There is a pattern to how Obama has advanced the project of a command-and-control economy -- i.e., fascism with a veneer of capitalism.  Using a negotiator's tactic, Obama sets up his opposition so that they will be happy with meaningless scraps.  The idea is to make demands that are outrageous to demand and then later back away to a degree it is no longer deemed egregious.  The opposition walks away foolishly thinking it scored a victory, all the while not realizing that the line had been moved.  By being focused on the worst of the demands, no one notices that they are accepting the premise behind the demands. 

This is the tactic of the shrewd negotiator, who includes things that he knows he does not need in his list of wants.  It is his hope that when he feigns a concession by removing some of the unneeded items, the other side shall be in a morally obligatory position to make their own concessions. 

In the political arena, the use of this tactic serves two purposes, the first being to put false pressure on the other side and the second to create a smokescreen for an underlying agenda. 

Obama regularly employs this tactic and has shoved us towards fascism with it.  Here I mean "fascism" in the sense that Obama believes that the capitalist economic system must be directed, managed, and coordinated under the supervision of the state, to bring about transformation the state deems desirable.

For example, instead of proposing to cut corporate business taxes, limiting regulation, or other actions that tangibly free up business capital to hire, he proposes a "stimulus" instead, a scheme to spend money that does not yet exist to come from someone in the private sector and to be spent on nonexistent "shovel ready" jobs.  With a budget that automatically increases each year, it was outrageous to demand that we spend more.  The parties should reasonably hammer out something that reduces costs to business.  But instead of the debate being about whether or not there should be a stimulus, they compromise instead about how much the stimulus should be.  Invisibly, the line is moved so that the stimulus represents a fresh baseline for the budget, and the false premise that the government can boost the economy tacitly receives the imprimatur of Congress.

Then there was ObamaCare.  Shrouded in a miasma of inconsistency, questions abounded whether the president was determined to get single-payer, government-run health care.  He said he wanted to increase competition and reduce costs, that we have to work with what we have and fix what is broken.  He then, nonetheless, pushed for a major overhaul that injected government into the "system" of health care.  Again, this was an outrageous step.  It was so outrageous that no Republicans signed up, so the negotiation ended up being between Obama and the more conservative Democrats.  The final holdouts, including Bart Stupak, signed on thinking they won victories for their causes, including a useless executive order ostensibly to prohibit directing federal funds to abortions.  But by signing on, they moved the line.  They accepted the premise that government's role and authority to manage and control the health care industry should be almost limitlessly expanded.

Finally, there is the recent rule by the administration that requires health plans to provide free contraception and sterilization, except if the employer is religious.  The outrage is that the definition for "religious" is so narrow that it does not exempt Catholic hospitals or universities, so, Catholic or not, they will have to set aside their conscience and convictions.  Obama must have known that this would spark outrage.  They went ahead anyway.  Why?  I think it is the same negotiation tactic, though technically this isn't negotiation; it is rule-making.  Obama wants greater government control, so he demands the outrageous, and now he is testing how much he has to walk it back to quell the fires.  As seen here, he has offered a "compromise" (a meaningless scrap), and since the religious institutions speaking out don't want confrontation, they may bite.  If so, Obama will have moved the line.  This process also serves as the smokescreen for his effort to cement the premise, which premise is the rule itself, created so that, as Krauthammer put it here, "the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state's regulators." 

In short, we're making such a fuss about the exception to the rule that we don't object to the rule. 

Consider the ramifications of where we are today.  We have generally accepted the gross idea that government may be entrusted with the power so controlling and intrusive that it may compel one side to buy the product of insurance, another side to sell it (if you mandate the purchase, logic holds that you mandate the sale), and then on top of all the very composition of the product. 

Ladies and gentlemen, tyranny and fascism are here.  When are we going to draw the line?