President Barack Obama:
President Barack Obama actually tops this Top Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians list for 2013 as the driving force behind so many of the misdeeds. This is Obamas seventh straight year on the list, dating back all the way to 2007 (in 2006, he earned a Dishonorable Mention). He is a master at catch-me-if-you-can, corrupt politics. This year, he has again acted as a one-man Congress, rewriting entire sections of federal law on his own. Not only is his administration secretive and dishonest; its callous disregard for the rule of law undermines our constitutional republic. Examples include:
Perhaps Obamas most outrageous actions over the past year were his continual lies about the ability of Americans to keep their own health insurance under Obamacare. According the Free Beacon, Obama misled the American people a total of 36 times between 2008 and 2013 with his promise, If you like your health insurance, you can keep it. And according to NBC News, Obama knew, even as he repeated his lie, that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them:
None of this should come as a shock to the Obama administration. The law states that policies in effect as of March 23, 2010 will be grandfathered, meaning consumers can keep those policies even though they dont meet requirements of the new health care law. But the Department of Health and Human Services then wrote regulations that narrowed that provision, by saying that if any part of a policy was significantly changed since that date the deductible, co-pay, or benefits, for example the policy would not be grandfathered.
Buried in Obamacare regulations from July 2010 is an estimate that because of normal turnover in the individual insurance market, 40 to 67 percent of customers will not be able to keep their policy. And because many policies will have been changed since the key date, the percentage of individual market policies losing grandfather status in a given year exceeds the 40 to 67 percent range.
That means the administration knew that more than 40 to 67 percent of those in the individual market would not be able to keep their plans, even if they liked them.
Throughout 2013, the Obama family continued to use the White House as its own personal travel bureau and the taxpayers as their personal expense account.
Though Obama quickly disavowed any knowledge of the IRS assault on Tea Party and other conservative groups leading up to the 2012 presidential election, the fact is that it was the president himself who fingered the groups for what might be called special handling. Consider Obamas own hostile and aggressive statements, made just as his IRS officials were gearing up their assault:
August 9, 2010: During his weekly radio address, Obama warned of attack ads run by shadowy groups with harmless-sounding names. The President said: We dont know whos behind these ads and we dont know whos paying for them . . . you dont know if its a foreign controlled corporation.
The only people who dont want to disclose the truth are people with something to hide.
September 20, 2010: Speaking in Philadelphia, Obama once again warned that nobody knows the identities of the individuals who support conservative groups.
September 22, 2010: Speaking in New York, Obama warned against groups opposing his policies [posing] as non-for-profit social and welfare trade groups and he claimed such groups were guided by seasoned Republican political operatives and potentially supported by some unidentified foreign controlled entity.
October 14, 2010: Obama attacked organizations with benign sounding names as a problem for democracy.
Little wonder that after their boss sounded the call to attack, Obamas IRS appointees obeyed the command. And even less wonder that, caught red-handed, Obama first claimed total ignorance and, when the ploy failed, simply labeled it all a phony scandal.
According to the Galen Institute, Obama has now unilaterally rewritten the Obamacare law as passed by Congress 14 times by executive fiat, with the majority of those changes coming in 2013. Those changes include such major overhauls as the congressional opt-out, eviscerating the individual mandate, and delaying the employer mandate. The latest Obama fix came on December 20, when he suddenly moved to allow hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their insurance due to Obamacare to sign up for bare-bone catastrophic plans. As National Review observed, Of course, like every other exemption from Obamacare the latest fix is supposed to last only a year, raising the prospect that people will be kicked off their catastrophic coverage as soon as the 2014 election is safely in the political rear-view mirror.
