions of dollars to support his message — and he won. But he has not owned up to his backroom tactics. “The administration essentially told the American people that how the law was written was none of their business,” a congressional staffer tells National Review. Representative Blackburn notes that “everybody but the White House has cooperated” with her investigation.Industry groups paid up big time, got some things they wanted, and failed to get others. Big business has long tried to steer government policy, but in this instance the stakes were greater than usual. The AMA, the AHA, and PhRMA — all of which declined interview requests for this piece — saw a future with an expanded government role in the health-care industry, and they worked to shape that future with an eye to their own interests. Their efforts helped bring about a new system in which the government has more power than ever before over the health-care industry, from macro issues to the smallest minutiae. They must accordingly bear a large portion of the blame for this massive and unprecedented intrusion of government into private life.Who Gave Us Obamacare? | National ReviewNumber of Special Interests Vying to Influence Health Reform Legislation Swelled As Debate Dragged On - OpenSecrets News

Thanks for asking! California, the fifth largest economy on the planet, is still supporting her weak sisters, the red states mired in ideologically induced economic torpor. (Take a bow, Kansas! Give us a high-five, Mississippi!)Jerry Brown did a bang-up job restraining some of the over-cozy financial shenanigans of the SEIU and other organizations that were using the Democratic Party to be as corrupt as…as Mitch McConnell! (Hope the wifey is making out okay for her family, Mitch!) Or Donald Trump! (Love those foreigners and government agencies paying the toll at the Trump hotels, Donald! That’s grifter genius!)We are, of course, suffering from the effects of global warming. Republican climate deniers trust their families’ lives to science every time they board an airplane, but somehow think the international scientific community is in secret league with AL Gore to thwart Republican scientific intuition. The result is that my fire insurance has doubled in the last year – and 86 of my neighbors in Paradise (I’m an hour away) were burned alive in the most devastating fire in California history. Of course, we’re not alone in being ravaged by climate change. (Hello, Puerto Rico. How are ya doin’, Houston?) Of course, the toll will keep mounting, and about the time their children burst into flames, Republicans will begin to shift on the issue. So nothing to worry about.California does have a housing cost problem. Somehow, that does not exactly match the model of people fleeing the state, but logic has never been a wing-nut specialty. Overall, the state has plenty of affordable housing, but not near the great money-geyser of Silicon Valley, or the international cultural and economic hubs of LA and SF. It’s a drag being a teacher or a cop in those localities. Your whole salary disappears into mortgage payments, or you face a horrible commute. It’s a problem endemic in highly successful communities, and it lands squarely on the people who don’t deserve it. It sucks – and needs to be addressed.But overall, the Golden State is doing just fine, thanks. Now ask me about Kansas!

QUESTION“What gives Fox News and Sean Hannity the right to insinuate that Obama's administration was corrupt and thereby Joe Biden can't be trusted?”ANSWERBecause Sean Hannity is right. The Obama administration was very corrupt, self-dealing, and unresponsive to taxpayers:Solyndra and Ener1 are examples of companies who donated heavily to Obama and Democrats, received millions of dollars in gov’t loans after Obama was in office, and then the owners took the money and shut the businesses. Even if those deeds were fully above-board, we’re still talking about solar panels constructed abroad with the money leaving America for good — “green energy” from yellow people in Red China — and their pollution controls for manufacturing are beyond lax.Cash For Clunkers was established to motivate people to sell their fuel-inefficient cars. Most people bought foreign cars and their trade-in American cars were either destroyed or parted out quietly to Mexico. Building a car requires energy and creates pollution. Destroying a car that still runs is relatively wasteful. (Duh.)A tax write-off that allowed people to buy electric vehicles and deduct thousands of dollars from their taxes basically became a means for rich Americans to get free $6,000 golf carts.IRS centers denied or delayed tax-free status to hundreds of 501(c)(3) applicants using names like “Tea Party,” or “Patriots,” (for what reason other than politics?) demanding donor lists, harassing the applicants, while green-lighting liberal applicants quickly prior to the 2012 election cycle. Did anyone at the IRS lose their job because of this? Lois Lerner was never fired and still has her pension.At Agriculture, the federal government allocated $1.25 billion in 2010 as part of the expanded Pigford II Black Farmer Settlement, handing over $50,000 checks to virtually any black person who claimed they tried to get a farm loan between 1983 and 1997, including people who were 6 years old at the time, and 500 members of one church. As of 2011, 86,000 people had filed claims. But the same government said that there were only 45,000 black farmers nationwide.In 2011, the IRS returned $46,378,040 in tax refunds to 23,994 unauthorized alien claimants whose given address was the same building in Atlanta. “The IRS sent 11,284 refunds worth a combined $2,164,976 to unauthorized alien workers at a second Atlanta address; 3,608 worth $2,691,448 to a third; and 2,386 worth $1,232,943 to a fourth.” Does anyone ever get fired for incompetency?On immigration: President Obama originally wanted what he called the DREAM Act: legal status for the children of illegal aliens brought to the US as minors, who grew up here, and, by Obama’s