Pitchfork and Torch

Obamacare Chart

2010-08-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

And you thought you hated Obamacare before...And this is only 1/3 of the actual chart! This was developed by Congressman Kevin Brady's office:

State's Powers are Indefinite

2010-07-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

"The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite." --James Madison, Federalist No. 45

(Somehow, this has concept has been lost and forgotten by our current congress and administration...and I fear most Americans are ignorant of it.)

No Justice for Crackers

2010-07-09T08:42:00.000-07:00

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Enough is Enough

2010-06-29T08:06:00.001-07:00

Hold on to Your Wallet

2010-06-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Government IS the Problem

2010-06-21T12:36:00.000-07:00

This sums up our current administration:
Government
"Katrina and the Gulf oil spill prove that, at best, government can only get in the way. But at worst -- like so-called global warming, lack of border security and unfunded Social Security -- they are all part of the same thing: government created problems that government prevents from being solved. The resultant discourse leads to weakening the resolve of the people to resist the 'helping' heavy hand of government. Put another way, government has an incentive to not solve problems, the Arizona immigration law being a perfect case in point where government has really shown its hand. Problems are its fuel -- fuel needed to empower itself and enslave its subjects. In the now infamous words of Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel: a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." --columnist W.R. Wansley

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Constitution of No

2010-06-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE
June 8, 2010
Constitution of No
If President Obama's motto is "Yes, we can," the Constitution's is "No, you can't."

By U.S. Senator Jim DeMint

When a reporter asked House speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) during a press conference last year where the Constitution granted Congress the authority to enact an individual health-insurance mandate, she answered, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" Speaker Pelosi then dismissed the question and moved on to the next reporter.

This exchange illustrates the way "yes we can" liberals treat the Constitution: They simply ignore it when it gets in the way of their big-government bailouts and takeovers.

Democrats have always been the "party of go," bent on transforming America with their "living Constitution," which changes to suit the political whims of the day. That's why Republicans shouldn't flinch when they are criticized as being the "party of no." Saying no is necessary to uphold the freedoms on which our nation was founded.

The Constitution is full of no's. It is by telling the government what it cannot do that the Constitution protects our freedoms. The Founders loathed tyranny and sought to erect a government ruled by law, not people. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, "in America the law is king."

The First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion" or abridging freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the right to assemble and petition government. Americans are allowed to keep and bear arms because the Bill of Rights says that this right "shall not be infringed." It also says no to unreasonable search and seizure, and to cruel and unusual punishment. The Fifth Amendment says that the government cannot deprive a person of life, liberty, or property without due process, and that private property cannot be taken without just compensation. The Eighth Amendment says no to excessive bail and fines, and the Tenth Amendment says powers not explicitly given to the federal government in the Constitution go to the states or the people. The Bill of Rights says no to the federal government over and over again.

Using the Constitution's amendment-making process, Americans have added even more no's over the years: The 13th Amendment says no to slavery; the 15th and 19th Amendments say no one can be denied the right to vote based on race or sex.

Every clause of Article 1, Section 9, which is all about the limits on Congress, contains the words "no" or "shall not."

There's one "no" in particular that Congress should have paid attention to in the fall of 2008, when the banking crisis reared its ugly head: "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law." That means only Congress can appropriate money to be spent.

But Washington didn't say no when President Bush's Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, came asking the Democratic Congress to give Treasury a $700 billion blank check. Paulson said the money would be used to buy up toxic assets under a Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP. In the end, only a portion of the money was used to do that.

The rest of the money became a slush fund for the president, greatly inflating the power of the executive office. TARP funds were used to bail out GM, Chrysler, and auto suppliers without a single vote from Congress. Because too many elected members of Congress didn't abide by the Constitution, one bad bailout led to another at the discretion of the executive branch.

This isn't the only way the Obama White House has grabbed power in defiance of the Constitution. Very early in his presidency, Obama began stuffing his executive office with czars to manage major areas of national policy, including health care, global warming, the closing of Guantanamo Bay, "green jobs," Mideast peace, energy, CEO pay, technology, and the border. Although the czars wield a tremendous amount of influence, they can't be subjected to congressional oversight, defeating the constitutionally established process of "advise and consent."

Bureaucracy in the executive branch has exploded tremendously over the years. At this point, Congress can barely keep up with its oversight duties of executive departments, agencies, offices, and regulatory commissions. As a result, these institutions often make rules on their own, or are given broad power by the Congress to do so. For example, President Obama's health-care law gives the secretary of health and human services, part of the executive branch, broad rulemaking powers: The HHS bureaucracy has been empowered to determine what health insurance should cost and what it should cover for every American, and HHS can change those policies each year, depending on the political struggles of the day, without any vote by Congress.

That's not all. Thanks to President Obama, every American will soon be required to buy Washington-approved health insurance. This is the first time Congress has used its power to make an individual person purchase something from a private company for no other reason than that the citizen is alive. This flies in the face of the Constitution.

Progressives like Obama believe government has limitless ability and power. Remember what Obama said the night he secured the Democratic presidential nomination: "This [is] the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Only a liberal would believe that tinkering with the levers of government could ever accomplish such planetary change.

If President Obama's motto is "Yes, we can," the Constitution's is "No, you can't." Obama may have once been a constitutional scholar, but he's no constitutionalist.

Although the Constitution does give some defined powers to the federal government, it is overwhelmingly a document of limits, and those limits must be respected. That's why it's more important than ever for Republicans to say no. We are standing against a long progressive effort to transform the country. Its roots are in the New Deal and the Great Society; today, President Obama's spending, bailouts, and takeovers are testing the Constitution in new and unprecedented ways.

An American awakening is taking place, however, and citizens are demanding that the government once again affirm its allegiance to our country's constitutional principles. If Republicans want to protect the Constitution and ensure our nation's survival as the beacon of liberty, "No" is an answer we are obligated to give and to proudly defend.

In the era of unlimited government, saying no is an act of patriotism, and being a member of the "party of no" should be a badge of honor.

Tom McClintock takes on Pres. Calderon.

2010-06-07T12:00:00.001-07:00

Obama's Shady Past

2010-06-07T07:41:00.000-07:00

The Jobless Obama Recovery

2010-06-04T08:09:00.001-07:00

(With friends like this, who needs enemies?)

The Jobless Obama Recovery

This Wednesday in Pittsburgh, President Barack Obama defended his administration's economic policies telling the audience at Carnegie Mellon University: "Now, I've never believed that government has all the answers. Government cannot and should not replace businesses as the true engine of growth and job creation." But that is exactly what the President's big government policies are doing. Last week, USA Today reported that in the first quarter of 2010, thanks to President Obama's failed $862 economic stimulus, paychecks from private business shrank to their smallest share of personal income in U.S. history while government-provided benefits — from Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps and other programs — rose to a record high.

And now the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report today showing that the economy added 431,000 jobs in May. But don't let that number fool you. Of those 431,000 jobs, 411,000 jobs were temporary government Census jobs. In fact, private sector job growth actually fell in May, from 231,000 new private sector jobs in April to just 41,000 new private sector jobs in May. Combining the private and public sectors--the nation's unemployment rate fell to 9.7% as 286,000 workers left the labor force. In total the U.S. economy has now lost a net of 2.2 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his stimulus bill and his administration is now 7.2 million jobs short of what he promised the American economy would support by 2010.

While there is little doubt our resilient economy is finally recovering, it is also becoming increasingly clear that this administration's policies are making it difficult for private sector firms to produce robust job growth. Obamacare not only raises taxes by $503 billion through 2019, but it also burdens small businesses with new 1099 IRS paperwork every time they do more than $600 in business with another entity, and it imposes an employer mandate which makes it harder for small businesses to hire new workers. Then there is Obama's budget which raises taxes on the small businesses that earn 72% of all small business income, raises capital gains taxes to 20%, and raises taxes on dividends to 39.6%. And don't forgot the recently passed tax bill in the House which manages to add billions in debt while adding on a job-killing tax on American corporations that compete overseas and a job-killing tax on innovation-creating venture capital partnerships.
But the Obama administration does not plan on stopping there. Desperate to shift the focus from their lack of leadership, President Obama used the Deepwater Horizon oil spill Wednesday to renew his call for further regulation of the energy industry. Since the Kerry-Lieberman cap and tax bill called for now verboten increased oil development, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) is signaling he wants pursue a renewable-energy-only path like Sen. Jeff Bingaman's (D-NM) American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACELA) which would mandate that electricity sellers produce a growing percentage of their power from renewable energy sources every two years. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis has crunched the numbers and found that at an RES would: 1) Raise electricity prices by 36 percent for households and 60 percent for industry; 2) Cut national income (GDP) by $5.2 trillion between 2012 and 2035; 3) Cut national income by $2,400 per year for a family of four; 4) Reduce employment by more than 1,000,000 jobs; and 5) Add more than $10,000 to a family of four’s share of the national debt by 2035.

The Census jobs obtained by 411,000 Americans last month are temporary jobs. That means by the end of this year, those 411,000 Americans will be through with temporary government work and will be looking for real work in the private sector. But the private sector will not be able to adsorb them. Not when the Obama administration is forcing them to pay higher taxes, higher health care costs, and higher energy costs. Our economy will continue to bounce back from the recession. But thanks to Obama we can expect near double-digit unemployment rates for a long time to come.

The Buck Stops Nowhere

2010-05-24T08:10:00.000-07:00

(Unfortunately, this is what's wrong with our country, in a nutshell. And it appears to be getting worse on a daily basis. I envision a future where my kid and grandkids spend their time working two jobs to pay their taxes and in their free time having to deal with bureacrats just to get daily needs met.)

According to best estimates, the collapsed Deepwater Horizon oil rig is pumping about 210,000 gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico every day. But don't worry, President Barack Obama has appointed an "independent" commission to investigate the spill. Our federal government will post an estimated $1.5 trillion budget deficit this year, and our debt is projected to equal 140 percent of gross domestic product within two decades. But don't worry, President Obama has appointed a debt commission to solve the problem. Our nation's southern border has degenerated into a violent, lawless and lethal zone. But don't worry, Congress wants to empower a new commission to control the problem. And millions of Americans don't know whether or not their health plan will be exempted from Obamacare. But don't worry, faceless bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services are already hard at work determining whether or not you will be allowed to keep your current health insurance.

Is this any way to run a country? Should the President of the United States be passing off responsibility to "independent" commissions? Should Congress be passing off responsibility for securing our nation's borders to an unaccountable commission of experts? How is any of this consistent with our nation's First Principles or the United States Constitution? It's not. The authors of our Constitution never meant to create a federal government with the power to force you to buy health insurance, let alone one where it would be unelected bureaucrats who determine what type of health insurance you could buy.

Our Founding Fathers specifically created a Constitution dividing the legislative, executive and judicial functions of government into three branches so that the separation of these powers would limit the size and scope of the federal government. Americans would know who to punish for bad policies at the ballot box because it would be clear who was responsible for creating and enforcing them. But that is very obviously not the system we have today. Our federal government has devolved into an incomprehensible mish-mash of alphabet soup government agencies and commissions that no one American could possibly understand. Why is our country in this state? What happened?

The Progressive movement happened. Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Political Science Ronald Pestritto explains:

For the American pioneers of the administrative state--the Progressives of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--this older, limited understanding of government stood in the way of the policy aims they believed the state ought to pursue in a world that had undergone significant evolution since the time of the Founding. They believed that the role of government, contrary to the perceived ahistorical notion of Founding-era liberalism, ought to adjust continually to meet the new demands of new ages. As Woodrow Wilson wrote in The State, "Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand."
...
It is the Progressives' desire to free bureaucratic agencies from the confines of politics and the law that allows us to trace the origins of the administrative state to their political thought. The idea of separating politics and administration--of grounding a significant portion of government not on the basis of popular consent but on expertise--was a fundamental aim of American Progressivism and explains the Progressives' fierce assault on the Founders' separation-of-powers constitutionalism. It was introduced into the United States by Progressive reformers who had themselves learned the principle from what was then the "cutting edge" theory of history and the state developed in 19th century Germany.

President Barack Obama, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) are the modern heirs of the Progressive campaign to eviscerate the rule-of-law-based limited government envisioned by the U.S. Constitution and replace it with an expert-ruled European welfare state. Everything this regime has done since assuming power (TARP, the Presidential Task Force on Autos, Obamacare, EPA global warming regulations) empowers unaccountable expert committees and commissions. Commenting on Congress' new immigration commission, Rutgers University political science professor Ross Baker told The Washington Post: "It's the ultimate expression for the need for political cover." Enough cover. It's time Washington is held accountable.

The Road to Repeal is Well Under Way

2010-05-12T07:54:00.000-07:00

"We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told us just weeks before Congress passed President Barack Obama's health care plan. Well, the nation's post-passage Obamacare education continued yesterday when the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirmed that the federal government will have to spend an additional $115 billion implementing the law, bringing the total estimated cost to over $1 trillion. The estimate had been requested before passage of the bill by Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), but the CBO was too overwhelmed with the Democrats' other constant revisions to the law to get back to Lewis before the final vote.

This is by far not the only nasty little surprise that has come back to bite Obamacare after passage. Shortly after it became law, U.S. employers began reporting hundreds of millions if dollars in losses thanks to tax changes in the bill. AT&T and Verizon alone pegged their Obamacare tax losses at around $1 billion each. At first, Democrats in Congress were outraged by the announcements and threatened to hold hearings persecuting these companies. But then the Democrats not only found out the companies were obligated by law to report their Obamacare related losses, but that the losses were a signal these companies might have to dump their employees' and retirees' health care coverage all together.

Then the Obama administration's own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released its final cost projections for Obamacare, finding that, contrary to White House claims, the legislation will increase national health care spending by $311 billion over the next decade. The CMS report also revealed that: 1) 18 million Americans will pay $33 billion in penalties for failing to comply with Obamacare’s individual mandate and still receive no health care; 2) U.S. employers will pay $87 billion in employer mandate penalties; 3) 14 million Americans will lose their current employer-based health coverage; 4) 7.4 million seniors will lose their current Medicare Advantage benefits; 5) 15% of all Medicare providers will be made unprofitable, thus “jeopardizing access to care for beneficiaries.”

Facing this onslaught of reality, the Obama administration has swooped into full spin mode, devoting the Weekly Presidential Address to explaining the "real benefits" Obamacare is "already delivering" to Americans. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius then sent letters to House and Senate leaders touting her "progress" in implementing the law. And then last night White House aides Nancy-Ann DeParle and Stephanie Cutter briefed the House Democratic Caucus on the "tangible benefits" of the law. The sales pitch for all three events were the same: 1) "adults" age 26 and younger can be added to their parents' plan (never mind that this drives up their parents' health care costs); 2) new high-risk pools for Americans with pre-existing conditions (never mind that 19 states have rejected working with HHS since Obamacare massively underfunded the pools); 3) supplementing insurance for early retirees (never mind that the Medicare Advantage cuts and tax changes mentioned above are a big reason why seniors will need supplemental coverage).

Democrats know that Americans simply are not buying what they are selling. Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) tells Politico: "It's just like trying to explain the Encyclopedia Britannica." And John Spratt (D-SC) adds: "You need to know what you're talking about and this is extremely complex. It's really difficult to remember, 'was this in this bill, or was this in the bill Senate side.'" Maybe Spratt should have figured out what was and wasn't in the bill before he voted for it.

Since the left can't even figure out what is in the bill they are trying to defend, the latest Rasmussen Reports shows that 63% of likely voters now believe it will increase the federal deficit, and 56% now favor repeal. Not waiting for this November's elections to change the leadership in Congress, states are leading the way on the road to repeal. According to The Washington Post 33 states have mounted legal and legislative challenges to the new law. Clint Bolick, litigation director of the Goldwater Institute, tells the Post: "This is going to be a long, protracted war of attrition and we haven't even seen the first wave of regulations yet. ... The initial challenges to McCain-Feingold were rejected. But since then, litigators found the vulnerabilities. Likewise, here I think you're going to see a thousand flowers bloom in terms of lawsuits. I'm hoping that this will die a death of a thousand cuts."

My New Life

2010-05-06T08:08:00.000-07:00

The Insurance Mandate in Peril

2010-04-30T08:12:00.000-07:00

(Wall Street Journal-Opinion Journal) link:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704446704575206502199257916.html?KEYWORDS=health+care+reform

First Congress said it was a regulation of commerce. Now it's supposed to be a tax. Neither claim will survive Supreme Court scrutiny.

By RANDY E. BARNETT

A"tell" in poker is a subtle but detectable change in a player's behavior or demeanor that reveals clues about the player's assessment of his hand. Something similar has happened with regard to the insurance mandate at the core of last month's health reform legislation. Congress justified its authority to enact the mandate on the grounds that it is a regulation of commerce. But as this justification came under heavy constitutional fire, the mandate's defenders changed the argument—now claiming constitutional authority under Congress's power to tax.

This switch in constitutional theories is a tell: Defenders of the bill lack confidence in their commerce power theory. The switch also comes too late. When the mandate's constitutionality comes up for review as part of the state attorneys general lawsuit, the Supreme Court will not consider the penalty enforcing the mandate to be a tax because, in the provision that actually defines and imposes the mandate and penalty, Congress did not call it a tax and did not treat it as a tax.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) includes what it calls an "individual responsibility requirement" that all persons buy health insurance from a private company. Congress justified this mandate under its power to regulate commerce among the several states: "The individual responsibility requirement provided for in this section," the law says, ". . . is commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce, as a result of the effects described in paragraph (2)." Paragraph (2) then begins: "The requirement regulates activity that is commercial and economic in nature: economic and financial decisions about how and when health care is paid for, and when health insurance is purchased."

In this way, the statute speciously tries to convert inactivity into the "activity" of making a "decision." By this reasoning, your "decision" not to take a job, not to sell your house, or not to buy a Chevrolet is an "activity that is commercial and economic in nature" that can be mandated by Congress.

It is true that the Supreme Court has interpreted the Commerce Clause broadly enough to reach wholly intrastate economic "activity" that substantially affects interstate commerce. But the Court has never upheld a requirement that individuals who are doing nothing must engage in economic activity by entering into a contractual relationship with a private company. Such a claim of power is literally unprecedented.

Since this Commerce Clause language was first proposed in the Senate last December, Democratic legislators and law professors alike breezily dismissed any constitutional objections as preposterous. After the bill was enacted, critics branded lawsuits by state attorneys general challenging the insurance mandate as frivolous. Yet, unable to produce a single example of Congress using its commerce power this way, the defenders of the personal mandate began to shift grounds.

On March 21, the same day the House approved the Senate version of the legislation, the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation released a 157-page "technical explanation" of the bill. The word "commerce" appeared nowhere. Instead, the personal mandate is dubbed an "Excise Tax on Individuals Without Essential Health Benefits Coverage." But while the enacted bill does impose excise taxes on "high cost," employer-sponsored insurance plans and "indoor tanning services," the statute never describes the regulatory "penalty" it imposes for violating the mandate as an "excise tax." It is expressly called a "penalty."

This shift won't work. The Supreme Court will not allow staffers and lawyers to change the statutory cards that Congress already dealt when it adopted the Senate language.

In the 1920s, when Congress wanted to prohibit activity that was then deemed to be solely within the police power of states, it tried to penalize the activity using its tax power. In Bailey v. Drexel Furniture (1922) the Supreme Court struck down such a penalty saying, "there comes a time in the extension of the penalizing features of the so-called tax when it loses its character as such and becomes a mere penalty with the characteristics of regulation and punishment."

Although the Court has never repudiated this principle, the Court now interprets the commerce power far more broadly. Thus Congress may regulate or prohibit intrastate economic activity directly without invoking its taxation power. Yet precisely because a mandate to engage in economic activity has never been upheld by the Court, the tax power is once again being used to escape constitutional limits on Congress's regulatory power.

Supporters of the mandate cite U.S. v. Kahriger (1953), where the Court upheld a punitive tax on gambling by saying that "[u]nless there are provisions extraneous to any tax need, courts are without authority to limit the exercise of the taxing power." Yet the Court in Kahriger also cited Bailey with approval. The key to understanding Kahriger is the proposition the Court there rejected: "it is said that Congress, under the pretense of exercising its power to tax has attempted to penalize illegal intrastate gambling through the regulatory features of the Act" (emphasis added).

In other words, the Court in Kahriger declined to look behind Congress's assertion that it was exercising its tax power to see whether a measure was really a regulatory penalty. As the Court said in Sonzinsky v. U.S. (1937), "[i]nquiry into the hidden motives which may move Congress to exercise a power constitutionally conferred upon it is beyond the competency of courts." But this principle cuts both ways. Neither will the Court look behind Congress's inadequate assertion of its commerce power to speculate as to whether a measure was "really" a tax. The Court will read the cards as Congress dealt them.

Congress simply did not enact the personal insurance mandate pursuant to its tax powers. To the contrary, the statute expressly says the mandate "regulates activity that is commercial and economic in nature." It never mentions the tax power and none of its eight findings mention raising any revenue with the penalty.

Moreover, while inserting the mandate into the Internal Revenue Code, Congress then expressly severed the penalty from the normal enforcement mechanisms of the tax code. The failure to pay the penalty "shall not be subject to any criminal prosecution or penalty with respect to such failure." Nor shall the IRS "file notice of lien with respect to any property of a taxpayer by reason of any failure to pay the penalty imposed by this section," or "levy on any such property with respect to such failure."

In short, the "penalty" is explicitly justified as a penalty to enforce a regulation of economic activity and not as a tax. There is no authority for the Court to recharacterize a regulation as a tax when doing so is contrary to the express and actual regulatory purpose of Congress.

So defenders of the mandate are making yet another unprecedented claim. Never before has the Court looked behind Congress's unconstitutional assertion of its commerce power to see if a measure could have been justified as a tax. For that matter, never before has a "tax" penalty been used to mandate, rather than discourage or prohibit, economic activity.

Are there now five justices willing to expand the commerce and tax powers of Congress where they have never gone before? Will the Court empower Congress to mandate any activity on the theory that a "decision" not to act somehow affects interstate commerce? Will the Court accept that Congress has the power to mandate any activity so long as it is included in the Internal Revenue Code and the IRS does the enforcing?

Yes, the smart money is always on the Court upholding an act of Congress. But given the hand Congress is now holding, I would not bet the farm.

Mr. Barnett is a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown and the author of "Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty" (Princeton, 2005).

ObamaCare and the Constitution: What would Jefferson and Madison think? - CSMonitor.com

2010-04-28T08:23:00.000-07:00

ObamaCare and the Constitution: What would Jefferson and Madison think? - CSMonitor.com

The Senate's Goldman Kabuki

2010-04-28T08:15:00.000-07:00

The New York Times reports this morning, "Politicians like nothing more than a convenient foil, and Democrats locked in a stubborn impasse with Republicans over new rules to govern Wall Street believe they have found a gold-plated one in Goldman Sachs. Democrats say the convergence of their push for an overhaul of financial regulation and a prominent federal securities case against the prestigious investment firm is a matter of coincidence, not planning." Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) added: "If the disclosures at these hearings are not the final nail that persuades the American people to demand this be done now, I don’t know what would be."

But the big problem for the leftist majorities in Congress is that the American people just don't believe that Washington has any idea about why the financial crisis happened or how to regulate our financial system. According to Rasmussen Reports, 64% of Americans are not confident that policymakers in Washington know what they’re doing when addressing the current economic problems on Wall Street. Intent on proving his ignorance of how finance works, Dorgan went on to say: "To bet against your clients, to bet against your country, all for the sake of big profits. The timing is serendipitous but it should increase the pressure on Republicans." Is Dorgan for real? Does he really believe that anyone who did not blindly keep inflating the housing bubble was "betting against your country"? Is it now unpatriotic to believe that housing prices cannot infinitely rise?

The left would have us believe that the 2008 financial crisis was all the fault of greedy Wall Street bankers like those at Goldman Sachs who dared to change their investment strategy on the belief that housing prices were inflated. To protect against future financial meltdowns, the left wants to give more power to the same federal regulators who failed to recognize the systemic risk caused by the very bubble Goldman and others correctly identified. In fact, one of the main reasons for yesterday's hearing was to deflect attention away from Washington's role in creating the 2008 financial crisis.

It was the government-created and subsidized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that played leading roles in the markets at the center of the housing storm. But the left prioritized their political goals over financial reality. Rep. Barney Frank told the House Financial Services Committee: "These two entities--Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac--are not facing any kind of financial crisis," and "[t]he more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing." And the author of thevery financial reform bill currently being debated in the Senate, Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) , told CNN in July of 2008: "To suggest somehow that [Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac] are in trouble is simply not accurate." Just two months later, completely overrun by bad debt, both companies were placed in conservatorship.

So unable to acknowledge the government's role in the last crisis, not only were Fannie and Freddie not mentioned at yesterday's hearing, they are not included in Dodd's financial regulation bill at all. Hence the need for a villain like Goldman. And what does Goldman think of the actual legislation the left is using them to pass? They are for it, Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein confirmed yesterday.

Sign the Petition to Repeal and Replace ObamaCare

2010-04-21T09:32:00.001-07:00

Go to this website to sign the petition:

http://www.revereamerica.org/

Constitutional Attorney's Take on Health Care Bill

2010-04-19T11:03:00.001-07:00

The Truth About the Health Care Bills - Michael Connelly, Ret. Constitutional Attorney

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business, and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats, and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled by the government.

However, as scary as all of that is, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people, and the businesses they own.

The irony is that the Congress doesn't have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with! I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for access, by the appointees of the Obama administration, of all of your personal healthcare direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide...

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance, or if you have private insurance that is not deemed acceptable to the Health Choices Administrator appointed by Obama, there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a tax instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn't work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the due process of law.

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much, out the original ten in the Bill of Rights, that are effectively nullified by this law It doesn't stop there though.

The 9th Amendment that provides: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people;

The 10th Amendment states: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people. Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights... Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to "be bound by oath or affirmation to support the Constitution." If I was a member of Congress I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it, without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation. If I voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me accountable.

For those who might doubt the nature of this threat, I suggest they consult the source, the US Constitution, and Bill of Rights. There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

Michael Connelly
Retired attorney,
Constitutional Law Instructor
Carrollton , Texas

Clean the House in 2010

2010-04-19T08:34:00.000-07:00

(Received in a forwarded email.)

Larry Kudlow : America's Constitutional Revolt - Townhall.com

2010-04-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

Larry Kudlow : America's Constitutional Revolt - Townhall.com

Raising taxes on rich unlikely to cut deficit - Washington Times

2010-04-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

Raising taxes on rich unlikely to cut deficit - Washington Times

The Real Tea Party

2010-04-15T08:08:00.000-07:00

Happy Tax Day Tea Party Rally Day! Can't wait to get out and see my conservative friends demonstrate their love of country and small government!

Source: "The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

Reasons for Optimism

2010-04-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

(This is from a forwarded email. I have not checked any of the sources.)

BRUCE R. McCONKIE
“It is our firm conviction as a people that the stars and stripes will be waving triumphantly in the breeze, as a symbol of the greatness and stability of the United States of America, when the Lord comes. This nation was established to be the Lord’s base of operations in this final gospel dispensation. From it the gospel is to go to every other nation and people. The greater its influence among the nations of the world, the more rapidly the gospel spreads. But the Lord has told us that all nations, the United States included, shall cease to be when he comes” (The Millennial Messiah, 491).

JOSEPH SMITH
“We are fast approaching that moment prophesied by Joseph Smith when he said: ‘Even this nation will be on the very verge of crumbling to pieces and tumbling to the ground, and when the Constitution is upon the brink of ruin, this people will be the staff upon which the nation shall lean, and they shall bear the Constitution away from the very verge of destruction” (Church Historian’s Office, Salt Lake City, July 19, 1840) (The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, 623 - 624).

JOSEPH SMITH
Words of James Burgess: “In the month of May 1843, several miles east of Nauvoo, the Nauvoo Legion was on parade and review, at the close of which Joseph Smith made some remarks upon our condition as a people and upon our future prospects, contrasting our present condition with our past trials and persecutions by the hands of our enemies; also upon the Constitution and government of the United States, stating that the time would come when the Constitution and government would hang by a brittle thread and would be ready to fall into other hands, but this people, the Latter-day Saints, will step forth and save it. . . .I, James Burgess, was present and testify to the above” (The Words of Joseph Smith, 279).

EZRA TAFT BENSON
“The Lord told the Prophet Joseph Smith there would be an attempt to overthrow the country by destroying the Constitution. Joseph Smith predicted that the time would come when the Constitution would hang, as it were, by a thread, and at that time ‘this people will step forth and save it from the threatened destruction’ (Journal of Discourses, 7:15). It is my conviction that the elders of Israel, widely spread over the nation, will at that crucial time successfully rally the righteous of our country and provide the necessary balance of strength to save the institutions of constitutional government” (The Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, 618 - 619).

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 11:49 AM, Daniel Kelly Ogden wrote:
There are some extraordinary and very timely thoughts from President Harold B. Lee (speaking in October 1973) circulating on the Internet. I looked into the quotation carefully and have confirmed that the words below are accurate; at the end I list the sources. Latter-day Saints and all Americans need this right now. (Someone might even want to forward this to Glenn Beck; he needs to see it!)
President Lee:
Men may fail in this country, earthquakes may come, seas may heave beyond their bounds, there may be great drought, disaster, and hardship, but this nation, founded on principles laid down by men whom God raised up, will never fail.
This is the cradle of humanity, where life on this earth began in the Garden of Eden. This is the place of the New Jerusalem. . . . This is the place where the Savior will come to His temple.
We are living in a time of great crisis. The Country is torn with scandal and with criticism, with faultfinding and condemnation. There are those who have downgraded the image of this nation as probably never before in the history of the country.
I plead with you not to preach pessimism. Preach that this is the greatest country in all the world. . . . It is the nation that will stand despite whatever trials or crises it may yet have to pass through.
We must be on the optimistic side. This is a great nation; this is a great country; this is the most favored of all lands. While it is true that there are dangers and difficulties that lie ahead of us, we must not assume that we are going to stand by and watch the country go to ruin. We should not be heard to predict ills and calamities for the nation. On the contrary, we should be providing optimistic support for the nation.
You must remember . . . that this church is one of the most powerful agencies for the progress of the world, and we should . . . all sound with one voice. We must tell the world how we feel about this land and this nation and should bear our testimonies about the great mission and destiny that it has.
If we do this, we will help turn the tide of this great country and lessen the influence of the pessimists. We must be careful that we do not say or do anything that will further weaken the country. It is the negative, pessimistic comments about the nation that do as much harm as anything to the country today. We who carry these sacred responsibilities must preach the gospel of peace, and peace can only come by overcoming the things of the world. Now, we must be the dynamic force that will help turn the tide of fear and pessimism.
(Excerpts from a talk given at Ricks College Devotional Assembly, “Have Faith in America,” October 26, 1973, and printed in two sources: Ye Are the Light of the World: Selected Sermons and Writings of Harold B. Lee, 340, 350-351, and The Teachings of Harold B. Lee, edited by Clyde J. Williams, 365-366.)

Andy Stern's America

2010-04-13T09:01:00.000-07:00

Last night, Politico reported that Service Employees International Union President Andrew Stern is expected to resign and, according to The New York Times, the resignation is about to happen very soon. If Stern does resign, he will be doing so while at the top of his game. Stern told The Las Vegas Sun last year: "We spent a fortune to elect Barack Obama - $60.7 million to be exact - and we're proud of it." President Obama is well aware of his huge debt to the SEIU. That is why he admits in his autobiography, "I owe those unions." And it also explains why Stern is the most frequent Obama White House visitor, according to official visitor logs.

Stern's access to President Obama has already paid huge dividends including: an $862 billion stimulus that prevented states from having to cut-back government union jobs or wages; $2.5 trillion in new government health care spending, much of which will go to unionized health care providers; and the appointment of SEIU associate general counsel Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board. The NYT describes the SEIU under Stern's tenure as "the nation’s most politically active union, with 1.9 million members." The marriage of politics to union organizing has been great for SEIU membership, making it the fastest-growing union in America.

But what has been great for SEIU's membership rolls has not been good for the SEIU's bottom line. Growing union membership through politics is expensive. The Wall Street Journal reports that as recently as 2002, total SEIU liabilities were about $8 million. But by 2008, the union owed more than $156 million, a 30% increase over the $120 million it owed in 2007. And make no mistake, lobbying government is where Stern believes the future of SEIU is. After President Obama's election, SEIU fired 75 national field staff and organizers so that the SEIU could "reallocate resources ... to lobbying and communications in Washington."

In fact, taking a more critical look at SEIU's recent growth, The Washington Post reports: "some of its biggest gains in recent years were less the result of shoe-leather organizing and more the result of deals with major employers or politicians -- including former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich." Specifically, Blagojevich signed a state law handing over 49,000 state child care workers to SEIU local 880, which is run by the notorious community organizing group ACORN. The deal nearly tripled SEIU 880’s income from $7 million in 2005 to $21 million in 2007. This came after SEIU’s Illinois Political Action Committee gave Gov. Blagojevich $908,000, making it the single largest campaign contributor for his re-election campaign.

It is no coincidence that under Stern's tenure the number of government union members surpassed the number of private sector union members for the first time in our nation's history. There are two reasons for this: 1) Unions kill private sector jobs, and unionized companies earn profits 15% lower than those of comparable non-union firms. This makes unionized firms less competitive, which is why unionized manufacturing jobs fell 75% between 1977 and 2008, while non-union manufacturing INCREASED 6% over that same time. 2) Government union jobs face no competition. Public sector unionization has exploded in the past decade as leaders like Stern realized politics paid much better than the free market. Under Stern's leadership, SEIU has become the nation's second largest government union with over half of its membership drawing a paycheck on the taxpayers dime.

Explaining how organized labor really works, US Court of Appeals judge for the 7th Circuit Richard Posner recently wrote:

The goal of unions is to redistribute wealth from the owners and managers of firms, and from workers willing to work for very low wages, to the unionized workers and the union’s officers. … Unions, in other words, are worker cartels. … There is also a long history of union corruption. And some union activity is extortionate: the union and the employer tacitly agree that as long as the employer gives the workers a wage increase slightly above the union dues, the union will leave the employer alone.

Except that in Stern's America, union management no longer redistribute wealth from firms to union members. With the majority of union members now working for the government, Andy Stern and his cohorts are extorting money from you, the taxpayer. And where is that money going? Not into shoring up union member pensions. Those are woefully underfunded. No, the Andy Sterns of the world turn around and use their taxpayer-funded government union dues to lobby for an even larger government that can pay for even more government union jobs. Andy Stern's America is a perpetual government dependency machine.

And don't think for a second that Stern's retirement means he is gone for good. Stern is still a proud member of President Obama's deficit commission. Complete reliance on government growth, crippling debt, and Blagojevich-style corruption. That is what Andy Stern did to the SEIU, and it is what Stern and President Obama will do to this country.

The Patriot Declaration - PatriotPost.US

2010-04-09T17:53:00.000-07:00

If you believe that we must defend the constitution from our domestic enemies (Washington), check out this Declaration and sign it:

The Patriot Declaration - PatriotPost.US

How the Left Really Plans to Pay for Obamacare

2010-04-07T08:11:00.000-07:00

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), over half of President Barack Obama's new $940 billion health care entitlement is paid for by price-fixing Medicare cuts. Never mind that the President's own Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services says that these cuts would cause "roughly 20 percent" of Medicare providers to go bankrupt in Obamacare's first ten years. The CBO has to believe these cuts will happen because they are required, by law, to believe everything Congress tells them. The American people are not. So the American people ought to know that instead of cutting doctors' Medicare reimbursement rates by 21% as required by law on April 1, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services froze payments at current levels until Congress could come back after Easter recess and rescind those cuts. Again. As they have done every year but one since the cuts were first enacted in 1997.

This doc fix is big enough that, if it had been included as a cost of Obamacare, it would have sent the President's bill into the red all by itself. But the half trillion dollars in Medicare cuts used to fund the rest of Obamacare are a much bigger problem. Even if we assume they all go as planned, President Obama's budget would borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010; would run a $1.6 trillion deficit in 2010; and would leave permanent deficits that top $1 trillion as late as 2020. Add on the half trillion dollars in Medicare cuts that, given Congress' track record, the American people would be naive to think will ever happen, and the federal government is looking at a pile of new debt.

The left's solution to this problem has been simmering for some time now. Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) floated the idea to The Washington Post last May. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) told Charlie Rose it was "on the table" in October. And yesterday White House adviser Paul Volcker told the New York Historical Society it should be considered. The "it" here is a Value Added Tax (VAT), which is a fancy way of saying national sales tax.

A VAT can be (and has been) structured in many different ways. But the real world results are always the same: higher taxes, more government spending, lower growth, fewer jobs and more special interest power.

Higher Taxes: Don't believe for a second that a VAT will help offset other taxes. International evidence clearly shows that a VAT is likely to increase the aggregate burden of government. Europeans used to only have a slightly higher tax burden than the United States. But beginning in the late 1960s, European countries began to implement VATs. Since then, the overall tax burden in Europe has climbed rapidly. And once a VAT is in place, the evidence shows that the tax rate rises over time.

Higher Government Spending: Not surprisingly, with more revenues, European governments turn around and spend much more than the United States does. According to a study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, government spending grew 45 percent faster in VAT nations than in non-VAT countries.

Slower Growth: According to the academic literature, there is a strong negative relationship between government spending and economic performance. In other words, more government spending means less economic growth and fewer jobs. Economic growth is driven by individuals and entrepreneurs operating in free markets, not by Washington spending and regulations.

More Power to Washington: There is one economy that would greatly benefit from a VAT: Washington, DC. No VAT could ever be levied evenly on all goods and services. Due to political considerations, a VAT in addition to current taxes would likely exempt politically sensitive items like food, clothing, health care and housing. Industries would lobby heavily for exemptions from the VAT for the economic benefits described above. This would give Congress an even larger role in picking winners and losers in the marketplace. Success would depend less on ingenuity and hard work and more on the ability to gain political favor.

Our nation faces a financial crisis. But low revenues are not the problem. Spending is. Heritage fellow Brian Riedl explains:

Real federal spending remained steady at $21,000 per household throughout the 1980s and 1990s, before President Bush hiked it to $25,000 per household. Now, President Obama has a proposed a budget that would permanently spend a staggering $32,000 per household annually – and that’s before all the baby boomers retire and add another $10,000 per household in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicare costs to the bottom line.

So the problem is not declining revenues, but rather a spending spree unlike any in American history. If Washington insists on spending $32,000 per household, it will have to tax $32,000 per household – an unaffordable and unfair tax burden regardless what kind of tax collects it.

Rather than tax America into permanent economic stagnation, President Obama and Congress must rein in runaway federal spending. Simply bringing real federal spending back to the $21,000 per household average that prevailed in the 1980s and 1990s would balance the budget by 2012 without raising a single tax on anyone. Even returning spending to the pre-recession level of 20 percent of GDP would eliminate two-thirds of the projected 2019 budget deficit without raising taxes.

Apple Boycotts Glenn Beck—Promotes Che Guevara!

2010-04-05T08:46:00.000-07:00

(http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/21632)

“More than 200 companies have joined a boycott of (Glenn) Beck’s program,” reports the Washington Post. “A handful of advertisers, such as (IPhone owner) Apple, have abandoned Fox altogether,” continues the WaPo article.

We can only assume this Apple “boycott” was prompted by what CBS’s Katie Couric (quoting the Fox commentator’s critics) describes as Beck’s “inflammatory, unfair, despicable, hateful rhetoric.”

This same hyper-sensitive-to-hate-speech Apple, by the way, has just launched an IPhone application featuring Che Guevara’s quotes. Yes! “Now you can carry around Che Guevara’s quotes on your IPhone!”

Alas, many of us, though not customer of this unquestionably hip product, suspect that most of Che Guevara’s hippest quotes are missing from this hippest of IPhone apps. Among those we fear were overlooked by the hyper-sensitive-to-hate-speech, Apple are:

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and booze, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”

“The negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known habit of avoiding baths” (as if Che had room to talk)

“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood…Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!” (From Che’s own diaries, later immortalized as The Motorcycles Diaries, though we note that executive producer Robert Redford “overlooked” this unquestionably dramatic citation for his movie.)

“Hatred as the central element of our struggle!...Hatred that is intransigent….Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold-blooded killing machine…We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!” (thus spaketh the icon of flower-children)

“The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind! Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination! If the nuclear missiles had remained (in Cuba) we would have fired them against the heart of the U.S. including New York City!”

“Don’t Shoot! I’m Che! I’m worth to you more alive than dead!” The plea was whimpered with a Eddie Haskell-in-front-of June Cleaver-esque smile on Oct. 8th 1967 in Quebrada de Yuro, Bolivia, as Che dropped his fully-loaded weapons. At the time, Che, dragging along his guerrilla charge Willi, was trying to slink away from a firefight when confronted by two Bolivian soldiers.

That’s exactly two flunky Communist guerrillas facing two Bolivian soldiers, by the way. But then, Che’s bloodthirsty bluster (see above) always had a habit of evaporating when facing men (or boys) capable of defending themselves. His stock-in-trade was blasting their skulls apart from five feet while they were bound and gagged. (Amazingly, Steven Soderbergh and Benicio del Toro overlooked any depictions of such guaranteed drama in their recent movie.)

“Mexicans are a rabble of illiterate Indians.” (note the Che Guevara banners and T-shirts at Nation of Aztlan gatherings.)

“Bolivian campesinos are simply Animalitos” (Note Bolivian President Evo Morales’ frequent genuflections to the ghost of Che Guevara and to his puppeteer, Fidel Castro.)

“Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates. Instead they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service. The very spirit of rebellion is reprehensible. (“Che is our fifth band member!” Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello)

Che the Lionhearted’s image indeed belongs on college campuses. But it’s usually in the wrong places. He belongs in the marketing, PR, advertising—and especially—psychology departments. His lessons and history are fascinating and valuable, but only in light of Sigmund Freud or P.T. Barnum. “One born every minute,” Mr. Barnum? If only you’d lived to see the Che phenomenon. Actually, 10 are born every second.

Here’s a “guerrilla hero” who in real life never fought in a guerrilla war. When he finally brushed up against one, he was routed and surrendered while a sniveling, whimpering wreck.

Here’s a cold-blooded murderer who executed thousands without trial, who claimed that judicial evidence was an “unnecessary bourgeois detail,” who stressed that “revolutionaries must become cold-killing machines motivated by pure hate,” who stayed up till dawn for months at a time signing death warrants for innocent and honorable men, whose office in La Cabana had a window where he could watch the executions—and today his T-shirts adorn people who oppose capital punishment!

Here’s a humorless teetotaler, a plodding paper-pusher, a notorious killjoy and all-around fuddy-duddy—and you see his T-shirt on MTV’s Spring Break revelers! Perhaps competent psychologists (if any exist) will explain this some day.

Che excelled in one thing: mass murder of defenseless men. He was a Stalinist to the core, a plodding bureaucrat and a calm, cold-blooded—but again, never in actual battle—killer. Che’s true legacy is simply one of terror, murder and sniveling cowardice.

Apple, we trust, will soon become as sensitive to torture and mass-murder by the Stalinist who craved to incinerate the nation that headquarters their office and facilitates their profits, as they claim to be over a few wisecracks by Fox commentators.

ObamaCare and the Constitution

2010-04-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal
REVIEW & OUTLOOK APRIL 2, 2010

If Congress can force you to buy insurance, Article I limits on federal power are a dead letter.

The constitutional challenges to ObamaCare have come quickly, and the media are portraying them mostly as hopeless gestures—the political equivalent of Civil War re-enactors. Discussion over: You lost, deal with it.

The press corps never dismissed the legal challenges to the war on terror so easily, but then liberals have long treated property rights and any limits on federal power to regulate commerce as 18th-century anachronisms. In fact, the legal challenges to ObamaCare are serious and carry enormous implications for the future of American liberty.
***
The most important legal challenge turns on the "individual mandate"—the new requirement that almost every U.S. citizen must buy government-approved health insurance. Failure to comply will be punished by an annual tax penalty that by 2016 will rise to $750 or 2% of income, whichever is higher. President Obama opposed this kind of coercion as a candidate but has become a convert. He even argued in a September interview that "I absolutely reject that notion" that this tax is a tax, because it is supposedly for your own good.

Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum and 13 other state AGs—including Louisiana Democrat Buddy Caldwell—claim this is an unprecedented exercise of state power. Never before has Congress required people to buy a private product to qualify as a law-abiding citizen.

As the Congressional Budget Office noted in 1994, "Federal mandates typically apply to people as parties to economic transactions, rather than as members of society." The only law in the same league is conscription, though in that case the Constitution gives Congress the explicit power to raise a standing army.

Democrats claim the mandate is justified under the Commerce Clause, because health care and health insurance are a form of interstate commerce. They also claim the mandate is constitutional because it is structured as a tax, which is legal under the 16th Amendment. And it is true that the Supreme Court has ruled as recently as 2005, in the homegrown marijuana case Gonzales v. Raich, that Congress can regulate essentially economic activities that "taken in the aggregate, substantially affect interstate commerce."

But even in Raich the High Court did not say that the Commerce Clause can justify any federal regulation, and in other modern cases the Court has rebuked Congress for overreaching. In U.S. v. Lopez(1995), the High Court ruled that carrying a gun near a school zone was not economically significant enough to qualify as interstate commerce, while in Morrison (2000) it overturned a law about violence against women on the same grounds.

All human activity arguably has some economic footprint. So if Congress can force Americans to buy a product, the question is what remains of the government of limited and enumerated powers, as provided in Article I. The only remaining restraint on federal power would be the Bill of Rights, though the Founders considered those 10 amendments to be an affirmation of the rights inherent in the rest of the Constitution, not the only restraint on government. If the insurance mandate stands, then why can't Congress insist that Americans buy GM cars, or that obese Americans eat their vegetables or pay a fat tax penalty?

The mandate did not pose the same constitutional problems when Mitt Romney succeeded in passing one in Massachusetts, because state governments have police powers and often wider plenary authority under their constitutions than does the federal government. Florida's constitution also has a privacy clause that underscores the strong state interest in opposing Congress's health-care intrusion.

As for the assertion that the mandate is really a tax, this is an attempt at legal finesse. The mandate is the legal requirement to buy a certain product, while the tax is the means of enforcement. This is not a true income or even excise tax. Congress cannot, merely by invoking a tax, blow up the Framers' attempt to restrain government under Article I.

The states also have a strong case with their claim that ObamaCare upsets the Constitution's federalist framework by converting the states into arms of the federal government. The bill requires states to spend billions of dollars to rearrange their health-care markets and vastly expands who can enroll in Medicaid, whether or not states can afford it.

Florida already spends a little over a quarter of its budget on Medicaid, and under ObamaCare that will expand by at least 50% as some 1.3 million new people enroll. Those benefits, and the burden of setting up the new exchanges, will cost Florida $149 million in 2014 and $1.05 billion annually by 2018. The state will either have to cut other priorities or raise taxes. In legal essence, ObamaCare infringes on state sovereignty and unconstitutionally conscripts state officials.

Less potent, at least to our reading, is the challenge on behalf of state laws that bar or exempt their citizens from the mandate. Virginia passed such a law earlier this year, and Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is suing on those grounds. But while such efforts serve as healthy political protest, federal laws that are constitutional are supreme under the 10th Amendment, and states can't "nullify" a Congressional action.

***
Judicial and media liberals are trying to dismiss these challenges as a revanchist attempt to repeal the New Deal, or, worse, as a way to restore the states's rights of Jim Crow. Modern liberals genuinely believe the federal government can order the states and individuals to do anything as long as it is in pursuit of their larger social agenda. They also want to deter more state Attorneys General from joining these lawsuits.

The AGs should not be deterred, because the truth is that ObamaCare breaks new constitutional ground. Neither the House nor Senate Judiciary Committees held hearings on the law's constitutionality, and we are not aware of any Justice Department opinion on the matter. Judges have an obligation not to be so cavalier in dismissing claims on behalf of political liberty. Under the Constitution, American courts don't give advisory opinions. They rule on specific cases, and the states have a good one to make.

Democrats may have been able to trample the rules of the Senate to pass their unpopular bill on a narrow partisan vote, but they shouldn't be able to trample the Constitution as well.

Welcome to the Obama Dependency Economy

2010-04-02T08:08:00.001-07:00

Today the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing that the nation's unemployment is 9.7% for the third month in a row. While the jobs report does indicate that 162,000 net jobs were created in March, almost 50,000 of those jobs were temporary government Census jobs that do not reflect any real economic progress. In total, the U.S. economy has now lost a total of 3.8 million jobs since President Barack Obama signed his $862 billion stimulus plan. We are 8.1 million jobs short of the 138.6 million he promised the American people.

It is good to see the American economy finally recovering again. It demonstrates the resilience of the American entrepreneur in the face a punishing job killing agenda from Washington. And don't fall for any White House claims that this belated recovery is due to the stimulus. As the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) admitted last month, its analysis of the stimulus' job creating record was simply "essentially repeating the same exercise" as the initial projections. In other words, the CBO numbers on the stimulus don't take any actual new real world data into account. Working with actual data, Veronique de Rugy of George Mason University's Mercatus Center has found: 1) no statistical correlation between unemployment and how the $862 billion was spent; 2) that Democratic districts received one-and-a-half times as many awards as Republican ones; and 3) an average cost of $286,000 was awarded per job created. $286,000 per job created. That is simply a bad investment.

And President Obama's future agenda is full bad investments. His recently released budget would raise taxes on all Americans by nearly $3 trillion over the next decade; borrow 42 cents for each dollar spent in 2010; and double the publicly held national debt to more than $18 trillion. This is simply unsustainable. As Thomas Edsall writes in The Atlantic: "Net annual interest on the debt will more than triple during the next ten years, according to the CBO, shooting from $207 billion in 2010, to $723 billion in 2020, more than doubling as a share of GDP, from 1.4 percent to 3.2 percent." The cause of these exploding deficits is spending and that spending is making the American public more and more dependent on the federal government Edsall continues: "According to the Federal Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), the share of total personal income in the United States that comes from government transfer programs – Social Security, Medicare, veterans’ benefits, unemployment compensation, etc. – has grown rapidly over the past six decades, from 5.9 cents of every dollar in 1950 ... to 17.3 cents in 2009. In addition, according to BEA, another 9.8 cents of every dollar went, in 2009, to salaries for state, local and federal government employees, a figure that does not include costs of fringe benefits. In other words, more than a quarter of all personal income in the United States is paid for with tax dollars."

Heritage's own Index of Dependence on Government shows a steep rise in American reliance on government: "The burgeoning of flagship entitlement programs and the shrinking number of taxpayers who have any financial stake in the government threaten to bankrupt the government--which has led to an increasing interest across the political spectrum in the growth of dependency-creating initiatives." And one of the strongest dependency-creating special interests, government unions, reached a key tipping this year. As Heritage's own James Sherk was the first to document, government union workers now out number those in the private sector. Edsall explains what this means for the American people: "The consequences of this shift are profound. A majority of the American labor movement is now directly dependent on tax dollars. In terms of political orientation, these workers can now be described as tax consumers as well as tax payers. For these workers, a tax increase may result in a slightly smaller paycheck but, more importantly, the hike means more money is available to pay for raises and new benefits."

There is an alternative to the Obama dependency economy. We do not have to subject ourselves to chronically high unemployment and an ever-increasing government workforce. As bad as the media makes this recession seem, job losses were actually far worse in the 2001 recession. The difference this time around is that the private sector has not created new jobs to replace the lost ones as fast as it did the last time around. Reduced hiring is particularly acute among small businesses: they account for 36% of the net job losses in this recession compared to just 12% in 2001.

What small businesses need to start hiring is less government intervention in the economy, not more. To promote entrepreneurship Congress could: Freeze all proposed tax hikes and costly regulations until unemployment falls below 7 percent; Freeze spending and rescind unspent stimulus funds; Reform business regulations, such as repealing Section 404 of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act in order to reduce excessive auditing costs; Reform the tort system to lower costs and uncertainty facing businesses; Remove barriers to domestic energy production in Alaska and the Outer Continental Shelf; Repeal the job-killing Davis–Bacon Act; Pass pending free-trade agreements; and Reduce taxes on companies’ foreign earnings if they repatriate those earnings to the United States.

Why the healthcare bill is unconstitutional

2010-03-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

(Let's hope this guy is right! There doesn't seem to be much concern for the constitution these days. Even in court.)

March 27, 11:20 PMBaltimore Legal News ExaminerMichael Dodd

Unless you live under a rock, you know that Congress passed the Obama-Pelosi Health care bill last week. If you have been stewing, crying, or a combination of the two, I have news that may brighten your spirits: the individual mandate in the bill is unconstitutional, and will, by any court that still believes in the Constitution as mandatory authority, be struck down.

The individual mandate in the bill requires that all individuals purchase health insurance or face civil and criminal penalties.

The Constitution provides enumerated powers to the Federal Government, and reserves the rest of governmental powers to the states in the 10th Amendment.

Supporters of the Democrats’ health care bill have incorrectly contended that the individual mandate is authorized by the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, or the Taxing and Spending Clause.

The Commerce Clause, which allows the federal government to regulate interstate commerce, does not apply to the individual mandate because there is no interstate commerce when private citizens do not purchase health insurance. Lack of commerce is not analogous to commerce. The federal government cannot coerce action on the part of private citizens who do not wish to participate in commerce.

The bill’s individual mandate is not authorized under the General Welfare Clause, which applies only to congressional spending. It applies to money going out from the government; it does not confer or concern any government power to take in money, such as would happen with the individual mandate. Therefore the mandate is outside the scope of the General Welfare Clause

Further, the individual mandate is not authorized under the Taxing and Spending Clause. The Constitution only allows certain types of taxation from the federal government, and the health care bill does fall under any of those categories.

When proponents of the individual mandate run out of foundational constitutional principals to cite for substantiation, the discussion inevitably reverts to the comparison between the individual mandate and drivers being required to purchase automobile insurance.

First, the federal government does not (and, cannot) mandate that individuals purchase car insurance, for reasons delineated above. Only the states have mandated individually that all drivers must purchase car insurance.

Second, states only mandate that individuals purchase liability insurance—that is, insurance that indemnifies claims of personal injury or property damage of another non-at-fault party. So, societal welfare is the interest of the car insurance mandate. Protecting others from your negligence is not the same as forcing you to protect yourself, as the individual mandate does.

Lastly, a person has a choice whether or not to personally operate an automobile on the public roadways. There are viable options, such as public transportation, for those who do not wish to be forced to enter into a contract. A person does not have a choice whether to be born and reach the age of majority, the age that an individual would be forced to buy health insurance.

The Constitution is still the law of the land regardless of how much disdain some members of Congress may have for it. But, usurpation of the 10th amendment, disregard for individual rights, and lack of common sense promise to be shot down, in this instance, by any reasonable court.

Hope

2010-03-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

Last night my husband and I stayed up late talking about where the country is going and what we can do about it. It was a very depressing conversation. I told him that there are two things that keep me sane: 1. That I think that at least half of the country feels the same way we do and 2. The Gospel. Then this morning when I picked up The Ensign to do my daily spiritual reading, the page I turned to had the message I needed to hear. It was about keeping our faith and peace during troubled times. If you want to read it, it's here: LDS.org - Ensign Article - Safe in His Hand

Here are some scriptures and quotes that gave me some peace and hope this morning:

"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you...Let not your heart be troubled, neither let it be afraid" (John 14:27).

God warned Noah of the Flood and told the righteous how to escape. God told Joseph in Egypt of the coming famine and how to prepare. That same God speaks today through His prophets, giving counsel that brings peace and safety when followed.

The Savior told His Apostles that they would face persecution and sorrow, then He said, "These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world," (John 16:33).

"Fear not, little children, for you are mine, and I have overcome the world, and you are of them that my Father hath given me" (D&C 50:41).

"Prophets, priests and kings...have looked forward with joyful anticipation to the day in which we live; and fired with heavenly and joyful anticipations they have sung and written and prophesied of this our day;...and we are the favored people that God has made choice of to bring about the Latter-Day glory."
(President Joseph Smith, in History of the Church, 4:609-10.)

"Every time they persecute and try to overcome this people, they elevate us, weaken their own hands, and strengthen the hands and arms of this people. And every time they undertake to lessen our number, they increase it. And when they try to destroy their faith and virtue of this people, the Lord strenghtens the feeble knees, and confirms the wavering in faith and power in God, in light, and intelligence. Righteousness and power with God increase in this people in proportion as the Devil struggles to destroy it."
(President Brigham Young, Discourses of Brigham Young, sel. John A. Widtsoe (1954), 351.)

"You do not need to worry in the least, the Lord will take care of you and and bless you.... He has stretched forth His hand to accomplish his purposes, and the arm of flesh cannot stay it....It is only necessary for us to try with our might to keep pace with the onward progress of the work of the Lord, then God will preserve and protect us, and will prepare the way before us."
(President Joseph F. Smith, in Conference Report, Oct. 1905, 5-6.)

"God has established His Church never to be thrown down nor given to another people. And as God lives and His people are true to one another, we need not worry about the ultimate triumph of truth."
(President David O. McKay, in Conference Report, Apr. 1969, 152.)

"We are seeing the signs of our times as foretold by the prophets and by the Master himself...in the Church, we have been witnessing some of the most dramatic things, and I can testify that you are seeing what the Lord is revealing for the needs of this people today...Safety can't be won by tanks and guns and the airplanes and atomic bombs. There is only one place of safety and that is within the realm of the power of Almighty God that he gives to those who keep his commandments and listen to his voice, as he speaks through the channels that he has ordained for that purpose." (President Harold B. Lee, "Closing Remarks," Ensign, Jan. 1974, 125.)

"Knowing what we know, and living as we are supposed to live, there really is no place, no excuse, for pessimissm and despair...I promise you in the name of the Lord whose servant I am that God will always protect and care for his people. We will have our difficulties the way every generation and people have had difficulties. But with the gospel of Jesus Christ, you have every hope and promise and reassurance. The Lord has power over his Saints and will always prepare places of peace, defense, and safety for his people. When we have faith in God we can hope for a better world--for us personally, and for all mankind."
(President Howard W. Hunter,"An Anchor to the Souls of Men," Ensign, Oct. 1993, 70.)

"I have faith, my dear brethren, that the Lord will bless us, and watch over us, and assist us if we walk in obedience to His light, His gospel, and His commandments." (President Gordon B. Hinckley, "If Ye Are Prepared Ye Shall Not Fear," Liahona and Ensign, Nov. 2005, 62.)

"I testify to you that our promised blessings are beyond measure. Though the storm clouds may gather, though the rains may pour down upon us, our knowledge of the gospel and our love of our Heavenly Father and of our Savior will comfort and sustain us and bring joy to our hearts as we walk uprightly and keep the commandments. There will be nothing in this world that can defeat us. My beloved brothers and sisters, fear not. Be of good cheer. The future is as bright as your faith."
(President Thomas S. Monson, "Be of Good Cheer," Liahona and Ensign, May 20009, 92.)

Sordid Politics

2010-03-22T11:34:00.000-07:00

For the Record
"Never before has the average American been treated to such a live-action view of the sordid politics necessary to push a deeply flawed bill to completion. It was dirty deals, open threats, broken promises and disregard for democracy that pulled ObamaCare to this point, and yesterday the same machinations pushed it across the finish line. ... By the weekend, all the pressure and threats and bribes had left the speaker three to five votes short. Her remaining roadblock was those pro-life members who'd boxed themselves in on abortion, saying they would vote against the Senate bill unless it barred public funding of abortion. Mrs. Pelosi's first instinct was to go around this bloc, getting the votes elsewhere. She couldn't. Into Saturday night, Michigan's Bart Stupak and Mrs. Pelosi wrangled over options. The stalemate? Any change that gave Mr. Stupak what he wanted in law would lose votes from pro-choice members. The solution? Remove it from Congress altogether, having the president instead sign a meaningless executive order affirming that no public money should go to pay for abortions. The order won't change the Senate legal language -- as pro-choice Democrats publicly crowed within minutes of the Stupak deal. Executive orders can be changed or eliminated on a whim. Pro-life groups condemned the order as the vote-getting ruse it was. Nevertheless, Mr. Stupak and several of his colleagues voted yes, paving the way to Mrs. Pelosi's final vote tally of 219." --columnist Kimberley Strassel
Source:"The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

Thank You, Obama, Pelosi, and Reid

2010-03-22T07:55:00.000-07:00

Dear Obama, Pelosi, and Reid,

I just wanted to take a moment to thank you on this morning after the health care reform vote. Before you all came to power and decided to force your agenda on the American people, many of us had become complacent.

As Americans, we had trusted our politicians to do the right thing, at least on major issues. Those days are over, for good. We now know that if we do not remain permanently vigilant, politicians will do whatever it takes to get what they want. The will of The People be damned. The Constitution be damned.

Now we know. So now we have accepted that we must gird our loins and be prepared to fight for our freedoms daily. We can no longer sit back and let you handle things up there in Washington for us. We are now PERMANENT POLITICAL ACTIVISTS. We will not rest. We will not forget health care.

We will be on the streets protesting. We will be calling you, emailing you, petitioning you, coming to your offices, and donating money to your opponents. We will be voting against you and your colleagues. We will be making phone calls to support your opponents. We will be putting up signs, we will be talking to our friends and neighbors. We will be educating everybody we can find about the Constitution and what YOU have done to shred it.

So thank you for waking us up and giving us a sense of purpose and a will to fight. We will not forget, we will not go away. But you and your socialist, Marxist, progressive ideas will as they continue to be exposed to the light of day by us, the newly-minted activists.

Sincerely,

Annette Bybee and Friends

Repeal

2010-03-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Fellow Americans,

Late last night, in a narrow and partisan vote, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the most significant piece of social legislation in over seven decades. It did so in the face of overwhelming and principled opposition from the American people. Large majorities of Americans oppose this legislation because it offends the historic American dedication to the principle of self-government. They understand that this new law will accelerate Washington's intrusion into our most personal and private decisions.

This is why opposition to this bill will only grow. Supporters of this bill argue that popular hostility will recede upon its passage. But, rather than cementing our descent into a European-style welfare state, last night’s passage of Obamacare is best seen as a historic turning point, a true catalyst for real change.

I write to reassure our supporters, the conservative movement, and the American people at large that The Heritage Foundation will do all within its power to keep this issue alive in the public square and make the intellectual case for the repeal of this act. We will bring all our resources to bear on behalf of those who believe America is and will always remain the Land of the Free.

This, rest assured, can be done. The American people are never permanently thwarted. President Obama's health care legislation can and will be repealed.

Those who supported this bill are our fellow Americans, and we do not question their good will or patriotism. In public policy, however, good intentions alone do not suffice. And let there be no mistake, our philosophical differences with supporters of this bill are profound. The reason government-run health care has been the holy grail of the left for decades is that liberals realize as much as we do that it is a giant step toward the creation of a European-style welfare state. This is an evolution Americans have always resisted because it is alien to our national character.

If there is one good thing about the past year—one in which we have witnessed unprecedented horse-trading, press stunts, midnight votes and political manipulation in both houses of the U.S. Congress—it is that the American people have come away educated as never before about the differences between these two visions for America. Americans are strongly opposed to this bill not because they have been hoodwinked but because they understand this bill both in its particulars and at an instinctive, gut level.

They understand this health care bill forces individuals and employers to buy insurance policies designed by government bureaucrats. This intrusion is intended to follow us from cradle to grave.

Instead of empowering families and individuals to make their own choices, Obamacare empowers the bureaucracy to make those decisions for them. It is this unelected bureaucracy, unanswerable to the electorate, that will determine the content of health benefits packages, including medical treatment and procedures, and how much will be paid for those services. Yesterday’s legislation brings us one step closer to fully government-run medicine, with expanded government power over the financing and delivery of medical services that is sure to ration care in the name of cost control.

You will hear the left say this new entitlement will be popular with the American people. Do not believe them for a second. Yes, 32 million people will gain the theoretical right to health insurance. But over half of that coverage comes from placing at least 16 million more Americans into Medicaid, an unpopular and overextended welfare program that already rations care.

Americans will not stand for it. The American love for liberty prevailed in our founding, and will prevail once again.

In December of 1773, to protest unjust taxation, a group of American colonists dumped tea in Boston Harbor. The punishment for that first Tea Party was a series of intrusive laws passed by Parliament that were so oppressive that they could only be described as the "Intolerable Acts."

Obamacare is today's Intolerable Act. And just as the colonists banded together to enact change after those acts were passed, so should America respond to Obamacare. This law must be repealed.

Much of the fight against this bill will be led by the individual states, a process we encourage. All told, 33 states have already taken steps to challenge various aspects of Obamacare, including its unprecedented mandate that every American purchase health insurance or face a steep penalty for noncompliance. Four additional States will have this question on the ballot in November.

On Capitol Hill, the initial battle over Obamacare will occur when Congress considers whether to fund the tens of thousands of new federal bureaucrats necessary to implement the new law. In the tradition of the Hyde amendment, which prevented federal funding for abortions through annual limitations appended to appropriations bills, conservatives should look to the appropriations process as our first line of defense. Straightforward funding limitations would prevent any Administration official or any bureaucrat from implementing the law.

Our health care system requires reform, and we have long advocated measures to improve our system. We can and should strengthen the ability of American families to choose the coverage they want, rather than giving that power to Congress and its agency bureaucrats. We can also spur competition and choice to bring efficiency and lower costs to the health system, in place of the bill’s deadening regulation and damaging price controls. And, above all, we should foster state innovation rather than Washington-based central planning.

But such reforms can only be considered once this tragedy of arrogance has been fully and completely repealed.

Fortunately, there are no permanent victories or defeats in Washington. For millions of Americans and for Heritage, Round One of this fight is over. Today, the Heritage Foundation is answering the bell for Round Two. Join our fight; become a part of our mission. Help us educate our lawmakers, as well as those who aspire to become tomorrow’s lawmakers. Together we can make the persuasive case for repeal of this Intolerable Act and thereby return us to our American destiny.

Onward!

Sincerely,
Edwin J. Feulner, Ph.D., President, The Heritage Foundation

If John Hancock Were in Congress 2010

2010-03-20T07:32:00.000-07:00

This Process is Undermining the Rule of Law

2010-03-19T08:09:00.001-07:00

This week, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal released poll results that are disturbing but by no means surprising. The March 11th - 14th poll of 1000 American adults showed that only 17% of respondents approve of the job Congress is doing in Washington. And as bad as that number is, the reason why Congress' approval rating is so low is even more disturbing: a full 76% of Americans simply do not trust the U.S. Congress. This was the lowest level of trust for any representative entity tested by NBC/WSJ.

It is no coincidence that these record low ratings come amid current debate over health care in Congress. Yesterday, former U.S. Attorneys General Edwin Meese III and William P. Barr released the following statement:

The convoluted and questionable method under discussion by both Houses of Congress for final passage of the long-debated health care legislation raises serious constitutional concerns, which, at best, will lead to protracted and wholly avoidable litigation and continued doubt about the bill’s validity. Members of Congress from both parties have criticized the use of such sleights of hand, and The Washington Post has rightly editorialized against such “unseemly” and “dodgy” maneuvers for the health care bill. Beyond the obvious practical concerns shared by all citizens, the use of such obscure “rules” for final passage is even harder to justify in light of the real constitutional doubt and the erosion of public confidence in government that it will cause.

Contrary to what President Obama and some congressional leaders have been repeating of late, the American people do care passionately that the process for consideration of health care reform be both constitutional and fair. At a bare minimum, article I, sec. 7, cl. 2 of the U.S. Constitution requires that before it becomes law “(1) a bill containing its exact text was approved by a majority of the Members of the House of Representatives; (2) the Senate approved precisely the same text; and (3) that text was signed into law by the President.” Clinton v. City of New York, 524 U.S. 417, 448 (1998).

The “deem and pass” and similar options under consideration in the House of Representatives plainly violate at least the spirit of the Constitution’s bicameralism and presentment requirements. Those constitutional requirements were intended to ensure democratic transparency with a straightforward up-or-down vote in each House on all bills that become law. More importantly, these requirements were designed to ensure that the new national government actually followed “the consent of the governed,” which the Declaration of Independence had declared to the world was the only basis of legitimate government.

The “deem and pass” options under consideration in the House and the subsequent use of a “reconciliation” process that is reserved for budget issues in acts already signed into law further erode confidence in the rule of law. Some past uses of the “deem and pass” or “self-executing” rules raise similar concerns, but none was as convoluted as the proposed use, and significantly, there may have been no one with legal standing to challenge prior uses in court. Many individuals will have standing to challenge any health reform legislation that restructures one-sixth of the American economy, and the contemplated use of the “deem and pass” maneuver in this instance may be combined with questionable procedural steps in the Senate that render it much more subject to challenge.

There is no need to engage in such procedural machinations, and no asserted reason for doing so exists other than to avoid the traditional legislative safeguards in the Senate and to obscure the appearance that Members of the House actually voted for the Senate bill, which is a prerequisite for genuine reconciliation. The constitutional requirement of bicameralism should not be jettisoned under any circumstances—and certainly not for such trivial and partisan reasons.

Members of Congress take an oath to uphold the Constitution. Members should violate neither the letter nor spirit of the Constitution, especially when there is so much at stake, not only as a policy matter, but when the very legitimacy of the legislative process is in question. Given that many parts of the underlying legislation itself raise substantial constitutional concerns, these “unseemly” and “dodgy” procedures underscore the justified concern the American people have that their elected representatives are blatantly disregarding the Constitution, and as a result, undermining the rule of law.

Circumventing Rule of Law

2010-03-18T08:28:00.000-07:00

This is how Obama is getting around those pesky checks and balances to push forward his agenda.

Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Steyn on Why We Can't Let Health Care Pass!

2010-03-08T13:15:00.000-08:00

The Last Word
"Once the state swells to a certain size, the people available to fill the ever expanding number of government jobs will be statists -- sometimes hard-core Marxist statists, sometimes social-engineering multiculti statists, sometimes fluffily 'compassionate' statists, but always statists. The short history of the postwar welfare state is that you don't need a president-for-life if you've got a bureaucracy-for-life: The people can elect 'conservatives,' as the Germans have done and the British are about to do, and the left is mostly relaxed about it because, in all but exceptional cases (Thatcher), they fulfill the same function in the system as the first-year boys at wintry English boarding schools who for tuppence-ha'penny or some such would agree to go and warm the seat in the unheated lavatories until the prefects strolled in and took their rightful place. Republicans are good at keeping the seat warm. A big-time GOP consultant was on TV crowing that Republicans wanted the Dems to pass ObamaCare because it's so unpopular it will guarantee a GOP sweep in November. Okay, then what? You'll roll it back -- like you've rolled back all those other unsustainable entitlements premised on cobwebbed actuarial tables from 80 years ago? Like you've undone the Department of Education and of Energy and all the other nickel 'n' dime novelties of even a universally reviled one-term loser like Jimmy Carter? Andrew McCarthy concluded a shrewd analysis of the political realities thus: 'Health care is a loser for the Left only if the Right has the steel to undo it. The Left is banking on an absence of steel. Why is that a bad bet?' Indeed." --columnist Mark Steyn
Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Mormons live longer...

2010-03-08T13:07:00.000-08:00

Culture
"Much, if not most, of health care depends on what individuals do in the way they live their own lives -- including eating habits, alcohol intake, exercise, narcotics and homicide. A study some years ago found that Mormons live a decade longer than other Americans. But nobody believes that Mormons' doctors are that much better than other doctors. When you don't do a lot of things that shorten your life, you live longer. That is not rocket science. Americans tend to have higher rates of obesity, narcotics use and homicide than people in some other countries. And there is not much that doctors can do about that. If those who make international comparisons were serious, instead of clever, they would compare the things that medical science can have a great effect on -- cancer survival rates, for example. Americans have some of the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and for some particular cancers, the highest. When you can get to see a doctor faster, and get treatments underway without waiting for months, while the cancer grows and spreads, you have a better chance of surviving. That, too, is not rocket science. But it is also something that you are not likely to see featured in most of the media, where people are promoting their own pet notions and agendas, instead of giving you the facts on which you can make up your own mind." --economist Thomas Sowell
Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

So, How's That Pivot to Jobs Going?

2010-03-06T08:35:00.000-08:00

Last week President Barack Obama hosted a seven-and-a-half-hour televised health care summit. This week the President launched his "final" campaign for passage of his health care plan. Next week, President Obama will travel to Missouri and Pennsylvania to continue this "final" effort to jam his unpopular plan through Congress. With this all-health-care-all-the-time White House agenda it seems like eons ago that the Obama administration announced, following the complete rejection of its health care plan in the Massachusetts Senate special election, that President Obama's first State of the Union would mark a "pivot" from health care and to a "razor sharp focus on jobs". So how is that pivot to jobs going? Well, the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report this morning and it showed the U.S. economy shed another 36,000 net jobs last month. Our nation's unemployment rate is still at 9.7%.

So why is our economy having such a tough time pulling out of recession? Here are the facts: the most recent data available show that the U.S. economy actually lost fewer jobs during this recession than were lost during the 2001 recession. Specifically, 50.8 million jobs were lost through the first six months of the '01 recession while 48.2 million jobs were lost through the first six months of this recession.

But if out economy is losing fewer jobs this time, then why is our unemployment rate so much higher under President Obama's stewardship of the economy? The answer: job creation. Or actually the lack thereof. Back to the BLS data: through the first six quarters of the 2001 recession 47.6 million jobs were created, while only 40.3 million jobs have been created through the second quarter of 2009. That's a 7.9 million jobs gap. The reason our unemployment rate is so much higher now is low job creation, not high job loss. So why aren't businesses creating jobs? Here is what entrepreneurs have been trying to tell the Obama administration:

At one of President Obama's many jobs summits, Fred Lampropoulos told The New York Times that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”

Dan DiMicco, CEO of steelmaker Nucor Corp, told the Wall Street Journal: “Companies large and small are saying, ‘I am not going to do anything until these things — health care, climate legislation — go away or are resolved.’”

Porta-King CEO Steve Schulte told USA Today his company is not investing because “proposals in Congress to tackle climate change and overhaul health care would raise costs.”

The New York Post's Charles Gasparino reported on the 600 companies stock analyst Peter Sidoti covers: "'There hasn't been one bankruptcy,' he tells me. How did they survive the recession? By cutting costs and hoarding cash, not expanding their business and hiring more people, even as the economy now is starting to recover. During other recoveries, Sidoti says, firms like these would be hiring workers in droves as demand picks up for goods and services. This time around, they're not -- because 'they don't know what their costs are going to be.'"

National Federation of Independent Business chief economist Bill Dunkelberg writes: "The horizon is filled with cost unknowns, from healthcare to cap and trade to yawning deficits and the need to come to grips with them, from paid family and medical leave to card check, from expiration of the Bush tax cuts to state decisions about their finances. Washington cannot expect small business owners, facing difficult economic circumstances anyway, to commit themselves to investing in new employees or equipment and vehicles without acknowledging and revealing the policy-inspired costs that will be imposed on them. It is all about uncertainty and confidence."

Our economy's job creators have been trying to send a message to the Obama administration for months: stop creating so much uncertainty in the tax and regulatory environment so that we can figure out how to invest our money and start creating jobs. Stop taking over car companies. Stop shedding financing contracts. Stop taking over 1/6th of our economy. Stop raising taxes on our energy sector. Just stop.

Our economy will eventually recover and start producing jobs again, probably very soon. But that recovery has already been delayed by an administration that saw this recession as an opportunity to fundamentally rewrite our nation's relationship with the federal government. Unless this administration completely abandons its far reaching transformation agenda, this recovery will be a very slow one.

"General Welfare" Quote

2010-03-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." --James Madison, letter to Edmund Pendleton, 1792

Source: http://patriotpost.us/subscribe/

Why Do People Think Obama is Brilliant?

2010-03-01T08:52:00.000-08:00

(This article is great. Basically, Obama in a nutshell.)

The Last Word
"[W]ho are regular, run-of-the-mill, tax-paying Americans to question Obama? He's brilliant, after all. ... [I]f Obama is so brilliant, why does he parrot the words and thoughts of a bunch of schmucks like Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Al Gore and Michael Moore? Why does he insist that the trouble with the Constitution and the Civil Rights movement is that they didn't focus on the redistribution of wealth? Why would he hand over the federal budget to a couple of morons like Pelosi and Reid? And why on earth would he put Henry Waxman in charge of his energy program? A brilliant person wouldn't trust Waxman to bring baked beans to a picnic. When someone decides to model a health care plan after such dismal failures as England, Canada and Cuba, while exhuming the failed economic policies of FDR, why would anyone suggest he is anything but a left-wing ignoramus? This is an American president, for heaven's sake, who has more in common with Noam Chomsky, Hugo Chavez and some Berkeley hippie than he has with Washington, Jefferson and Adams. Except that he is now 30 years older, Obama seems to think exactly the same way he was thinking back in college, when he was a pot-smoking idiot who sought out students who were self-professed revolutionaries and professors who were communists. If we have come to a point where the ability to read scripted lines off a teleprompter is considered a sign of brilliance, no matter how fatuous the actual words may be, we are in even worse shape than I imagined." --columnist Burt Prelutsky

Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Personal Responsibility

2010-03-01T08:44:00.000-08:00

(More good stuff from the Patriot Post.)

Faith & Family
"One of the major differences between the right and the left concerns the question of authority: To whom do we owe obedience and who is the ultimate moral authority? For the right, the primary moral authority is God (or, for secular conservatives, Judeo-Christian values), followed by parents. Of course, government must also play a role, but it is ultimately accountable to God and it should do nothing to undermine parental authority. For the left, the state and its government are the supreme authorities, while parental and divine authority are seen as impediments to state authority. ... In a nutshell, the left wants to have ever-expanding authority over people's lives through ever-expanding governmental powers. It does so because it regards itself as more enlightened than others. Others are either enemies (the right) or unenlightened masses. It is elected by demonizing its enemies and doling out money and jobs to the masses." --radio talk-show host Dennis Prager

Culture
"Personal responsibility is a real problem for those who want to collectivize society and take away our power to make our own decisions, transferring that power to third parties like themselves, who imagine themselves to be so much wiser and nobler than the rest of us. Aimless apologies are just one of the incidental symptoms of an increasing loss of a sense of personal responsibility -- without which a whole society is in jeopardy. The police cannot possibly maintain law and order by themselves. Millions of people can monitor their own behavior better than any third parties can. Cops can cope with that segment of society who have no sense of personal responsibility, but not if that segment becomes a large part of the whole population. Yet increasing numbers of educators and the intelligentsia seem to have devoted themselves to undermining or destroying a sense of personal responsibility and making 'society' responsible instead." --economist Thomas Sowell

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

The Party of NO!

2010-03-01T08:32:00.000-08:00

(I'm not a big Ann Coulter fan because her sarcasm is so biting, but this little blurb describes exactly how I've been feeling about health care reform lately. And I've been thinking again and again, Republicans shouldn't shy away from being called the party of NO. They should instead say, "We aren't the party of NO, we're the party of Hell NO when it comes to these massive government takeovers!")

Re: The Left
"The reason massive Democratic majorities in Congress aren't enough to pass socialist health care is AMERICANS DON'T WANT SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! In fact, you might say that the nation is in a boiling cauldron of rage against it. Consequently, a lot of Democrats are suddenly having second thoughts about vast new government commissions regulating every aspect of Americans' medical care. Obama isn't stupid -- he's not seriously trying to get a health care bill passed. The whole purpose of this public 'summit' with the minority party is to muddy up the Republicans before the November elections. You know, the elections Democrats are going to lose because of this whole health care thing. Right now, Americans are hopping mad, swinging a stick and hoping to hit anyone who so much as thinks about nationalizing health care. If they could, Americans would cut the power to the Capitol, throw everyone out and try to deport them. ... But the Democrats think it's a good strategy to call the Republicans 'The Party of No.' When it comes to Obamacare, Americans don't want a party of 'No,' they want a party of 'Hell, No!' or, as Rahm Emanuel might say, '*&^%$#@ No!' ... Complaining that Republicans are 'obstructionists' is not a damaging charge when most Americans are dying to obstruct the Democrats with a 2-by-4. While you're at it, Democrats, why not call the GOP the 'Party of Brave Patriots'?" --columnist Ann Coulter
Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Will the Republicans Deliver?

2010-03-01T08:30:00.001-08:00

Political Futures

"When Republicans regain a majority in the House and Senate -- either this fall, as seems increasingly likely, or in the election following -- they must learn from their previous mistakes when they last held power. In addition to focusing on overturning whatever health insurance 'reform' proposal this Congress eventually passes (by a veto override, or a lawsuit challenging the measure's constitutionality), a Republican congressional majority must help large numbers of the public unlearn the factual errors they have been taught to accept. From 'climate change,' to the notion that government is a guarantor through 'entitlement' programs of a minimal outcome in life, to the forgotten idea given to us by the Founders that Liberty is the most precious gift there is, the country needs a history lesson based on truth, experience and provable facts. ... A Republican majority should turn the nation's attention away from Washington. A Republican majority must teach us again that 'you can do it,' like so many of our fathers did when the training wheels came off and we learned we could fly down the sidewalk without assistance. America doesn't need restructuring. It needs revival; revival of the principles that made us strong and great; revival of the moral foundation that proved to be our real strength and allowed us to conquer our demons and become independent, not dependent on government. This is the message most Americans want to hear and need to hear. Will the Republicans deliver it?" --columnist Cal Thomas
Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

2010-02-25T08:57:00.000-08:00

(Received this as a forwarded email. Have not verified any of the info.)

Taken directly from the L. A. Times:

1. 40% of all workers in L. A. County are working for cash and not paying taxes. This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card.

(L. A. County has 10.2 million people)

2. 95% of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens.

3. 75% of people on the most wanted list in Los Angeles are illegal aliens.

4. Over 2/3 of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on Medi-Cal, whose births were/are paid for by [you] taxpayers.

5. Nearly 35% of all inmates in California detention centers are Mexican nationals here illegally. 29% of inmates in ALL federal prisons are illegal aliens...

6. Over 300,000 illegal aliens in Los Angeles County are living in garages.

7. The FBI reports 50% of all gang members in Los Angeles are most likely illegal aliens, 80% from south of our border.

8 Nearly 60% of all occupants of HUD properties are illegals.

9. 21 radio stations in L. A. are Spanish speaking.

10. In L. A. County 5.1 million people speak English, 4.9 million speak Spanish,
and only 0.2 million speak other languages.
(There are 10.2 million people in L. A. County. [+/- 3% error]).
(All 10 of the above facts were published in the Los Angeles Times)

Less than 2% of illegal aliens are picking our crops, but 29% of illegal aliens are on welfare. Over 70% of the United States annual population growth results from ILLEGAL immigration (and over 90% of California, Florida, and New York).

Obama at Waterloo

2010-02-24T08:55:00.000-08:00

"The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

The White House Learned Nothing from Massachusetts

2010-02-22T09:01:00.000-08:00

In July of this year, the American people were mostly undecided about Obamacare: equal numbers opposed and supported the health care bills that the White House was shepparding through Congress. But then August happened and informed Americans turned out at townhalls across the country to express their strong disapproval of Obamacare. The larger American public noticed and and pluralities of the American people began to oppose Obamacare. The White House concluded they had a "communications problem" so they scheduled a prime time speech in front of a rare Joint Session of Congress. But the President's speech arrogantly dismissed the concerns of the American people and after a brief uptick in support (from the low 40s to the mid 40s), opposition to the President's plan grew.

Then in November, liberals lost governor's races in New Jersey and Virginia as opposition to President Obama's signature policy priority inched towards 50%. Again the White House concluded that nothing was wrong with their policy agenda and they dismissed their setbacks in two states that had voted for President Barack Obama as local elections with weak candidates. Instead of rethinking their policies and procedures the White House doubled down and pushed for a speedy passage of Obamacare with as little debate as possible. Over the next two months the White House bought support for their health care plan with the Louisiana Purchase, the Cornhusker Kickback, and big labor tax breaks. And their behind-closed-doors, backroom-deal tactics almost worked ... until Massachusetts happened.

Just like in August and November, Sen. Scott Brown's (R) upset win over Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) took the Obama administration completely by surprise. Again, the White House concluded they had a "communications problem" so this time they scheduled a six-hour health care summit that is supposed to take place at The Blair House, across the street from the White House, this Thursday. But like everything else that has come out of the Obama administration during this health care debate, the President's effort to "seek common ground" at the summit is completely disingenuous. The New York Times reported this past Friday that the White House is drafting, and will release this morning, a final health care bill they expect Congress to pass quickly. And this bill is specifically designed to pass without any conservative support:

Democratic officials said the president’s proposal was being written so that it could be attached to a budget bill as a way of averting a Republican filibuster in the Senate. The procedure, known as budget reconciliation, would let Democrats advance the bill with a simple majority rather than a 60-vote supermajority.

And a "simple majority" does not mean they need 51 Senators. The nuclear option the White House is now pushing, reconciliation, only requires the Obama administration to muster 50 votes before Vice President Joe Biden can cast a tie breaking vote in favor of a government takeover of health care.

And make no mistake, a government takeover of health care is exactly what Obamacare is. Just last night the White House revealed that one new feature of their legislation will be to give the federal government sweeping new authority to set prices for health insurance. This is on top of the sweeping new authority that Obamacare already grants the federal governemnt to micromanage the coverage details of every single health insurance policy in the country. And since the nuclear option only requires 50 Democratic Senators for passage, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) has signaled that an outright government run health insurance company, the public option, will also be included in the final bill.

There is a reason that the longer this health care debate has dragged on, more and more Americans have become solidly against Obamacare: the plan has been exposed as a welfare state takeover of our health care sector that can only be passed by the most partisan and venal tactics. If the President was capable of listening to the American people, and learning from August, November, and Massachusetts, then he would abandon the legislative disasters still pending in the House and Senate and start over. That is what the American people want.

What Are The Tea Parties All About?

2010-02-22T08:44:00.000-08:00

Political Futures
"Are this year's 'tea parties' really tea parties? What could today's protesters have in common with the 'Indians' who dumped 90,000 pounds of tea in Boston harbor in 1773? Quite a bit, actually. What do today's tea partiers want? According to the Christian Science Monitor, the movement 'is about safeguarding individual liberty, cutting taxes, and ending bailouts for business while the American taxpayer gets burdened with more public debt. It is fueled by concern that the United States under Mr. Obama is becoming a European-style social democracy where individual initiative is sapped by the needs of the collective.' Broadly speaking, the tea parties reflect a growing anger in America that the government seems to be a closed circle, run by an elite in both parties. These elites, combined with a class of bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists and businessmen, use government power to serve their own ends, and not the public good. ... When the government is unresponsive to the views of the people, and, beyond that, when our administrative and judicial branches restrict the scope of the people's legislative rights, protest rises. President Obama, an heir to the Progressive tradition, wants to strengthen this unaccountable, administrative state. The response has been altogether fitting." --columnist Richard Samuelson
Source:"The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

Ronald Reagan Quote

2010-02-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

The Gipper
"Our current circumstances in the 21st century are not greatly different from those surrounding our Founders, who remarked on the long train of abuses and usurpations whose ultimate design seemed clearly to abrogate all the citizens' rights and render them subjects of an absolute despotism. The Founders' impending tyranny arose under an unjust king; ours derives from a centralizing and increasingly powerful national government that intrudes into ever-growing aspects of our lives, and prevents us from freely exercising our acts of self-government. We New Federalists therefore seek a return to our foundation on the principles of self-government. We seek a new birth of federalism because we seek a new birth of freedom, both for ourselves and for our posterity." --Ronald Reagan
Source:"The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

Ungovernable? Nonsense.

2010-02-19T08:40:00.000-08:00

(Source: townhall.com)
by Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- In the latter days of the Carter presidency, it became fashionable to say that the office had become unmanageable and was simply too big for one man. Some suggested a single, six-year presidential term. The president's own White House counsel suggested abolishing the separation of powers and going to a more parliamentary system of unitary executive control. America had become ungovernable.

Then came Ronald Reagan, and all that chatter disappeared.

The tyranny of entitlements? Reagan collaborated with Tip O'Neill, the legendary Democratic House speaker, to establish the Alan Greenspan commission that kept Social Security solvent for a quarter-century.

A corrupted system of taxation? Reagan worked with liberal Democrat Bill Bradley to craft a legislative miracle: tax reform that eliminated dozens of loopholes and slashed rates across the board -- and fueled two decades of economic growth.

Later, a highly skilled Democratic president, Bill Clinton, successfully tackled another supposedly intractable problem: the culture of intergenerational dependency. He collaborated with another House speaker, Newt Gingrich, to produce the single most successful social reform of our time, the abolition of welfare as an entitlement.

It turned out that the country's problems were not problems of structure but of leadership. Reagan and Clinton had it. Carter didn't. Under a president with extensive executive experience, good political skills and an ideological compass in tune with the public, the country was indeed governable.

It's 2010 and the first-year agenda of a popular and promising young president has gone down in flames. Barack Obama's two signature initiatives -- cap-and-trade and health care reform -- lie in ruins.

Desperate to explain away this scandalous state of affairs, liberal apologists haul out the old reliable from the Carter years: "America the Ungovernable." So declared Newsweek. "Is America Ungovernable?" coyly asked The New Republic. Guess the answer.

The rage at the machine has produced the usual litany of systemic explanations. Special interests are too powerful. The Senate filibuster stymies social progress. A burdensome constitutional order prevents innovation. If only we could be more like China, pines Tom Friedman, waxing poetic about the efficiency of the Chinese authoritarian model, while America flails about under its "two parties ... with their duel-to-the-death paralysis." The better thinkers, bewildered and furious that their president has not gotten his way, have developed a sudden disdain for our inherently incremental constitutional system.

Yet, what's new about any of these supposedly ruinous structural impediments? Special interests blocking policy changes? They have been around since the beginning of the republic -- and since the beginning of the republic, strong presidents, like the two Roosevelts, have rallied the citizenry and overcome them.

And then, of course, there's the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. "Don't blame Mr. Obama," writes Paul Krugman of the president's failures. "Blame our political culture instead. ... And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable."

Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about "extremists" trying "to eliminate the filibuster" when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.

Leave it to Mickey Kaus, a principled liberal who supports health care reform, to debunk these structural excuses: "Lots of intellectual effort now seems to be going into explaining Obama's (possible/likely/impending) health care failure as the inevitable product of larger historic and constitutional forces. ... But in this case there's a simpler explanation: Barack Obama's job was to sell a health care reform plan to American voters. He failed."

He failed because the utter implausibility of its central promise -- expanded coverage at lower cost -- led voters to conclude that it would lead ultimately to more government, more taxes and more debt. More broadly, the Democrats failed because, thinking the economic emergency would give them the political mandate and legislative window, they tried to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right country. The people said no, expressing themselves first in spontaneous demonstrations, then in public opinion polls, then in elections -- Virginia, New Jersey and, most emphatically, Massachusetts.

That's not a structural defect. That's a textbook demonstration of popular will expressing itself -- despite the special interests -- through the existing structures. In other words, the system worked.

The Mount Vernon Statement

2010-02-18T08:55:00.000-08:00

The Mount Vernon Statement

Yesterday, I joined a broad coalition of conservative leaders representing a wide spectrum of the movement including fiscal, social, cultural and national security conservatives, to sign The Mount Vernon Statement. In light of the challenges facing the country and the need for clarity, we needed to produce this defining statement of conservative beliefs, values and principles. It is the culmination of a thoughtful deliberation about our nation’s principles. I was proud to participate in that discussion, and to chair the committee that drafted the statement.

Constitutional Conservatism: A Statement for the 21st Century

We recommit ourselves to the ideas of the American Founding. Through the Constitution, the Founders created an enduring framework of limited government based on the rule of law. They sought to secure national independence, provide for economic opportunity, establish true religious liberty and maintain a flourishing society of republican self-government.

These principles define us as a country and inspire us as a people. They are responsible for a prosperous, just nation unlike any other in the world. They are our highest achievements, serving not only as powerful beacons to all who strive for freedom and seek self-government, but as warnings to tyrants and despots everywhere.

Each one of these founding ideas is presently under sustained attack. In recent decades, America’s principles have been undermined and redefined in our culture, our universities and our politics. The selfevident truths of 1776 have been supplanted by the notion that no such truths exist. The federal government today ignores the limits of the Constitution, which is increasingly dismissed as obsolete and irrelevant.

Some insist that America must change, cast off the old and put on the new. But where would this lead — forward or backward, up or down? Isn’t this idea of change an empty promise or even a dangerous deception?

The change we urgently need, a change consistent with the American ideal, is not movement away from but toward our founding principles. At this important time, we need a restatement of Constitutional conservatism grounded in the priceless principle of ordered liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The conservatism of the Declaration asserts self-evident truths based on the laws of nature and nature’s God. It defends life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It traces authority to the consent of the governed. It recognizes man’s self-interest but also his capacity for virtue.

The conservatism of the Constitution limits government’s powers but ensures that government performs its proper job effectively. It refines popular will through the filter of representation. It provides checks and balances through the several branches of government and a federal republic.
A Constitutional conservatism unites all conservatives through the natural fusion provided by American principles. It reminds economic conservatives that morality is essential to limited government, social conservatives that unlimited government is a threat to moral self-government, and national security conservatives that energetic but responsible government is the key to America’s safety and leadership role in the world.
A Constitutional conservatism based on first principles provides the framework for a consistent and meaningful policy agenda.

* It applies the principle of limited government based on the rule of law to every proposal.
* It honors the central place of individual liberty in American politics and life.
* It encourages free enterprise, the individual entrepreneur, and economic reforms grounded in market solutions.
* It supports America’s national interest in advancing freedom and opposing tyranny in the world and prudently considers what we can and should do to that end.
* It informs conservatism’s firm defense of family, neighborhood, community, and faith.

If we are to succeed in the critical political and policy battles ahead, we must be certain of our purpose.

We must begin by retaking and resolutely defending the high ground of America’s founding principles.

The Heritage Foundation was founded to uphold the very principles articulated in this document. Our mission statement reads: “To formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense.” Our vision statement is “to build an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish.” That is the same mission, the same vision embraced by the founders and articulated in the Mount Vernon Statement. We’ve been bound, voluntarily and enthusiastically, to those ideals since Heritage’s founding in 1973. I hope you share these principles, and join me in supporting this framework and signing your name here. (http://www.heritage.org/MountVernon/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell)

By Edwin J. Feulner, President of The Heritage Foundation

Gore's Blizzard

2010-02-10T08:34:00.000-08:00

Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/)

Snow Slows Obama's Second Stimulus

2010-02-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

(What we need is a very long deep freeze in Washington...until say, November!)

The snowstorms that have already dumped over two feet of snow on the nation's Capitol and that are threatening to dump another 12 to 16 inches, have grounded the legislative process to a halt. But that might not be such a bad thing. Senate Democrats had hoped they could pass President Barack Obama's second stimulus today, but with only three of the Senate’s 100 lawmakers able to make it to the chamber, that vote has been postponed indefinitely. And the more we learn about what might be in President Obama's second stimulus, the better a little delay looks.

The Las Vegas Sun reported this weekend that big labor leaders are pushing to include their long-sought "card check" provisions into Obama's Second Stimulus. This legislation would effectively end a worker's right to fight unionization through secret ballot elections, would give the federal government the power to run small businesses and would cost the American economy thousands of jobs.

The other major provisions of Obama's second stimulus are also job killers. The $5,000 new worker tax credit does not create any incentive for already-struggling companies to begin long-term hiring. What's worse, it could even increase unemployment; companies would delay existing plans to create jobs so they could take advantage of the tax credit. And it would add to our national debt. Then there's the TARP-funded government-subsidized loans for small businesses. It's a big-government program destined to fail since the Small Business Administration has a terrible record of effectively allocating capital to the private sector.

For months, the American people and small businesses have been trying to tell the White House and Democrats in Congress that federal regulations and spending are part of the problem, not part of the solution. According to the latest National Federation of Independent Businesses survey, small business owners identified high taxes and government regulation as two of the top three problems facing their business.

Instead of piling on more debt and more regulations, the federal government should move in the opposite direction. For example, suspending the Davis-Bacon rules for the construction industry could fund 160,000 new jobs. Rescinding the unspent dollars from Obama's first failed stimulus would signal business owners that they will not face crippling new taxes enacted to cover the deficit. Killing the economically-devastating cap-and-trade legislation and prohibiting the EPA from regulating carbon-dioxide under the Clean Air Act would stabilize the regulatory environment so businesses could safely make long term decisions again.

There are things this Congress could do to help spur job creation. Notably, those job-creating ideas do not include more regulations and more deficit spending. Maybe a good thaw is what Washington needs to get back on the same page as the American people.

The Great Peasant Revolt of 2010 by Krauthammer

2010-02-05T11:21:00.000-08:00

Wonderful article by Krauthammer about the arrogance of liberals:

http://townhall.com/columnists/CharlesKrauthammer/2010/02/05/the_great_peasant_revolt_of_2010

Second Stimulus, Same as the First

2010-02-05T08:19:00.000-08:00

When President Barack Obama was sworn into office, the U.S. economy employed 134.6 million people and the unemployment rate stood at 7.6%. In response to growing job losses, President Obama passed an $862 billion stimulus plan that his economic experts promised would help the United States employ at least 138.6 million people by 2010. Reality has not been kind to President Obama's hope. Today, the Bureau of Labor and Statistics released its monthly jobs report showing the U.S. economy shed another net 20,000 jobs, leaving only 129.5 million jobs, almost 10 million short of the President's promises.

Anticipating this bleak job news, the President announced in his State of the Union address last week: "That is why jobs must be our number one focus in 2010, and that is why I am calling for a new jobs bill tonight." It is understandable why the President wants to call this new legislation a "jobs bill" instead of what it really is: his second stimulus. But that would mean admitting that his first stimulus completely failed, which both the objective evidence and the opinion of the American people show it has.

And why did the President's first stimulus fail? For the same reason his second stimulus is destined to fail: Only the private sector in pursuit of opportunity can create jobs on net. The best we can hope from government is that it keeps to a minimum the jobs it prevents and the income and wealth it destroys.

And the specific policies being talked about on Capitol Hill for this second round of stimulus are particularly pernicious. The $5,000 tax credit for any business that hires a new worker not only does not create any incentive for already-struggling companies to begin hiring, it could even result in some currently unemployed individuals remaining unemployed until the tax credit is passed into law, or similarly, some companies firing some workers and then re-hiring once the tax credit is passed into law.

The President's TARP-funded government-subsidized loans for small businesses are also terrible policy. Besides the fact that unspent TARP funds ought to be used to pay down the deficit, the Small Business Administration has a terrible record of effectively allocating capital to the private sector.

There is one sector of the economy that is thriving under President Barack Obama: government. This week, the Obama administration announced that the number of government employees will grow to 2.15 million this year, topping two million for the first time since President Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over.” And today, USA Today reports "the lobbying industry is humming along in the nation's capital" as the top 20 trade associations and companies increased their lobbying expenses by 20% in 2009. ConocoPhillips spent $18.1 million dollars lobbying Congress in 2009, up from $8.5 million the year before, while it also laid off 1,300 people.

This is a perfect example of what happens to an economy when government becomes "the focus" of job creation. Jonathan Rauch explains: "Economic thinkers have recognized for generations that every person has two ways to become wealthier. One is to produce more, the other is to capture more of what others produce. … Washington looks increasingly like a public-works jobs program for lawyers and lobbyists, a profit center for professionals who are in business for themselves."

The real way Washington could create jobs is by getting out of the way. Fred P. Lampropoulos, founder and chief of Merit Medical Systems Inc., told the President in December that businesses were uncertain about investment because “there’s such an aggressive legislative agenda that businesspeople don’t really know what they ought to do.” That uncertainty, he added, “is really what’s holding back the jobs.”

Quote of the Day

2010-02-03T08:32:00.000-08:00

"We must present a clear choice: stay the course of progressive liberalism, which moves away from popular consent, the rule of law, and constitutional government, and toward a failed, undemocratic, and illiberal form of statism; or correct course in an effort to restore the conditions of liberty and renew the bedrock principles and constitutional wisdom that are the roots of America's continuing greatness." --Heritage Foundation scholar Matthew Spalding

Source:"The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

Baby Debt

2010-02-03T08:27:00.000-08:00

Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Obama Stays the Course

2010-02-01T08:50:00.000-08:00

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Scott Brown Commercial

2010-01-31T20:56:00.001-08:00

Rush's Letter to Obama

2010-01-31T14:18:00.000-08:00

From Rushlimbaugh.com
I heard this on the show on Thursday...it was awesome!

My Letter to President Obama
January 28, 2010

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I penned a message to Obama that I would like to deliver now. Because Mr. Obama, I think it's time we had a heart-to-heart talk. Let me be the father that you never had or never really knew, because I think you need some guidance. It's time to man up. It's time to grow up. That speech last night was an embarrassment. You couldn't focus, you lashed out in all directions, you refused to accept responsibility for your own actions, and you were angry.

And he was, folks! He was mad. Being president is a big job. It's a big responsibility. You wanted the position, Barack. You campaigned for it. You told the public to trust you with it, and they elected you -- and you're now president of the greatest country mankind has ever known, and yet you act like this was all coming to you, like you deserve it, that you're better than the people you are supposed to serve and that you have no tolerance for debate or dissent. That's not the way it works as president, Barack. We have a Constitution, we have checks and balances, we have separation of powers, we have states -- and most of all, we have the people. You don't get to impose your programs and policies on the nation and the people without our consent.

This is a representative republic, not a banana republic, and let me remind you: Karl Marx and Saul Alinsky are not our Founding Fathers. This is a nation built on individuality, built on liberty, free markets, and faith. Yet you, Barack, demand fidelity to a different belief system: A system that crushes individual initiative and free will. The president does not berate Supreme Court justices who are guests of the Congress and who have no ability to respond to your attacks. You've made such a mess of things, Barack, and it's time to stop deluding yourself. It's time to stop blaming others. You are delusional. You are delirious. It's time for you to assume the responsibilities of a president rather than pretending to be one.

You've driven the nation's debt over the edge. It is your responsibility to fix it now. Otherwise, our young people will have no future. You were wrong to grant terrorists constitutional rights. Even the libs in New York don't want the trial there now! You, Mr. President, are endangering the security of this nation. Now fix it! Reverse course, and end the terrorists -- all of them -- back to Guantanamo Bay, where they belong. You are wrong to nationalize one industry after another from automobiles to banks. You are destroying competition and jobs. You need to stop what you were doing before millions of more families go broke from your misguided policies. It's not too late to stop this. I know you're not going to stop it because last night you said you don't quit, and I know what you mean.

You're gonna keep plugging for the same agenda, which is going to destroy this country even more -- which makes me think, Barack, that's your objective. You know, Barack, unlike most presidents you're dealing with a Congress that has super majorities in both houses, fellow Democrats. It amazes me that with all the talk about your ability to persuade and communicate, that you can't even hold your own party members together anymore. Is that Bush's fault, too? Is it is fault of the banks and the insurance companies and the lobbyists that you can't keep your own Democrat Party unified -- or is it a problem with your leadership, Barack, or lack of leadership? It's the latter, Mr. President. I'll tell you, you are not a leader. You are an agitator and an organizer, and a process guy, but you are not a leader. It is you who are doing something wrong.

The people in Virginia don't like it. The people in New Jersey don't like it. The people in Massachusetts don't like it. The people in Massachusetts and all over the country have the ability to inform themselves outside of your sycophant press corps, and they are doing so. Members of your own governing majority don't like what you are doing. I mean, this calls for some self-reflection and some circumspection. Has it occurred to you, Mr. President, even once that you're not as cool as you think you are? Has it occurred to you that you are screwing up? And if it has, are you happy about that? Has it occurred to you that you have a great deal to learn and that you need to take your own measure, or are you Mr. Perfect? Are you God-sent?

Are you The One that you've been waiting for? See, I have a little concern there may be a psychological issue at play here. I don't say this to demean you, Barack. I say it because I'm concerned. I mean, Tom Daschle was always "concerned" and I like the word. I'm concerned. You seem to have a whole lot of enemies, at least in your own mind. A partial list would include Fox News, insurance companies, banks, oil companies, the "special interests," the Supreme Court, Republicans, talk show hosts, executives, anyone or any business that earns over $250,000 a year, mortgage companies, credit card companies -- and the list goes on and on and on. You have the longest enemies list of anybody I've ever known.

These people are not your enemies, though, Barack. They are Americans. They are part of this country. They are part of what makes the nation work. You are not. You have nothing to do, and have had nothing to do, with this nation's greatness. You can't lay claim to greatness on any scale, not even rhetorical. But you have no direct relationship to the greatness of this country. You are damaging the possibility of further greatness. Nevertheless, like a bully, you continue to threaten all of these people. The Supreme Court, Big Oil, Big Pharmaceutical, Big Retail, talk show hosts, Fox News, the list goes on. You threaten anybody who does not agree with you. You try to intimidate them. You smear them. Your sycophantic media goes right along and carries your water. But this is not what presidents do.

You're supposed to lead not by threatening people but by encouraging them, by embracing them, by thanking them, by inspiring them. Most of all you don't seem to appreciate the magnificence of this nation! I know you don't. The way you've been educated about this country it's painfully obvious. You think this country is guilty, period. Guilty and unjust. You seem to think this country needs to be torn down so you can rebuild it. But you were elected to be president, not some kind of dictator. You must operate within the confines of the Constitution. You are not bigger than the law, and you are not bigger than the people. You were elected to serve the people, not dictate to them. Anyway, I'm sure this little lecture will not do you much good, particularly given the spectacle of your speech last night. You really are full of yourself. But I truly hope that this little talk does do you some good down the way, because something is going to have to change in you or we are doomed for at least the next three years.

END TRANSCRIPT

Real Message from the SOTU

2010-01-28T20:50:00.000-08:00

Source: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Glenn Beck Rally

2010-01-25T15:43:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to say...I'm going to be there! My mom is meeting me there and we are going to support Glenn and see some of D.C. while we're there. We have already made plane and hotel reservations, thank goodness, as it looks like hotels are filling up quickly! I hope we have a stupendous turn out.

Glenn Beck: Restoring Honor

January 25, 2010 - 14:09 ET

Restoring Honor Rally 8-28
On August 28, 2010 come be a part of history by joining Glenn at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the Restoring Honor Rally. This is a non-political fundraiser for the Special Operations Warrior Foundation.

GLENN: We have talked about so many things in the last few years, and as I, as I try to figure out a way out, because people come and listen to this program for laughs, for perspective, for my opinion on things, what I believe is the truth, but they also have been listening for some sort of an answer, and I will tell you that I've never considered myself an answer man. As a dad I have been looking for answers as well. I told you last year that the answer would come from the people, and I think we saw that last week. And that's not a comment on Ron on Scott Brown. This is a comment on people waking up and standing up and saying, you're pushing me too far. Eight months ago we didn't even well, many people didn't even have hope. We never stop it. What's happening to us?

Now people are aware of what's happening to us. More and more people are waking up every day and more people are standing up. Question with boldness, hold to the truth, and speak without fear. That has been my answer.

I told you at the, around Thanksgiving that I was changing the show because I had been thinking about what is the answer. What is the answer? And I announced something when I went down to Florida, I announced to you that I was coming to you with a plan. I will tell you, I'm going to shoot real straight with you. I was on the air I'm sorry, I was on the stage and there were 30,000 people there and as I said it and I said this phrase: Two can play at that game. And I broke out in a cold sweat. I knew the direction that I was supposed to go in but I believe that I was 2 to 5% off course. And I broke out in a cold sweat and I walked off stage and I said to one of my guys, I said, this is the wrong direction, I don't know. And he looked at me and said, Glenn, have you not been talking about this for weeks and weeks and weeks? And I said, yes, but it's the wrong direction and I don't know, I don't know why. Well, I figured it out. Because two cannot play that game. That makes us them. We must play another game, one that isn't a game. It is the original way this country was set up. We must do two things. And really it's just this one. Remember, remember who we are. If we remember who we are, where we came from, why we came here, who let us, who wrote those documents, why did they write them, if we remember the mistakes we've made, and we made a lot, but I ain't going on a European apology tour for it. Every country has made mistakes, some bigger than others. I think in the balance we've been pretty good. But if we remember our mistakes, we'll be able to fix them. So remember.

And what happens when we remember? Well, if we remember, then we have to choose. And here comes the second part. Then we have to choose. Are we going to be part of the solution or part of the problem? And really honestly the problem is two can play at that game. The solution is to just always tell the truth. I announced on that same stage that I was going to be holding an event, and I didn't tell you much about it. On August 28th, this coming August 28th, I told you it would be at the mall in Washington. A lot of people are going to think that this is a tea party. It is not. I hope it will be something much, much deeper than a tea party. I believe what we are creating is going to be something that will be one for the history books. There is not going to be one word of politics from the stage, not one. Because the way to fix Washington is not through politics but through each of us as individuals. Because when we fix ourselves and we are united on the principle of honor and honesty and integrity, they will fear us like they've never feared us before. Why can somebody go to Washington that you think is so strong and then all of a sudden turn? All of a sudden they become part of the problem? Well, I think it's because they've lost their honor. They may have lost their honor before they even got there. And when they lost that honor, when they cheated on their wife or they embezzled or they took this deal or they compromised here, whatever it is, that's when they become a tool. That's why I ask you to join me at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on 8/28 in a program called Restoring Honor. The feet of Abraham Lincoln. I'm reading a book right now called Giants. It's fantastic. It's the things that Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln had in common. Amazing men. But you don't have to solve Washington. The tea parties have the backdrop of the capitol. The capitol could go into a giant sinkhole as far as I'm concerned. Doesn't matter to me. You are not going to be able to go in there and fix that, unless you start at the other end of the mall and you start by looking and reflecting at Abraham Lincoln. And then you look and reflect. That's what the reflecting pool means. Reflect. You look one way and you are looking at Abraham Lincoln and you can reflect on him. You look the other way and you see the Washington Monument and everything that Washington stood for and you reflect on him. Once you do that and then make your choice, two can play that game. Or I'm going to be like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. When you do that, you'll fix the country. I'm convinced of it. Education, reflection and higher choices. I can't tell you who or what is going to be on the program at this point for a myriad of reasons. But just know we want to be there. It is going to be amazing.

Now, here's the problem and here's where I need your help. Well, I tell you what, I have to take a break. Let me tell you this. If you are planning on going, I had two people at the Bill O'Reilly event this weekend come up to me and say, Glenn, I can't get a hotel for your 8/28 thing. We called, like, three hotels. They're already sold out. People are coming to this, and I recommend that if you even think you want to go, book now. Plan on being there. We did it, we intentionally didn't do it on 9/12 for a couple of reasons. One, 9/12 is on Sunday. I don't do anything on Sunday. The second reason is I wanted your I wanted you to be able to bring your kids. So this is the, I think the last week before the August holiday is over, and I want you to be there, and I want you to bring your family. And I want you to bring your friends. And I want you to help me get the word out. Restoring honor. 8/28, August 28th. Please mark it down on your calendar. Make plans to join me now. I'll tell you when I need your help in just a second.

(OUT 11:20)

GLENN: All right. So now when I had this idea about restoring honor, 8/28, and you can read all about it at GlennBeck.com, when I had this idea, we started running some numbers and it looks like it could be in, you know, like $2 million to produce this thing. I hope to God not but that's what they said. And I was faced with a choice: Not do it, go to sponsors, you know, go to say, hey, Goldline, you want to cough up a couple of million dollars, and it would be the Goldline restoring honor thing. And I thought, no, that's not. Or come to you.

Here's the deal I've made. I'm going to come to you and for anything that we don't raise and we spend, I'll cover the rest. It cost $2 million? We raise a million dollars, I'll cover the rest. But I also had another problem because I am so I mean, I am such a watchdog thing. I don't want to ask you for money. I don't want any money even coming close to me. Because I don't even want the appearance of, you know, oh, Glenn Beck's making money off this, Glenn Beck's getting rich off this, Glenn Beck's, I don't even want the money coming close to me. I want nothing to do with it. So I'm trying to think who can we, who can we go to that you would trust and that I trust. We can go to Cooper what is it, Price Cooper House Waterhouse, whatever that is, you know, whatever.

PAT: Are those the guys that do the Oscars?

GLENN: Yeah.

PAT: Oh, you know they're credible.

GLENN: Yeah, they're credible. So I would be going there, but then I would be saying their name over the next year and giving them all of this advertisement, and I don't really care to advertise them. And I also think that we might raise more than whatever it is we need. What happens to the money then? That's why I went to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. These guys, so you know, they are a 501(c)(3). They are a charity. They have just been awarded their fourth consecutive four star rating for financial efficiency by a charity watchdog group, The Charity Navigator. So they are totally on the up and up. They are really, really good. There is I mean, when I think of honor, honestly I thought of George Washington first and maybe Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan. I was thinking who really has shown honor to me in my head? But every when I thought of George Washington, obviously I thought of him because of what he did during the war. He was an honorable man. When I think of honor today, I think of warriors. When you think of honor today, I think I mean, when I'm making this decision, we're starting the trials on the Navy SEALs and everything else and I'm just getting more and more wound up.

So what I want to do is I'm asking you to go to the specialops.org and you will see Glenn Beck Restoring Honor rally and you can make a contribution there in any amount. It's all tax deductible. Anything that we raise over the cost of the event will stay with them.

Let me tell you this. They are also going to be very motivated to make sure that we're not spending money frivolously. I am because I don't want you to think that we've used your money frivolously. I mean, we want to put on an amazing historic event. And believe me, we will. But I want to do it for the cheapest amount we can. They're motivated as well as I am to do it for the cheapest because anything that we raise over that amount, if we do, goes to this charity. And it is a great, great charity. These are the people that grant scholarships for college, financial aid, educational counseling to all of the kids of special operations personnel that are killed, and these guys are the heroes among us. So here's what I need you to do. If you got a buck, if you got five bucks, you got ten bucks, if you believe in, you believe in the message of, we have a deficit in this country of honor and integrity. We have a deficit in this country just telling the truth, just being decent people, just, didn't you take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States? To protect it from enemies foreign and domestic? What are you thinking? What are you doing? The deficit we have is people who will actually engage in their thinking of, it's not me, it's not my career. It's my children's future. It is the freedom of all mankind. If America fails, there's no place else on planet Earth for oppressed people to run to. None! This is it! And if it fails, it will have failed because we were not honorable people. Only honorable, decent people can be free.

I ask you to donate and help put this on. This will truly be the people's grassroots rally. You can donate whatever it is you want. You can join us. If you can't donate a dime, that's fine. But if you can, go to specialops.org. Specialops.org. By the way, I just want to say this again clearly. All proceeds above the actual cost of, you know, putting this thing on go to this charity.

We also are going, at GlennBeck.com if you want something in return, all proceeds above the actual cost of making the stuff, from the sale of 8/28 merchandise will also go to the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. So we are selling products that you can see now at GlennBeck.com including Bill O'Reilly, I don't even know if this is up there. I brainstormed with him a little bit on Saturday and we have Restoring Honor Starts Here doormats. It all goes to this, to the event. Anything above and beyond that goes right to the special warriors.

Read the Bill!

2010-01-25T08:51:00.000-08:00

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow." --Federalist No. 62

Source: http://patriotpost.us/subscribe/

Video-The Day ObamaCare died

2010-01-21T19:37:00.000-08:00

Got this off of YouTube. First heard it on Rush.

A Nothing Burger, A Fig Leaf, and a Commission On the Side

2010-01-21T08:05:00.001-08:00

From the President who brought you unaccountable, constitutionally-questionable czars comes the latest innovation in pass-the-buck leadership: a White House executive commission designed to solve the behemoth of a spending problem plaguing the federal government. Members of Congress have described the commission as a “nothing burger,” a “fig leaf” and “something that is put in place to kind of cover [President Obama’s] rear end." Colorful critiques aside, it’s an executive commission tasked with making policy recommendations aimed at reducing the country’s projected $1.4 trillion deficit.

News of the commission follows the Senate’s debate this week on the increase of America’s debt limit by a whopping $1.9 trillion, which would raise Congress’ theoretical credit card limit to $14.3 trillion. That's a legal necessity if the federal government wants to keep borrowing more money. The key word is "wants," since the only return on the borrowed money is out-of-control discretionary spending and an expansive entitlement system with no responsible fiscal future. Congress must address the entitlements crisis if it wants to honestly address the root cause of our future debt problems.

Due to rising costs in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, federal spending will cause the debt to grow to 300% of the economy by 2050. In total, the entitlement programs have promised $45 trillion more in benefits than the country can afford to pay. But hey, we can just raise taxes right? Raising taxes to fund these benefits would require an additional $12,072 per household by 2050 and further thereafter, which would create a tremendous burden on families and future generations. Cutting spending will not be sufficient to pay for the programs, as they will consume the entire federal budget by 2052.

And if you think today's economy is bad, you'll really dislike what the future has in store. If Congress does not immediately address its long-term debt problem, America will face a fiscal crisis far worse than what we've seen in the past two years. Publicly-held debt must not grow faster than the economy if it is to be sustainable; otherwise the demand on capital markets would be so severe that private and foreign lenders would stop buying U.S. securities. Yet the United States is still on an unsustainable course.

Enter the executive commission. The Wall Street Journal describes its component make-up: "The 18-member commission will include six people appointed by congressional Democrats, six appointed by congressional Republicans and six appointed by the president. Of the president's six, two will be Republicans and four will be Democrats."

This veneer of budget-fixing bipartisanship will no doubt make for a lovely rhetorical flourish at the President’s January 27 State of the Union Address, where it will likely serve as a centerpiece in his argument that he is making serious efforts to tackle out-of-control spending.

But as The Heritage Foundation’s Stuart Butler explains, the commission would be inherently flawed and ineffective, given that it lacks the accountability and “public consultation” necessary to gain popular support for any reforms it recommends: "The commissioners would be chosen from a pool of potentially lame duck Members of Congress, with a report due after the election and recommendations to be crammed through and voted on by the end of the year in a lame duck session. If this process were actually successful, it would virtually guarantee a back-room “Andrews Air Force Base” deal consisting of immediate and real tax hikes combined with distant and doubtful spending cuts."

There’s a deeper truth at work here: a commission to study budget reform is an unnecessary measure designed to keep one’s hands clean while another does the dirty work. In reality, there’s nothing stopping Congress or the President from acting on their own accord and bearing the mantle of responsibility that the public has placed on their shoulders. In short, they have the power – but evidently not the will – to take serious steps to cut spending and reduce the deficit that this year exploded to “26 percent of the economy.”

They could start with canceling TARP, capping discretionary spending growth (which has increased by 25 percent over the last three years), and returning to federal spending levels of just a decade ago. These fiscally prudent steps would immediately signal the American public that Congress comprehends the crisis. At that time, Washington could undertake serious entitlement reform that puts America on a fiscally responsible path forward. Understanding you have a problem is a good start, but a lame duck commission is not the solution.

We've Only Just Begun

2010-01-20T08:11:00.000-08:00

Source of picture:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Last night my mom called me after Scott Brown was announced the winner in MA and we had a few nice minutes of celebration. We were both relieved and heartened at the first REALLY good political news in a long, long time. (Va, NJ, and New York were good, but this was GREAT.) We both think that a lot of prayers were answered last night. Then mom asked what we were going to do about the big financial mess this country is in. We both sobered up. I told mom this is just the beginning of the fight, not the end. We have merely put out the fire on our house. Now we have to address the structural foundation problems.

It is only a start, but it's a good one! Obama, Pelosi, and Reid have acted as though their ears were made of tin for this last year. Nothing we've said or done has penetrated their ideological drive to fulfill their agenda, come hell or high water. But last night a HUGE message was delivered. It will be interesting to see if they get that message or simply explain it away as a bad campaign on Coakley's part and go full steam ahead on finding an alternative way to pass health care. I'm afraid they will do the latter.

In a way, I hope they do. I hope they ignore everything they should have learned last night and really rub our noses in the fact that they don't care what we think. That way, they will further harden the resolve of their opposition, us The People. After all, we didn't look for this fight. They brought it to us. But now that they have, we'll take it on. And we won't quit because our very freedoms and our American way of life is at stake. And we won't give it up for anything. No freebies from the government will entice us to give up everything we hold dear.

Whether health care is scrapped or dies after more shenanigans, it will die eventually. And the Dems have to decide whether they want to jump ship now and try to salvage their careers or go down with the sinking Obama ship. Either way, we've only just begun. After we beat down health care, cap and trade, more stimulus, etc., we must take on and reform medicare, social security, the deficit, and the debt. We must shore up our defense and our intelligence services. We must cut taxes, REDUCE SPENDING, and balance the budget. We must start actually following the constitution, not ignoring it or trying to find a way around it. (Yes, Pelosi, we are serious, we are serious!) These things must be done if we are to save this great nation of ours.

And if the incumbents are not willing to do this in Washington, there's plenty more where Scott Brown came from.

It's so cold...

2010-01-19T11:17:00.000-08:00

Source: http://patriotpost.us/subscribe/.

Nancy Pelosi Joke

2010-01-19T11:15:00.000-08:00

Nancy Pelosi and Father O'Malley
Father O'Malley rose from his bed. It was a fine spring day in his new Washington, D.C. parish. He walked to the window of his bedroom to get a deep breath of air and to see the beautiful day outside.

He then noticed there was a jackass lying dead in the middle of his front lawn. He promptly made a phone call. The conversation went like this:

"Good morning. This is Speaker Pelosi. How might I help you?"

"And the best of the day te yerself. This is Father O'Malley at St.Brigid's. There's a jackass lying dead in me front lawn. Would ye be so kind as to send a couple o'yer lads to take care of the matter?"

Speaker Pelosi, considering herself to be quite a wit, replied, "Father, it was always my impression that you people took care of last rites!"

There was silence on the line for a moment, and Father O'Malley replied:

"Aye, that's certainly true, but we are also obliged to first notify the next of kin."

Source: http://patriotpost.us/subscribe/.

Health Care in the Balance as Ground Shifts Under Obama

2010-01-19T08:04:00.000-08:00

One year ago, President Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address at the foot of the Capitol, laid out an agenda of “big plans” for his administration, and chided “cynics” who “fail to understand that the ground has shifted beneath them.” One year later, as voters head to the ballot box in Massachusetts, it seems that the ground very well may have shifted under President Obama.

And that ground shift might spell trouble for the President’s health care magnum opus.

In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll released yesterday, President Obama’s approval ratings have “plummeted to 50%, down from 64% after he took office,” giving him an average 57% approval rating for the year and placing Obama “nearly last in the ranking of former presidents’ first-year job approval averages.”

Why the dissatisfaction? For President Obama, “big plans” meant a year of “big government” in the form of the nationalization of private corporations, hundreds of billions of dollars in new federal spending and a massive government takeover of health care. Those liberal policies haven’t sat well with a majority of Americans.

The Washington Post reports that “By 58 percent to 38 percent, Americans said they prefer smaller government and fewer services to larger government with more services.” As the Post reports, that’s 15 percent more people favoring smaller government over larger government since Sen. Obama won the Democratic nomination in June 2008.

Those anti-big-government sentiments could put the kibosh on President Obama’s hallmark health care legislation if today’s special election for the late Edward Kennedy’s Senate seat doesn’t go the President's way. Make no mistake, the Massachusetts election is very much about national issues – and President Obama’s liberal agenda. Health care came to dominate the Massachusetts race, and Republican candidate Scott Brown has made no bones about being the deciding vote to block Democrats' health care reform legislation.

A Brown victory would be a game-changer in the Democratic Congress’ efforts to pass health care legislation. And that’s a distinct possibility, given the latest Politico/InsideAdvantage poll that puts Brown up over Democrat Martha Coakley by a 52-43 margin. Politico reports:

“A defeat by Martha Coakley for the seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy would be embarrassing for the party — and potentially debilitating, since Democrats will lose their filibuster-proof, 60-vote hold on the Senate.”

With so much on the line, it’s no wonder that President Obama swooped-in to support Coakley in a last-minute get-out-the-vote effort, but it’s questionable whether his Sunday campaign stop or his TV ad on her behalf will be enough to get her across the finish line. In fact, Democrats are already circling the horses in anticipation of a defeat in the Bay State.

The Hill reports that Democrats are “eyeing a parliamentary maneuver to sidestep the Senate’s filibuster rules to pass healthcare if they lose their supermajority.” And Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said Monday, "Let's remove all doubt, we will have healthcare one way or another."

Likewise, Republican leadership are expecting Democrats to pull out the stops to pass health care reform in the event of a Brown victory. "It's pretty clear that they're going to use every trick imaginable ... to shove this down the throats of the American people," House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said on Monday.

Heritage’s Director of U.S. Senate Relations, Brian Darling, explains that if Brown wins today, Democrats will have two options:

“One would be for the House to take up and pass Obamacare with reconciliation being used as a technical corrections mechanism to allow Democrats to avoid a filibuster in the Senate. Option two would be to drop Obamacare and finally understand that the American people want Congress to scrap this version of health care reform and start over.”

The first option might give President Obama a much-needed legislative victory for his January 27 State of the Union address, but dropping Obamacare and starting over from scratch would be a victory for the American people. The question is whether President Obama understands – or cares – that the ground has shifted beneath his feet, too.

Obama's Economy

2010-01-18T08:48:00.000-08:00

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/)

Education, Economics, and Self-Government

2010-01-16T12:21:00.000-08:00

Here is a wonderful article from Imprimis entitled Education, Economics, and Self-Government by Larry Arnn:

Imprimis

Small Business Gets Screwed by Govt. under Obama

2010-01-15T08:48:00.000-08:00

Source:The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Bank Tax Misses the Real Bailout Deadbeats in Detroit and DC

2010-01-15T07:58:00.000-08:00

Facing rising populist anger over his administration's billion-dollar bailouts, President Barack Obama proposed a $117 billion tax over the next 12 years on financial companies with assets of more than $50 billion. "We want our money back, and we’re going to get it," the President said. The President is half right. Taxpayers are going to get their money back from the banks that received bailout money ... but don't expect to see any of the money the Obama administration poured into General Motors and Chrysler at the behest of their union allies. That is where the real losses are coming from.

The TARP program has so far distributed $247 billion to more than 700 banks. Of that, $162 billion in principal and $11 billion in interest and dividends have already been repaid. Except for AIG, almost all banks that received taxpayer money are expected to pay back the American taxpayers in full. As The New York Times reports: "The losses from the bailout fund are expected from money paid to rescue Chrysler and General Motors and the insurance giant American International Group, and from a program to help homeowners avert foreclosures."

So the real deadbeats that are not giving us "our money back" are not the banks, but the union-backed car companies and failed government mortgage modification programs. But guess what? The White House has chosen not to include the car companies among the institutions that will pay this so called "Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee." Also exempted are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored entities that helped create the crisis.

The plan also will do nothing to help reform the banking system. Financial regulatory analyst Karen Shaw Petrou tells The Washington Post: "The new big-bank tax is just like charging a nickel sin tax on a half-gallon of cheap liquor -- it may make moralists feel good, but it doesn't do much to stop bad behavior." Instead of protecting consumers, it will just end up hurting them. Financial services analyst Meredith Whitney tells The New York Times: "The irony is it hurts the weaker banks more than the stronger banks. To think that it won’t come out of consumers and businesses is mistaken." And banking analyst David Hendler tells Bloomberg: "We remain concerned that this is more evidence of the cynical view of the banking industry which prevails in Washington."

In sum, this new $117 billion Obama tax will penalize firms that already repaid TARP, and some who never accepted bailout money to begin with, while also making it harder for Americans to get the loans they need to help our economy recover, all while letting the real deadbeats get off scot-free. If the President were serious about making taxpayers whole and restoring confidence in the banking sector, then he should end TARP now.

Constitutional Reform

2010-01-14T20:53:00.001-08:00

Constitutional Reform

Posted: 12 Jan 2010 06:25 PM PST on Tax Day Tea Party

The following was submitted for posting and I’ve published it on behalf of the author.

-Eric
——————–

I am perplexed by the issues that are facing our nation right now. But I am even more concerned that the root of these problems are not being addressed. The answer to everything that ails this nation is the Constitution. We are losing our freedoms because we are ignoring the Constitution as put forth by our Founding Fathers. Washington is taking liberties that do not belong to them, and they have the arrogance to ignore the citizen protests in the process.

The Constitution is very clear in stating where the power lies. It is with the people, and the States in which they reside. We have been far too complacent in letting the Federal government, aided and abetted by the Progressive movement, to erode and transfer this power, beginning with the constitutional amendments ratified in 1913. In much the same way that Esau sold his birthright to Jacob for a mess of pottage, the States sold their birthright to the Federal government. It is time to take this birthright back.

What I would like to explore and debate, with the help of other conservatives such as the Liberty Alliance, is using the ballot initiative process (in the 24 States that use ballot initiatives)

to force a Constitutional Convention designed to restore the Constitution back to a document designed to ensure the liberties of its citizenry.

Some of the restorative changes I would like to see are as follows:

1. Reiterate the 10th Amendment which already states that the federal government does not have the power or authority to introduce programs such as health care.

2. Rescind the 16th Amendment. Let the States set the Federal budgets and collect monies needed for the operation of the Federal government. This will end the progressive movement, pork barrel spending, most corruption, influential lobby groups, and much more. It will also allow the States to make decisions that are better suited to the needs of its own citizens in areas such as healthcare, education, and much more. It will also put an end to tax dollars being used to bail out companies that should be allowed to fail. This change would make the federal government subservient to the States, rather than controlling the States. In turn, this would put an end to enough wasteful spending that would allow States to balance their budget deficits.

3. Force a balanced budget amendment. No more borrowing or printing money. Put an end to the Federal Reserve. This will protect our currency and allow America to lead the world economically.

4. Rescind the 17th Amendment. Let the State Senators be appointed by the States. This will give direct power to the States and put an end to the need for term limits.

5. Require that all foreign treaties be ratified by the Senate with a two-thirds majority, essentially letting the States determine foreign policy by virtue of the States appointing and controlling the Senators. This will ensure against being absorbed into the International community and protect our Sovereignty, and respect for American law over International law.

6. Define the meaning of “regulating interstate commerce” to mean that Congress shall encourage interstate commerce and shall do nothing to hinder interstate commerce.

7. Reiterate property rights by restricting eminent domain.

It is not my intention of defining in detail the Constitutional changes that need to be made that will end federalism, shrink the government and restore freedoms. I need the feedback of those much smarter than me. But I see no alternative. Fighting and debating Washington is like debating your four year old. It is pointless, when neither of them have any power except that which you are willing to succeed them.

If I could come up with specific language to be used in any ballot initiatives, I see great synergies in using the grassroots movement that has developed this past year in moving these initiatives forward.

I am looking for assistance in this endeavor. Although I would prefer to just raise my family and run my business, I sense an urgency in correcting this and am willing to dedicate my time and efforts to this cause.

Regards,
Lyndon Brittner
lbrittner@connect2.com

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A Black Woman's View of Obama

2010-01-14T20:49:00.000-08:00

(Received as an email forward.)

Anne Wortham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Illinois State University and continuing Visiting Scholar at Stanford University 's Hoover Institution. She is a member of the American Sociological Association and the American Philosophical Association. She has been a John M. Olin Foundation Faculty Fellow, and honored as a Distinguished Alumni of the Year by theNational Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.

In fall 1988 she was one of a select group of intellectuals who were featured in Bill Moyer's television series, "A World of Ideas." The transcript of her conversation with Moyers has been published in his book, A World of Ideas.

Dr. Wortham is author of "The Other Side of Racism: A Philosophical Study of Black Race Consciousness" which analyzes how race consciousness is transformed into political strategies and policy issues.

She has published numerous articles on the implications of individual rights for civil rights policy, and is currently writing a book on theories of social and cultural marginality.

Recently she has published articles on the significance of multiculturalism and Afrocentricism in education, the politics of victimization and the social and political impact of political correctness. Shortly after an interview in 2004, she was awarded tenure.

This article (below) by her is something worth your time to read.

Fellow Americans,

Please know: I am Black; I grew up in the segregated South. I did not vote for Barack Obama; I wrote in Ron Paul's name as my choice for president. