{"id":9947,"date":"2012-03-29T10:59:58","date_gmt":"2012-03-29T14:59:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/henrypayne.com\/?p=9947"},"modified":"2012-03-30T11:01:33","modified_gmt":"2012-03-30T15:01:33","slug":"payne-fundamentally-transforming-the-united-states-of-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/2012\/03\/payne-fundamentally-transforming-the-united-states-of-america","title":{"rendered":"Payne: &#8216;Fundamentally transforming the United States of America&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Give President Obama his due. He is fulfilling his campaign promise of &#8220;fundamentally transforming the United States of America.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Some myopic commentators have expressed surprise claiming that Obama sold himself as a moderate &#8211; but they weren&#8217;t paying attention. From his radical, patronizing 2007 speech to the Detroit Economic Club promising that he would force them to build hybrid cars to his 2007 promise of &#8220;universal health care by the end of my first term&#8221; to Joe Biden\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=iJ55UzAsp6M\">in 2008<\/a>\u00a0pledging &#8220;no new coal plants here in America,&#8221; this is a Democratic ticket that has consistently believed that America needed an Extreme Makeover.<\/p>\n<p>This week, that transformation was in full view as Obama&#8217;s nationalization of the health sector clashed with Constitutional principles before the Supreme Court and as Obama&#8217;s EPA decreed an end to coal power.<\/p>\n<p>This is sweeping stuff. And yes, Obama has exercised disturbing, authoritarian means to get there including procedural sleight-of-hand to ram through the partisan health care bill, an unconstitutional individual mandate, and now executive branch emissions edicts that bypass the legislative process.<\/p>\n<p>But liberals have not been shy that transformation includes end-running democratic process. Most famously, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, one of the leading intellectual influences on the Obama White House and author of &#8220;Hot, Flat, and Crowded,&#8221; has been openly jealous of Chinese Communist rule as a way of quickly imposing societal makeovers that force green technologies.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are the ones we have been waiting for,&#8221; President Obama said of his victory in 2008. He promised &#8220;change&#8221; and America is getting it good and hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Give President Obama his due. He is fulfilling his campaign promise of &#8220;fundamentally transforming the United States of America.&#8221; Some myopic commentators have expressed surprise claiming that Obama sold himself as a moderate &#8211; but they weren&#8217;t paying attention. From his radical, patronizing 2007 speech to the Detroit Economic Club promising that he would force [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,87],"tags":[13],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9947"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9949,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9947\/revisions\/9949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrypayne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}