reasoning, shouldn’t have to return to their homelands. (This was actually first proposed in 2001, but gained new life, in discussions, anyway, during Obama’s 2008 campaign.) When Congress failed to pass this, Obama created an Executive Order in the form of a memorandum, declaring that, as a consequence of budget priorities, the US government would not deport anyone who would have qualified for legal status if the DREAM Act had been passed into law. This became DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. President Trump’s efforts to rescind DACA have been frustrated by the Supreme Court, which ruled on the process but not the merits of Trump’s order. It seems that Obama’s illegal EO is more durable than a law passed by Congress. Also, DACA inspired DAPA, another Obama EO protecting illegal alien parents (who are parents to illegal alien children who are treated as citizens) from being deported. So, we have “anchor babies” and “anchor parents.” (Sigh.)But that wasn’t enough: Obama also hired pro bono attorneys who defend illegal aliens in court, as executive officers for ICE and Border Patrol. The people in charge of enforcing US immigration policy are the very people who are least likely to want the policy enforced. Border enforcement agents received guidance that told them their superiors wouldn’t defend them from prosecution, and advised them not to follow engagement policies that were legal.And that wasn’t enough: The US government, under Obama, advertised the fact that it was not deporting and removing childhood arrivals. Latin American parents were sending their children to the US border in trains. During Obama’s administration, the number exceeded 100,000.The Veterans Administration gave its 470 senior executives perfect marks during Obama’s first term, noting each and every one of them achieved across-the-board success in every area for four years, and paying out $2 million in performance bonuses. Meanwhile, 120,000 veterans in the Phoenix VA Center were left waiting or never received care, and at least 35 of them died while waiting for appointments that were never scheduled. The number of VA employees fired over this scandal seems to be in single-digits. One employee, placed on administrative leave for seven months due to performance, was paid $90,000 while on leave, prior to being fired.At ATF, the government was running a “sting” operation called Fast and Furious. Firearms were sold to illicit straw buyers, and the gov’t was supposed to spy on them and arrest them when the firearms were transferred to cartel members; however, the cartel members were never caught. 2,000 weapons were allowed to “walk,” and about half were recovered. Some of them were used in crimes, like the one that felled Officer Brian Terry. When the Congress investigated, President Obama raised an executive privilege claim; when that was overturned by a judge in 2016, House members filed suit to recover the relevant documents; in 2019, the newly Democrat-controlled House withdrew the suit.General Motors went bankrupt in 2009. In an immense restructuring, the government under Obama created a New GM corporation, fed it enough money to purchase all of General Motors’ assets, hired the unions back under identical terms, hired the same GM leadership except for two people, paid the GM debtholders ten cents on the dollar, and protected the jobs of 150,000 people, 90,000 of which were not Americans, and in 2013, the government announced that it lost $12 billion on the bankruptcy (and the debtholders apparently lost many times that much). It is very shocking to retain the leadership of a failed business and doubly shocking to retain the union contracts that the business demonstrably could not pay. Triple shocking that all this government money was washing around, the unions were unscathed and the vendors were screwed, completely upside down from any bankruptcy.The US Embassy in Libya is in Tripoli. It was established there in the 1950s, closed in 1980, reopened in 2004, and it’s been open since then. Our embassy has never been in Benghazi. So why did we have a diplomatic mission there starting in February 2011? As a cover for the movement of arms. That’s the long and short of it, and that’s why it was important for terrorist groups to target the American mission in Benghazi and destroy it. Obama & Co were running guns in Benghazi, supposedly helping Libyans and others protect their freedom. Of course they couldn’t admit that to you, because they don’t want you to have guns. Anyhow, on September 11, 2012, less than two months away from Obama’s re-election, the mission was attacked and four Americans were killed. Obama didn’t want you to know that terrorists were responsible. He sent Susan Rice to lie to the American people, giving some dumb story about protesters reacting to a video they watched online. This was weird since the “protesters” were using not just grenades but also RPGs, AK-47s, and “heavier weapons.” Rockets, mortar, and gunfire were used against the CIA compound nearby. The public was kept in the dark about the true nature of Benghazi, and it would be quite some time before they learned that significant arms — reportedly $500 million worth — ended up with Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the attackers themselves.President Obama hated the fact that terrorists were kept indefinitely as prisoners at Guantanamo Bay (aka Camp X-Ray). First, he wanted to close the prison and try the terrorists as criminals in New York City. When that proved unworkable, the next idea was to release the lower-level ones. That also didn’t work out good, because they tended to race back to Afghanistan and shoot at our soldiers, and the foreign media reported this. Eventually US mainstream media had to cover it. Also, five important Taliban senior leaders were swapped for Bowe Bergdahl, a wayward young private with a month in-country, who deserted his unit and was captured and held for five years.In 1979, the Shah of Iran fled to the US and his government fell to the Ayatollah Khomeini. Iranian