Obama Politicizes Government Contracts

I was appalled -- but not surprised -- when I read this article from The Wall Street Journal yesterday. The gist of it is that Obama is about to sign an executive order reversing a 70-year-old government policy. This new order will require all private companies and their officers to list their political donations as a condition to bidding for government contracts.

This is called using the power of the government to silence your political opponents. Companies have two choices: donate to Republicans (or conservative third-party groups) and lose out on all government contracts, or protect their livelihoods and don't give any money to Republican candidates. Oh yeah, and guess who doesn't have to disclose their donations? That's right. Unions, which donate overwhelmingly to Democrats.

Thanks to Obama, no longer will we have a federal contract system based on best value and best quality. Now politics will decide who gets what contract. That may be good for Obama's re-election campaign, but it's not very good for our country.

It is increasingly difficult for me to understand how someone who genuinely cares about the future of our country can support this radical leftist, this partisan hack who now occupies the White House.

Hope and Change Is Code for Threats and Intimidation

Check out this article in the Washington Examiner. As I noted in an earlier post, numerous large American corporations have announced in the last few days that ObamaCare is going to significantly raise their costs to provide prescription drug coverage for former employees, possibly resulting in loss of benefits. Obviously, this doesn't quite fit with the Democrats' preferred narrative about their health care bill, so they've decided to fix the problem by hauling those companies' executives before a congressional committee and demanding they release all internal documents relating to the impact of the health care bill on their costs. The goal is to intimidate these companies into keeping silent about ObamaCare and to discourage other companies from saying anything critical about ObamaCare in the future. The Democrats are using the full powers of government to force private companies and citizens to keep their mouths shut, Soviet style. OK, maybe not quite Soviet style yet. But definitely Chicago thug-style. These companies are now between a rock and a hard place. By failing to disclose changes that could have a negative impact on their bottom line, they open themselves up to investigation, penalties, and prosecution by the SEC. By disclosing those changes, which happens to reflect poorly on the Democrats' health care legislation, they open themselves up to a partisan witch-hunt by our esteemed Democratic Congress. And we wonder why American companies aren't hiring....