This is simply unbelievable. Mike Huckabee, while on a trip to Israel, suggests we free a traitor to the United States, Jonathan Pollard, as a show of "friendship" towards Israel.
From the Case Against Jonathan Pollard by Seymour Hersch, which originally appeared in New York Magazine on January 18, 1999:
In the last decade, Jonathan Pollard, the American Navy employee who spied for Israel in the mid-nineteen-eighties and is now serving a life sentence, has become a cause celebre in Israel and among Jewish groups in the United States. The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, a consortium of fifty-five groups, has publicly called for Pollard's release, arguing, in essence, that his crimes did not amount to high treason against the United States, because Israel was then and remains a close ally. Many of the leading religious organizations have also called for an end to Pollard's imprisonment, among them the Reform Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the Orthodox Union.
Let me get this straight. Jonathan Pollard, someone who betrayed his country, and gave classified information to a foreign nation, should be let go? This man committed high treason. The penalty is supposed to be death. He's quite lucky he only got life in prison.
According to prosecutors in the case, Pollard made more than $540,000 selling those secrets. And the secrets he passed along were so sensitive that portions of the trial were classified and not made available to the general public. And on top of it all, many of those secrets ended up in the hands of our enemy, the Soviet Union.
There a whole lot more to the story. If you want to read a definitive and well-sourced account of the Pollard case can read more here.
Suffice it to say this guy is a traitor, and should spend the rest of his life in prison.
Thirty-nine (39) Members of Congress have signed a letter requesting clemency (Curiously, they are all Democrats.)
What in the world is Huckabee thinking? I know he thinks he has a shot at the presidency. Does he think pandering like this, and siding with democrats, in a foreign land, will win him votes? With who exactly?
Huckabee is dangerous, and a fool. Criminals are placed in prisons for a reason. Sadly, it seems Huckabee never met a criminal, or a traitor he didn't want to set free.
Let me just say this, the democrat/communist party is openly carrying out a coup d'état right in front of us. I have written on many occasions how many of the provisions of ObamaCare are nothing more than a complete and total usurpation of the Constitution that will forever destroy states’ rights, and severely restrict individual rights in this country.
ObamaCare is completely and totally unconstitutional. This is pointed out, yet again, in the Wall Street Journal op-ed co-written by Orrin Hatch, Ken Blackwell, and Kenneth Klukowski:
Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional
If the government can mandate the purchase of insurance, it can do anything.
President Obama's health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.
First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate. Congress's powers to tax and spend do not apply because the mandate neither taxes nor spends. The only other option is Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce.
Congress has many times stretched this power to the breaking point, exceeding even the expanded version of the commerce power established by the Supreme Court since the Great Depression. It is one thing, however, for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned.
In fact, the Supreme Court in United States v. Lopez (1995) rejected a version of the commerce power so expansive that it would leave virtually no activities by individuals that Congress could not regulate. By requiring Americans to use their own money to purchase a particular good or service, Congress would be doing exactly what the court said it could not do.
Some have argued that Congress may pass any legislation that it believes will serve the "general welfare." Those words appear in Article I of the Constitution, but they do not create a free-floating power for Congress simply to go forth and legislate well. Rather, the general welfare clause identifies the purpose for which Congress may spend money. The individual mandate tells Americans how they must spend the money Congress has not taken from them and has nothing to do with congressional spending.
A second constitutional defect of the Reid bill passed in the Senate involves the deals he cut to secure the votes of individual senators. Some of those deals do involve spending programs because they waive certain states' obligation to contribute to the Medicaid program. This selective spending targeted at certain states runs afoul of the general welfare clause. The welfare it serves is instead very specific and has been dubbed "cash for cloture" because it secured the 60 votes the majority needed to end debate and pass this legislation.
A third constitutional defect in this ObamaCare legislation is its command that states establish such things as benefit exchanges, which will require state legislation and regulations. This is not a condition for receiving federal funds, which would still leave some kind of choice to the states. No, this legislation requires states to establish these exchanges or says that the Secretary of Health and Human Services will step in and do it for them. It renders states little more than subdivisions of the federal government.
This violates the letter, the spirit, and the interpretation of our federal-state form of government. Some may have come to consider federalism an archaic annoyance, perhaps an amusing topic for law-school seminars but certainly not a substantive rule for structuring government. But in New York v. United States (1992) and Printz v. United States (1997), the Supreme Court struck down two laws on the grounds that the Constitution forbids the federal government from commandeering any branch of state government to administer a federal program. That is, by drafting and by deliberate design, exactly what this legislation would do.
The federal government may exercise only the powers granted to it or denied to the states. The states may do everything else. This is why, for example, states may have authority to require individuals to purchase health insurance but the federal government does not. It is also the reason states may require that individuals purchase car insurance before choosing to drive a car, but the federal government may not require all individuals to purchase health insurance.
This hardly exhausts the list of constitutional problems with this legislation, which would take the federal government into uncharted political and legal territory. Analysts, scholars and litigators are just beginning to examine the issues we have raised and other issues that may well lead to future litigation.
America's founders intended the federal government to have limited powers and that the states have an independent sovereign place in our system of government. The Obama/Reid/Pelosi legislation to take control of the American health-care system is the most sweeping and intrusive federal program ever devised. If the federal government can do this, then it can do anything, and the limits on government power that our liberty requires will be more myth than reality.
*Mr. Hatch, a Republican senator from Utah, is a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Blackwell is a senior fellow with the Family Research Council and a professor at Liberty University School of Law. Mr. Klukowski is a fellow and senior legal analyst with the American Civil Rights Union.
This piece hits on all cylinders. Never in our nation’s 233 year history has the federal government attempted to mandate that a United States citizen purchase a product or service, whether that product or service is welcomed by the citizen, or it is forced on them against their will.