revolutionaries captured 52 Americans and held them for 444 days. In the meantime, the US gov’t froze billions of dollars in Iranian assets held in US banks. Thirty years later, those assets had accumulated in value to about $150 billion. To achieve a nuclear deal with Iran that would make him look good internationally, Obama sent the $150 billion to Iran, plus $2 billion in (foreign!) cash, air-dropped on huge pallets. Obama also secretly released seven Iranian spies to Iran. There is little doubt that several billion of this was used by Hezbollah in terrorism.The Obama presidential campaigns were riddled with FEC troubles. While McCain ’08 dutifully reported every penny, Obama For America (OFA) used a loophole to avoid reporting “small” contributions ($25 or less). But OFA made out like a bandit because they heavily encouraged small contributions and took many millions of them, reportedly using this route for illegal foreign contributions. The re-elect campaign (America For Obama) was super-dirty because of course the FEC was packed and muzzled, and the media was complicit.The FCC under Obama was pressured to adopt broad, sweeping rules which, if enacted, would have destroyed conservative talk radio. Radio stations were to be made liable for lawsuits from anyone claiming “equal time” to respond to any political view offered on air, and there are many millions more people than there are radio stations.ObamaCare was foisted down America’s throat, with a multi-trillion dollar price tag, 20 new taxes, numerous corrupt “carve-outs” and bailouts for certain states with wavering Senators, and public support was below 30 percent. You have already heard of “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” but of course this was the deal that was so complicated literally no one in Congress understood it before it passed. Nancy Pelosi said, “we have to pass it to find out what’s in it,” and we don’t even think she was senile yet when she said that. One new tax, the “Cadillac Tax,” specifically targeted health plans that were too good, meaning they covered too many expenses. Design for the website was farmed out to the company employing Michelle Obama’s college friend, and the roll-out of the website was a huge disaster. President Obama gave himself the authority to sign “exemptions” to anyone he thought deserving of them, which included major unions like the million-plus strong SEIU.Digitizing health records was considered a big improvement, and in that same federal power grab, was the notion that physicians were to be required to ask patients, even children, if there is a firearm in the home. President Obama has never been a supporter of the Second Amendment, but this is undoubtedly one of many methodologies contemplated to quickly round up private firearms in the event it ever becomes politically possible. We’re also told that the data has been repeatedly hacked.President Obama put Joe Biden in charge of the US-Ukraine foreign policy. A corrupt Ukrainian oligarch arranged for Joe’s son, Hunter, to be a board member for Burisma. The State Deprtment knew about this and there was concern about it in 2015. And Hunter knows nothing of energy or natural gas or Ukraine. Doesn’t speak Ukrainian. Did he even go to Ukraine? But he earned at least $850,000, looks like more. When Burisma got into trouble, there were calls to Washington, and soon after, the troubles started going away. Another deal with China earned Hunter about half a million dollars, and Joe’s brothers and sister and son-in-law have had plenty of foreigner steak and taxpayer pie. Yet we’re supposed to believe these working-class shmoes have done nothing wrong.“Russia, Russia, Russia,” started in Ukraine. Something called the Black Book was used against Paul Manafort, who was part of the Trump campaign for a few weeks in 2016, to take him down, and it was part of the seed that grew into Spygate. We read about a Hillary Clinton co-chair named Alexandra Chalupa. Darn shame that you missed that. The basic concept of accusing the Trump campaign of collusion with Russia, China, Ukraine, or some foreign country is that Hillary was colluding with foreign powers to win the election and this was her inoculation. This was her defense against accusation from Trump. As this scam grew and grew, it blossomed into a full-fledged fake investigation by the FBI, who knew that they were not getting good information, but kept spying anyway, even when it meant lying to the FISA court. President Obama and Vice President Biden knew about Spygate and were briefed on it. We are now hearing reports that Biden was the one who suggested General Flynn be tripped up in a Logan Act violation, even though no one has been convicted of it since Congress passed it in 1799.Donald Trump is not a mean or vindictive person, so he did not fire Obama appointees up and down, throughout every department, in every office, and appoint his own people on January 20. As we now know, that was a huge mistake, because President Obama positioned spies and saboteurs, convincing his appointees to find work in the supposedly-apolitical bureaucracy, which famously became “la Resistance.” Trump was horribly mistaken to assume James Comey meant him no harm. If we were Trump (and we’re in no way connected) we’d fire Christopher Wray right now.If Donald Trump had not won the Presidency in 2016, we would literally know nothing about Spygate, because there was no mechanism, no counterbalance, nothing in that corrupt 7th-floor witch coven that causes them to come clean. WikiLeaks didn’t know about it. (They did see a pattern that Hillary opponents are somehow all tagged as antisemitic sexists/sex offenders with ties to Russia. They did know of Obama/Hillary ties to Russia and Putin.) Had Trump not won, the folks wouldn’t be reminded of Ukraine and corruption, especially not through the Fake News Ukraine Call that launched Shampeachment. It might never have been revealed that Hunter Biden got fantastic paydays from Ukraine and China for no adequately explored reason.And more to come.