And if you look at any poll out there, 70 to 80 percent of the citizenry do not want the current health care schemes that the most corrupt president in the nation’s history and the most corrupt Congress in history plan to forcibly impose on them.
Now I know, the democrat/communists use the excuse that states require that owners of automobiles are required to maintain liability insurance, under the penalty of law to justify this.
But this argument is fatally flawed in several ways, and shows a willful ignorance of how this nation is fundamentally structured.
The automobile insurance example they use is laughable on it’s face value. Driving an automobile is a privilege not a right. You must earn a license in order to drive.
Also, driving a car is a matter of choice. There are millions of Americans who live their entire lives having never driven a car. The insurance you are required to maintain as an owner of an automobile is not to protect you, but to protect others from you, should you have an accident.
You may chose to buy insurance to also take care of repairs or medical issues that effect you in an accident, and if you are financing a car, your bank will require this. But every step of way, all of this is based on the fact that you voluntarily chose to drive a car.
Congress intends to force you to buy health insurance simply because you are alive.
First and foremost, the United States is a Representative Republic, and as the very name of our nation implies, we are united STATES. The entire United States Constitution is centered around the fact that the founders, in their wisdom, planned America as a loose confederation of separate sovereign states that are joined together for mutual benefit. While you certainly find the mention of the duties of the federal, or central government, the Constitution places more effort in protecting the rights of the several states, as they are called. In fact, the 10th Amendment was written solely to protect both the American people, AND the several states from an overreaching central government:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The 10th Amendment is so important to the concept of America it is the final right included in the Bill of Rights that were ratified by the several states in 1791.
To put this another way, the United States is 50 separate sovereign entities, independent from each other in most matters. This was a genius move by our founders, as it allows maximum local control by the people, the citizens who make up these states, and ultimately make up this great nation.
Now, for practical purposes, the states are united for a common cause, and with good reason. The founders saw the need to pool resources for things like national security. The also saw a need for uniform trade laws between the several states. It was quite common before the nation was founded, and even when the nation was in it’s infancy, to see trade wars between states. Obviously, a uniform system of trading, and a common currency, were of benefit to all parties involved.
Now over the years, especially since the "progressive era" that began with Teddy Roosevelt, and went into overdrive with FDR, we have seen many usurpations of states’ rights "for the greater good." Now, not all federal law....law that binds all states, and all citizens to a uniform rule or regulation is bad. But each and every one of these laws erode precious rights of our citizenry and must be strongly considered before becoming law. We’ll go into just how much of this has hurt the nation and the negative impact it has on American citizens in future writings, but for now, let’s stay focused on what is going on right here.
The democrat/communist party does not agree with any of the concepts of our Constitution, or the path our founders laid out for us. A path, by the way, that has made America the nation with the most durable civilization, the most stable, mankind has ever known.
The democrat/communists have been openly saying for generations now that our Constitution is "obsolete" or, better yet, that it is a "living document." I guess they think that sounds better when they ignore it, which is something they do daily, and have since FDR. Not that "progressive" Republicans haven’t done their fair share, as the trend really first took hold under the Republican Roosevelt, Teddy. Many transgressions there.
The bottom line is this: The democrat/communists simply do not trust the citizenry to "do as they are told." Americans, by their very nature, and birthright, are an independent people. We don’t need or want anyone to tell us what to do, or how to live our lives. We are a people that feel we should be able to do anything we wish, so long as it doesn’t harm someone else, and we feel that government should not only not be seen, but not be heard!
For the most part, other than providing for a strong national defense, and protecting us, we see little or no need for a federal government. At best, the federal government should be a referee of sorts in case of disputes between the several states, period.
Yes, I know that’s sort of idealized, but it is in line with the vision our founders had.
The rest of governing, of setting rules and regulations are to be left up to each of the several states, which in turn, should be weaker than the local, city governments, in most cases, only creating statewide rules for uniformity and fair practices, or setting minimum standards for things like education, law enforcement, and the like.
We also need state government, along with local government to plan and build major infrastructure, like roads, bridges, and water and sewer systems.
Again, the democrat/communists see government in an entirely different light. They see government as the end all, be all of civil society. All other nations of the world are set up the way the American democrat/communist wish to see America, though what the democrat/communists offer is a more harsh, more severe lifestyle that will rival that of the most brutal dictatorship, and will severely limit, or completely eliminate most of the basic natural rights, God given rights that all of mankind possess. (Though most governments take away)
You see, this is the real problem these evil people have. What most Americans do not realize, and that’s by design as they no longer teach this in government controlled schools, is this: Unlike any other governing document in the world, the United States Constitution assumes the people have unlimited rights, natural rights, rights given to them by their creator. Our Constitution is designed to protect those rights, and the people, from a tyrannical government.
To the democrat/communist, this is a serious impairment to their cause, to their goals. Barack Obama was the first though to just come out and say what all of these corrupt people have been thinking for decades.
Obama has called the Constitution a set of "negative rights" because it limits what the government can do to you and doesn’t say what it must do for you!
Of course, this is the point!
Obama, like pretty much every democrat/communist, especially the Ivy Leaguers, is educated well above the level of his actual intelligence. Like the old saying goes: "Just smart enough to be dangerous!"
BTW, this applies to the Ivy League "progressive" Republicans, as well.
In short, the Constitution seeks to limit government, not people. As a person, you are assumed to have no limits on your rights. Now obviously, to hold civil society together, there are any number of common sense laws that we all must abide by. Some are rules of conduct, like those that restrict driving to only those who have been granted permission, or set building standards. And of course we have laws against stealing, or murder, and so on.
But in the end, the Constitution is all about protecting the citizen from government, and limiting the federal government severely. This is what frustrates the "progressives, " the democrat/communists to no end.
Of course, they can’t just come out and say that they want to do away with the form of government that is the envy of the world! So, slowly but surely, for about 100 years, they have methodically, and deliberately, undermined the Constitution.
We are now at a tipping point in history though. The democrat/communists have become incredibly unpopular as America has finally awaken to the fact that these people are truly the enemy within, and we will see the next several election cycles completely and totally remove most, if not all of those currently in office. And they know it. In fact, many of the most evil, the most corrupt, are already announcing retirements. Dozens will no longer seek office.
As you will read, they are seeking ways to forever prevent this from happening though.
Of course, having the worst of the worst go away is a tactic as well, as they believe if they bail out, and move on to jobs promised to them by democrat/communist leadership, outside of government, the people will vote for whatever democrat/communist decides to run in their place.
Oh, one thing you must know, all of these "retirees" are leaving seats that have been safe and reliable democrat/communist strongholds, and all of them are losing in the polls to Conservatives. This is why they believe by tactically stepping down, they will once again fool the people with a little bait and switch. Somehow I don’t think that will work, but only time will tell.
All in all, the democrat/communist is an over educated, arrogant, elite, who think it knows best for everyone else. These people also have an insatiable lust for power and unlimited greed.
The American republican system of federal government simply does not allow them to exert the control over mankind they lust for. This almost maniacal, psychopathic desire to exert dominance and control over others "for their own good" is the hallmark of the "progressive" movement. And while it is not exclusive to the democrat/communists, there more than a few "progressive" Republicans, this disease is more dangerous when combined with the democrat/communist ideology.
But for all of this to work, America as we know it, must be destroyed, forever.
One more thing I have talked about at length is the so-called environmental movement, and most importantly Big Global Warming. Just like they are using health care, I mean who isn't for giving people health care, under the guise of "saving the planet" the democrat/communist "progressives" seek to gain total dominance over all of mankind by guilting you into "being a good steward of the earth."
This is an even easier sale than health care, because there actually is pollution, and real environmental issues, just not global warming. No one, and I mean no one wants a dirty environment, and everyone is on board for common sense methods of preserving nature. It’s a real no brainer to be on that bandwagon.
However, you can’t develop a system that will control mass populations, and line your pocketbooks, by just taking good care of the planet. So the global warming "crisis" was born. The greatest lie ever told was cooked up in order to give "progressives" an excuse to create Big Global Warming, and of course grow Big Government.
Look at the trillions of dollars that have been thrown away chasing this mess. Crooks like Al Gore, the Bernie Madoff of the climate change crowd, has made $100's of millions of dollars off of this scam, and as we know, the proposed cap and trade schemes will make Gore, and others billionaires as they trade "carbon credits" like stocks, in carbon credit trading exchanges.
This hoax also allows Big Global Warming to team up with Big Government and create regulations that absolutely touch every single facet of a person’s life. Literally no activity, will be left unaffected. A quick search through my past works will show you that population control, forced sterilizations and abortions are very much part of their overall plans. Some real radicals even call for the outright extermination of mass sections of populations. And these are so-called mainstream people. .
In other words, using the "for your own good" argument, the democrat/communists seek to permanently seize control of the United States government, and destroy the very concept of the United States. In it’s place they, in the words of Barack Obama, want to "fundamentally transform" the United States into a communist dictatorship. They seek to create a strong central command and control government. A government where ever decision, every rule, every regulation, comes not from your local city council, or state legislature, but anonymous, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats in Washington.
Remember, democrat/communists are all about power. They lust for it, live for it. They are also incredibly greedy. Now all of them have nothing but contempt for capitalism, and openly discuss how horrible it is, but at the same time, they lust after great personal wealth, for themselves, and they make that wealth off the backs of the American tax payer.
To that end, and for the coup d'état to be complete, the democrat/communists must control elections, ALL elections. Now we have already come to realize that Barack Obama’s former employers, ACORN and their union thug wing, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) are the gold standard when it comes to stealing elections. They wrote the book on voter fraud, and they are partially funded by the federal government, to the tune of billions of dollars for their trouble.
As long as there is a single democrat/communist in Congress, ACORN/SEIU will receive astronomical sums of tax payer money that they will use to continually research new ways to steal elections, as well as refine the old ways.
This is why Barack Obama announced, just days after taking office, that he was taking over the United States census activities, the mechanism we use to apportion delegates to Congress, as well as many other programs, and basically handing it over to ACORN/SEIU to perform. If one has any doubts there won’t be massive corruption in that process they need their heads examined!
Back to voting though. I came across this from the American Thinker’s James Simpson that spells out how the democrat/communists will destroy the republican form of government, the most successful one ever devised by man, and "fundamentally change" America into a central command and control communist dictatorship:
What the Dems Know: Universal Voter Registration
Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats with no apparent concern for their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago, "What do they know that we don't?"
We may have found out. It's called universal voter registration. The Wall Street Journal's John Fund described the Democrat plan recently at a David Horowitz Freedom Center forum. Watch the video here.
Fund describes the proposal as follows:
In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration. What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states: 'take everyone on every list of welfare that you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver's license holders and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be ...'
Fund anticipates that Congress will attempt to ram this legislation through, as with the health care bill. What a surprise! Fund covers the vote issue at greater length in his book, How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections.
Leftist groups are already arguing that universal voter registration will solve all the problems with our voting system. But the left created most of these problems. The radical leftist Nation Magazine, for example, absolutely loves the idea of universal voter registration. This is the same magazine, however, that advanced Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven's Manufactured Crisis strategy. The Cloward/Piven strategy was designed to undermine government institutions by overwhelming them with impossible demands for services. Cloward and Piven focused on welfare, housing, and voting as the main targets of this strategy, and the radical group ACORN was specifically created for the purpose of executing it.
The Nation article enthusiastically lists Cloward/Piven-inspired organizations like Project Vote, the ACORN group where President Obama cut his teeth. It also discusses the left's efforts to push enforcement of the Motor Voter law and explains how universal voter registration could assist in these efforts. Cloward and Piven were the ones who crafted Motor Voter legislation in the early 1980s and pushed for its enactment until 1993, when President Clinton signed it into law.
Cloward and Piven considered Motor Voter to be their crowning, lifetime achievement. The picture, from White House photo archives, shows Cloward (light gray suit) and Piven (green coat and navy dress) standin g directly behind Clinton at the Motor Voter signing ceremony.
The left has predictably launched vicious smear attacks against John Fund for bringing universal voter registration to our attention. A Google search of the issue brings up any number of nasty ad hominem attacks. Most notable is Media Matters, the leftist group whose sole purpose seems to be to smear Republicans and defend the left's indefensible policies. They put up this gem: "Right-Wing Ass Weasel John Fund Doesn't Like Universal Voter Registration because of ACORN."
The problems with universal voter registration are numerous and obvious. Many states' lists include vast numbers of illegals, including some states which allow illegals to obtain drivers licenses; because many homeowners have more than one home, there will be duplicates; because so many people are on so many separate federal and state government agency lists, there will be duplicates; and because so many lists exist with little or no cross-checking capability, all of these duplicates are likely to go uncorrected. Add to this the fact that Dems hope to extend voting rights to felons, and the whole thing begins to look like a nationwide Democrat voter registration drive facilitated by taxpayers.
Universal voter registration will create massive vulnerabilities to systemic voter fraud nationwide, and if Democrats have proven anything in recent years, it is that they can win elections that way. The George-Soros-funded Secretary of State project (SOS) was designed to take advantage of such vulnerabilities and may have been developed in anticipation of the universal voter registration plan. Al Franken's stolen election in Minnesota was a trial run for the SOS project. Longtime ACORN friend Mark Ritchie was elected Minnesota Secretary of State in 2006 with Soros's SOS and ACORN money, and what followed in Norm Coleman's Senate runoff election was a frightening demonstration of just how far Democrats will go to win. Franken won the runoff, and the Democrats got their filibuster-proof sixty-vote Senate majority.
The Motor Voter law was correctly identified as a facilitator of vote fraud. One of the few legal issues Barack Obama actually participated in as a lawyer was a 1995 suit against the State of Illinois, which he brought on behalf of ACORN. Then-Republican Governor Jim Edgars saw the newly passed Motor Voter act as creating the potential for massive vote fraud and refused to implement it. With the assistance of the Clinton Justice Department, Obama's legal team won that suit. Obama himself actually participated very little, a strategy that seems to have served him well in life. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, after identifying himself in court proceedings, Obama sat back and let "the heavy-hitters at the Justice Department make the arguments."
It is not surprising that the Democrats are now choosing to push this new initiative, for universal voter registration will be Motor Voter on turbochargers. And who better to sign it into law than the president from ACORN?
Simpson includes an incredible amount of links in his piece. This information will shock some, and simply blow your mind. So with that said, I strongly encourage all readers to visit the website and further investigate this for yourselves. You can do so by following the link here.
Unfortunately, many Americans are ignorant of how our system actually works. I contend this is on purpose, as the "progressives" have purposely removed, or downplayed, a lot of this from school curriculums nationwide.
So a quick refresher course:
America does not have "national" elections. Never has. Ever election is local, even for the President of the United States. Each and every sovereign state has it’s own set of rules, regulations, and practices designed to suit local populations. Past that, counties and parishes, have their own election boards who actually carry out the elections, in accordance with state rules.
The only real input the federal government has in elections is to enforce rules that have to do with civil rights and discrimination. Past that, it’s all local rule.
Of course, with Obama’s regime, we understand civil rights mean nothing, as Obama’s terrorist friendly Attorney General recently set aside a guilty verdict against members of the New Black Panther Party who were convicted, in absentia, for voter intimidation during the 2008 Presidential elections.
The New Black Panthers, are a domestic terror organization that are a redeaux of the original group that had ties to Obama friend and mentor William Ayers’ Weather Underground terror organization. Ayers’ wife, Bernardine Dohrn, was part of the failed Brinks armored car robbery that left security guards and a policeman dead that was planned and carried out by the Black Panthers.
In 2008 the Panthers showed up at a Philadelphia polling place, dressed in full para-military regalia, and carrying deadly weapons.
The men were arrested, tried, and convicted of voter intimidation by the United States Department of Justice, which is headed by Obama’s attorney General, Eric Holder, who promptly ordered the felon convictions set aside.
The New Black Panthers are basically the black version of the Klu Klux Klan, another "progressive" organization that we have written extensively about. Now unlike the Klan, which was founded by the democrat party in the wake of the Civil War, this group was founded purely as a terror organization, and has no real civic efforts. You can visit their website here.
You need to contemplate this a minute before you read further, and remember these were armed men, in military looking garb, standing at the front door of the polling place.
You also need to remember, that even after being receiving felon convictions in federal court, all was forgiven by America’s chief law enforcement officer, Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder. And this is with the Republican Party still in place. And saying nothing.
I also want readers to contemplate this for a minute: Every modern day tyrant, every murderous dictator in our lifetimes, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Castro, Saddam Hussein, and Hugo Chavez, were all legally elected by the popular vote of the people.
The one thing they all have in common is that once elected, they worked with their legislative bodies, and networks of street thugs, labor unions, and so on, to gain complete control of government, and retain power until removed by war and/or death.
What this seemingly innocent "universal voter registration" will cause to happen, besides opening up the voter rolls to felons, illegal aliens, and others not legally allowed to vote, is to wrest control of the voting process from the local, state, county, and parish officials, and give command and control of all elections to the all powerful federal government.
It doesn’t take a genius to see that a nation that already tolerates groups like ACORN/SEIU who openly steal elections, with impunity, and a nation that doesn’t raise holy hell when an ultra-racist domestic terrorist group shows up at a polling place armed and with an attitude, is ripe for destruction.
Throw in a compliant media that is more than happy to not only shill for the democrat/communist party, and actively smear anyone from any other party, but cover up anything to do with stories about group likes ACORN/SEIU and the Black Panther Party, and it’s over!
We are in real trouble in this nation. We are literally one or two little pieces of the puzzle falling into place before there in no more United States. Only a few more things need to happen: ObamaCare needs to pass, and it seems that in some form it will, and cap and trade laws need to be in place. Obama, through the EPA, will force Congress to pass them, as the EPA now has the authority to impose draconian regulation on all of America, if they don’t.
This "universal voter registration" scheme will be the final step needed to end the United States forever. Now I’m not saying Obama will be a dictator, per se, as he is a truly incompetent man, but he may remain a figurehead, "duly elected by the people."
Here’s the problem: With ACORN/SEIU left unchecked to get itself involved in every state, local, and federal election, with terror groups like The New Black Panther Party allowed to carry out voter intimidation, knowing that even felony convictions will be thrown out, and a complicit and corrupt media looking the other way, the democrat/communist party will become the only party. No other party will be able to win another election.
We already see how these people operate. Look at health care. Between 70 and 80 percent of the country are against this deal, and yet, we are going to get it "for our own good." Republicans have been totally shut out of the process, they are not even allowed to participate. Their only contribution to the American people is to use parliamentary procedures to at least delay this thing. It’s all they can do.
The same efforts will be used with cap and trade.
We also know that Obama has no problem with Chicago style thug tactics, as he sent out union thugs from the SEIU during the summer, implored by him to "punch back twice as hard." at those who opposed his health care plan. This lead to many attacks by SEIU members on peaceful American citizens, like Kenneth Gladney, who was beaten so badly he ended up in a wheel chair, and called a "nigger" by the purple shirted SEIU thugs, many black themselves, all because he was selling patriotic goods at a town hall rally. These are the tactics were used by Hitler’s brown shirts, by the way.
Anyone who doesn’t think the power mad, maniacal leaders of the democrat/communist party won’t do whatever it takes to pull off this coup d'état is simply naive. They have thirsted for the sort of power they now enjoy for 100 years, and they now have the mechanisms in place to see that they will forever remain in power.
This power will allow them to finally do away with the uniquely American republican form of representative government. To forever destroy the concept of states’ rights, and state sovereignty, and the concept of personal liberty and freedom.
This power will allow them to swiftly set up an all powerful central command and control government that will rule over every single facet of your lives.
You now have a choice. Will you get actively involved and do absolutely everything humanly possible to stop this evil, and stop it now, or will you, like many populations in history, simply abdicate all of your freedom and liberty for a life of tyranny and oppression, because doing something about all of this will be just too hard?
More like Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil with this bunch!
At what should be the happiest, most wonderfully magical time of the year, a great evil has gripped the nation. The most corrupt Congress in our nation’s history in lockstep with the most corrupt and evil man to ever step foot in the Oval Office are committing acts that amount to no less than treason.
As we wrote earlier, in a piece entitled Death of the Republic, some serious maneuvering by Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid slipped some language into the already grossly unconstitutional Obamacare fiasco that would prohibit future Congresses from making changes or repealing key measures of this legislation.
As you can imagine, the outrage over this is through the roof nationwide.
Ironically, and well...even laughably, this provision that Reid and the other communists want to make sure is never, ever modified, or repealed, is the very death panel that the communists and their lap dogs in the corrupt, Obamacentric media have been working night and day, with almost superhuman effort, to convince the public that it never existed!!
It was even deemed "lie of the year" by the radical left wing media!
Sarah has now weighed in on the subject:
Midnight Votes, Backroom Deals, and a Death Panel
Last weekend while you were preparing for the holidays with your family, Harry Reid’s Senate was making shady backroom deals to ram through the Democrat health care take-over. The Senate ended debate on this bill without even reading it. That and midnight weekend votes seem to be standard operating procedures in D.C. No one is certain of what’s in the bill, but Senator Jim DeMint spotted one shocking revelation regarding the section in the bill describing the Independent Medicare Advisory Board (now called the Independent Payment Advisory Board), which is a panel of bureaucrats charged with cutting health care costs on the backs of patients – also known as rationing. Apparently Reid and friends have changed the rules of the Senate so that the section of the bill dealing with this board can’t be repealed or amended without a 2/3 supermajority vote. Senator DeMint said:
"This is a rule change. It’s a pretty big deal. We will be passing a new law and at the same time creating a senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law. I’m not even sure that it’s constitutional, but if it is, it most certainly is a senate rule. I don’t see why the majority party wouldn’t put this in every bill. If you like your law, you most certainly would want it to have force for future senates. I mean, we want to bind future congresses. This goes to the fundamental purpose of senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future congresses."
In other words, Democrats are protecting this rationing "death panel" from future change with a procedural hurdle. You have to ask why they’re so concerned about protecting this particular provision. Could it be because bureaucratic rationing is one important way Democrats want to "bend the cost curve" and keep health care spending down?
The Congressional Budget Office seems to think that such rationing has something to do with cost. In a letter to Harry Reid last week, CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf noted (with a number of caveats) that the bill’s calculations call for a reduction in Medicare’s spending rate by about 2 percent in the next two decades, but then he writes the kicker:
"It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would be accomplished through greater efficiencies in the delivery of health care or would reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care."
Though Nancy Pelosi and friends have tried to call "death panels" the "lie of the year," this type of rationing – what the CBO calls "reduc[ed] access to care" and "diminish[ed] quality of care" – is precisely what I meant when I used that metaphor.
This health care bill is one of the most far-reaching and expensive expansions of the role of government into our lives. We’re talking about putting one-seventh of our economy under the government’s thumb. We’re also talking about something as intimate to our personal well-being as medical care.
This bill is so unpopular that people on the right and the left hate it. So why go through with it? The Senate is planning to vote on this on Christmas Eve. Why the rush? Though we will begin paying for this bill immediately, we will see no benefits for years. (That’s the trick that allowed the CBO to state that the bill won’t grow the deficit for the next ten years.)
The administration’s promises of transparency and bipartisanship have been broken one by one. This entire process has been defined by midnight votes on weekends, closed-door meetings with industry lobbyists, and payoffs to politicians willing to sell their principles for sweetheart deals. Is it any wonder that Americans are so disillusioned with their leaders in Washington?
This is about politics, not health care. Americans don’t want this bill. Americans don’t like this bill. Washington has stopped listening to us. But we’re paying attention, and 2010 is coming.
I love this woman! The radical communist scumbags in the media, Congress, and the White House keep saying she's crazy with the death panel talk, trying to intimidate her, and she comes right back and shoves it up their asses!
BOOM, taste my nightstick!
Sarah, of course, is correct here. This is all about politics and nothing about health care. This is an evil, wicked thing that is being visited on the American people as we get ready to celebrate the birth of Christ, our Lord and Savior.
At the end of her note, Sarah references an opinion piece from the Wall Street Journal that must be read:
Change Nobody Believes In
A bill so reckless that it has to be rammed through on a partisan vote on Christmas eve. And tidings of comfort and joy from Harry Reid too. The Senate Majority Leader has decided that the last few days before Christmas are the opportune moment for a narrow majority of Democrats to stuff ObamaCare through the Senate to meet an arbitrary White House deadline. Barring some extraordinary reversal, it now seems as if they have the 60 votes they need to jump off this cliff, with one-seventh of the economy in tow.
Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.
Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.
The rushed, secretive way that a bill this destructive and unpopular is being forced on the country shows that "reform" has devolved into the raw exercise of political power for the single purpose of permanently expanding the American entitlement state. An increasing roll of leaders in health care and business are looking on aghast at a bill that is so large and convoluted that no one can truly understand it, as Finance Chairman Max Baucus admitted on the floor last week. The only goal is to ram it into law while the political window is still open, and clean up the mess later.
***
• Health costs. From the outset, the White House's core claim was that reform would reduce health costs for individuals and businesses, and they're sticking to that story. "Anyone who says otherwise simply hasn't read the bills," Mr. Obama said over the weekend. This is so utterly disingenuous that we doubt the President really believes it.
The best and most rigorous cost analysis was recently released by the insurer WellPoint, which mined its actuarial data in various regional markets to model the Senate bill. WellPoint found that a healthy 25-year-old in Milwaukee buying coverage on the individual market will see his costs rise by 178%. A small business based in Richmond with eight employees in average health will see a 23% increase. Insurance costs for a 40-year-old family with two kids living in Indianapolis will pay 106% more. And on and on.
These increases are solely the result of ObamaCare—above and far beyond the status quo—because its strict restrictions on underwriting and risk-pooling would distort insurance markets. All but a handful of states have rejected regulations like "community rating" because they encourage younger and healthier buyers to wait until they need expensive care, increasing costs for everyone. Benefits and pricing will now be determined by politics.
As for the White House's line about cutting costs by eliminating supposed "waste," even Victor Fuchs, an eminent economist generally supportive of ObamaCare, warned last week that these political theories are overly simplistic. "The oft-heard promise 'we will find out what works and what does not' scarcely does justice to the complexity of medical practice," the Stanford professor wrote.
• Steep declines in choice and quality. This is all of a piece with the hubris of an Administration that thinks it can substitute government planning for market forces in determining where the $33 trillion the U.S. will spend on medicine over the next decade should go.
This centralized system means above all fewer choices; what works for the political class must work for everyone. With formerly private insurers converted into public utilities, for instance, they'll inevitably be banned from selling products like health savings accounts that encourage more cost-conscious decisions.
Unnoticed by the press corps, the Congressional Budget Office argued recently that the Senate bill would so "substantially reduce flexibility in terms of the types, prices, and number of private sellers of health insurance" that companies like WellPoint might need to "be considered part of the federal budget."
With so large a chunk of the economy and medical practice itself in Washington's hands, quality will decline. Ultimately, "our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all," as Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey Flier recently wrote in our pages. Take the $2 billion annual tax—rising to $3 billion in 2018—that will be leveled against medical device makers, among the most innovative U.S. industries. Democrats believe that more advanced health technologies like MRI machines and drug-coated stents are driving costs too high, though patients and their physicians might disagree.
"The Senate isn't hearing those of us who are closest to the patient and work in the system every day," Brent Eastman, the chairman of the American College of Surgeons, said in a statement for his organization and 18 other speciality societies opposing ObamaCare. For no other reason than ideological animus, doctor-owned hospitals will face harsh new limits on their growth and who they're allowed to treat. Physician Hospitals of America says that ObamaCare will "destroy over 200 of America's best and safest hospitals."
• Blowing up the federal fisc. Even though Medicare's unfunded liabilities are already about 2.6 times larger than the entire U.S. economy in 2008, Democrats are crowing that ObamaCare will cost "only" $871 billion over the next decade while fantastically reducing the deficit by $132 billion, according to CBO.
Yet some 98% of the total cost comes after 2014—remind us why there must absolutely be a vote this week—and most of the taxes start in 2010. That includes the payroll tax increase for individuals earning more than $200,000 that rose to 0.9 from 0.5 percentage points in Mr. Reid's final machinations. Job creation, here we come.
Other deceptions include a new entitlement for long-term care that starts collecting premiums tomorrow but doesn't start paying benefits until late in the decade. But the worst is not accounting for a formula that automatically slashes Medicare payments to doctors by 21.5% next year and deeper after that. Everyone knows the payment cuts won't happen but they remain in the bill to make the cost look lower. The American Medical Association's priority was eliminating this "sustainable growth rate" but all they got in return for their year of ObamaCare cheerleading was a two-month patch snuck into the defense bill that passed over the weekend.
The truth is that no one really knows how much ObamaCare will cost because its assumptions on paper are so unrealistic. To hide the cost increases created by other parts of the bill and transfer them onto the federal balance sheet, the Senate sets up government-run "exchanges" that will subsidize insurance for those earning up to 400% of the poverty level, or $96,000 for a family of four in 2016. Supposedly they would only be offered to those whose employers don't provide insurance or work for small businesses.
As Eugene Steuerle of the left-leaning Urban Institute points out, this system would treat two workers with the same total compensation—whatever the mix of cash wages and benefits—very differently. Under the Senate bill, someone who earned $42,000 would get $5,749 from the current tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage but $12,750 in the exchange. A worker making $60,000 would get $8,310 in the exchanges but only $3,758 in the current system.
For this reason Mr. Steuerle concludes that the Senate bill is not just a new health system but also "a new welfare and tax system" that will warp the labor market. Given the incentives of these two-tier subsidies, employers with large numbers of lower-wage workers like Wal-Mart may well convert them into "contractors" or do more outsourcing. As more and more people flood into "free" health care, taxpayer costs will explode.
• Political intimidation. The experts who have pointed out such complications have been ignored or dismissed as "ideologues" by the White House. Those parts of the health-care industry that couldn't be bribed outright, like Big Pharma, were coerced into acceding to this agenda. The White House was able to, er, persuade the likes of the AMA and the hospital lobbies because the federal government will control 55% of total U.S. health spending under ObamaCare, according to the Administration's own Medicare actuaries.
Others got hush money, namely Nebraska's Ben Nelson. Even liberal Governors have been howling for months about ObamaCare's unfunded spending mandates: Other budget priorities like education will be crowded out when about 21% of the U.S. population is on Medicaid, the joint state-federal program intended for the poor. Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman calculates that ObamaCare will result in $2.5 billion in new costs for his state that "will be passed on to citizens through direct or indirect taxes and fees," as he put it in a letter to his state's junior Senator.
So in addition to abortion restrictions, Mr. Nelson won the concession that Congress will pay for 100% of Nebraska Medicaid expansions into perpetuity. His capitulation ought to cost him his political career, but more to the point, what about the other states that don't have a Senator who's the 60th vote for ObamaCare?
***
"After a nearly century-long struggle we are on the cusp of making health-care reform a reality in the United States of America," Mr. Obama said on Saturday. He's forced to claim the mandate of "history" because he can't claim the mandate of voters. Some 51% of the public is now opposed, according to National Journal's composite of all health polling. The more people know about ObamaCare, the more unpopular it becomes.
The tragedy is that Mr. Obama inherited a consensus that the health-care status quo needs serious reform, and a popular President might have crafted a durable compromise that blended the best ideas from both parties. A more honest and more thoughtful approach might have even done some good. But as Mr. Obama suggested, the Democratic old guard sees this plan as the culmination of 20th-century liberalism.
So instead we have this vast expansion of federal control. Never in our memory has so unpopular a bill been on the verge of passing Congress, never has social and economic legislation of this magnitude been forced through on a purely partisan vote, and never has a party exhibited more sheer political willfulness that is reckless even for Washington or had more warning about the consequences of its actions.
These 60 Democrats are creating a future of epic increases in spending, taxes and command-and-control regulation, in which bureaucracy trumps innovation and transfer payments are more important than private investment and individual decisions. In short, the Obama Democrats have chosen change nobody believes in—outside of themselves—and when it passes America will be paying for it for decades to come.
This health care bill is a complete and total disaster for the nation. It destroys the Republic forever. In this writer’s opinion, anyone who puts their name to this legislation is guilty of treason and deserves the harshest penalties allowed by law.
One last thing, as both Sarah and myself mentioned death panels here, I just got an e-mail linking to a nice piece from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, that backs up what we’ve been writing about here, and Sarah has been saying from the start:
Death Panels? Sarah Palin Was Right
Posted by Alan Reynolds
PolitiFact.com gave Sarah Palin their "Lie of the Year" award for warning on August 7 that the Democrat’s idea of "cost containment" implied rationing by "death panels."
The self-described fact-checking web site of the St. Petersburg Times claimed Palin was criticizing a provision in the House bill under which "Medicare would pay for doctors’ appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues."
The claim that Governor Palin confused one-on-one counseling between doctors and patients with any sort of "panel" was always ridiculous on its face. Indeed, that claim should itself have been a leading candidate for "Lie of the Year." Yet Palin’s critics kept on equating death panels with counseling throughout the year, as though they could not even begin to understand plain English.
In a column called "Reporting the Lies," Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote, "Before Sarah Palin talked about death panels, no one knew about Sen. Johnny Isakson’s quiet crusade to persuade Medicare beneficiaries to adopt living wills."
Adopting a living will requires a lawyer, not a doctor, so there must have been more to the crusade than just that. There is some reason to wonder if the crusaders intended to promote penny-pinching advice like President Obama’s famous suggestion that perhaps grandma should skip the expensive operation and take a cheap pain pill instead (generic, of course).
In any case, no single physician’s advice involves any panel, deathly or otherwise. Palin was clearly worried about rationing by some government-appointed group, panel or board of experts — such the (currently) powerless panel that recently suggested fewer and later breast exams, or the Senate bill’s potentially more lethal Independent Payment Advisory Board
The shameless hoax that Palin had confused individual consulting with rationing by a panel was repeated endlessly. By November, the Washington Post was treating this obvious canard as an established fact: "Proposed health-care reform legislation includes a provision that allows Medicare to pay for "end-of-life" counseling for seniors and their families who request it. The provision — which Sarah Palin erroneously described as "death panels" for seniors — nearly derailed President Obama’s health-care initiative."
How could anyone believe Palin’s sensible comment about rationing was, in reality, a senseless fear of counseling? To say so was no mistake; it was an oft-repeated big lie.
Rather than even mentioning the House bill, Palin linked to an interesting speech by "Rep. Michele Bachmann [which] highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff."
Dr. Emmanuel’s varied and murky remarks about using panels of experts (like himself) to ration health care are less clear or less candid than those of another bioethicist, Peter Singer of Princeton. Singer’s article, "Why We Must Ration Health Care," was a cover feature in The New York Times Magazine on July 15 — shortly before Palin took the opposing side of this issue.
Singer’s argument (about an expensive anti-cancer drug) is that, "If there is any point at which you say, ‘No, an extra six months [of life] isn’t worth that much,’ then you think that health care should be rationed." But the question itself is rhetorical trickery, sophistry. Even if there was certain knowledge about life expectancy with or without some treatment (which is never true), Singer has no right to any opinion about how much an extra six months of my life is worth (and vice-versa) unless he’s paying the bills.
But that, of course, is what makes the proposed expansion of insurance subsidies and Medicaid so ominous. Just as federal politicians imagine that a small minority stake in some bank entitles them to override all other stockholders when it comes to executive pay, federal politicians would surely claim that even small subsidies for anyone’s health insurance entitle them to, as Singer put it, set "limits on which treatments should be paid for." And those politicians would surely appoint panels of experts as cover when some life-saving procedure, device or drug was ruled-out for those with insufficient quality-adjusted years left to live.
Singer wrote, quite correctly, that in "Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits. . . [and] low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients." [emphasis added]
Pending health care bills would make such government-mandated scarcity of health care much worse. There would be massive shifting of money away from Medicare toward Medicaid. But the extra Medicaid money would be spread around more thinly. States would cut benefits to the poor in order to accommodate millions of new, less-poor people lured into Medicaid, at least half of whom (7 or 8 million by my estimate) currently have employer-provided health insurance.
The Senate health bill supposedly intends to slash Medicare payment rates for physicians by 21% next year and more in future years, with permanent reductions in payments to other medical services too. It would also establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board which would be empowered to make deeper cuts which Congress could reject only with considerable difficulty. If that’s not quite a "death panel" it would surely not be pro-life in its impact.
Actually, it’s clear enough that the proposed Medicare cuts won’t be achieved, but that efforts in that direction will nonetheless reduce access to care and diminish its quality. The government can’t boost demand and cut prices without creating excess demand. And that, in turn, means rationing by longer waiting lines and by panels (rationing boards) making life-or death decisions for other people.
As Sarah Palin predicted, "Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course."
As the CATO Institute points out so well, Sarah is right, as usual. The chronically ill, old folks, and, of course, the disabled are royally screwed here. Evil men like Dr Ezekiel Emanuel have already written the book on these death panels, and it's all based on who is deemed "productive to society." This is as evil as it gets. This is a few psychopaths playing God with Americans' lives.
Below is the original poster the modified one above came from. In Nazi Germany, the government worked overtime to convince it's people that some lives just weren't worth living and should be extinguished. They even went so far as to point out how much keeping what they termed "useless eaters" alive cost each and every German. They got this thinking from the American "progressive" movement, by the way.
Sarah Palin brings this home to me, through her beautiful son Trig. Thanks to the American "progressive" (liberal) movement and immoral groups like Planned Parenthood, a group started by Klu Klux Klanner Margaret Sanger, as a way of Negro population control...she called blacks "human weeds"...,we now abort fully 90 percent of all Downs Syndrome babies.
As our friend Adrienne Ross points out: "Trig is a testimony to the beauty and value of all God's children." There is simply no way you can look at this beautiful boy and not see that he is a blessing and a true gift. He brings much joy to his family, and inspiration to other families with Downs Syndrome children.
It breaks one's heart that so many children like Trig never are allowed to experience life because the "progressives" are carrying out a jihad against all children with disabilities. They are attempting to desensitize and dehumanize all of mankind.
Sorry to be so long winded here, but lets face it, this is the most sweeping, and the most dangerous legislation ever proposed by Congress and a President. This is pure and absolute evil. Nothing less. The men and women who have signed on to this destruction of America, and her peoples need to be dealt with in the harshest manner humanly possible. They are all traitors.
There was one bit of sanity in Congress though as freshman Alabama Congressman Parker Griffith did something very rare, he switched parties. From Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air:
Usually one does not see Congressmen or Senators flipping parties to join the minority. However, Politico’s Josh Kraushaar has a scoop that Blue Dog Democrat Parker Griffith of Alabama, a freshman in Congress, has seen enough of Nancy Pelosi’s leadership. He will join Republicans in a move that has far more symbolic than substantive impact — for now.
This is a fascinating story. It is rare to see folks switch parties, and switching to the minority party is virtually unheard of. This is a very strong statement about the state of the democrat/communist party.
Congressman Griffith is a doctor BTW. I imagine that had a lot to do with his switching parties and fighting so hard against all of this. I know from speaking with my doctors and their staff, that this pending evil is not wanted in any way, shape, or form.
Sarah was quick to welcome Congressman Griffith aboard via Twitter:
Congratulations Alabama!And all Americans concerned about Capitol Hill's current agenda;Rep Parker Griffith just did the right thing.Welcome
We are proud to welcome him to the fight as well.
I want to leave everyone with this reminder from the Great Ronald Reagan on the dangers of allowing government to take over health care and what their real end game is:
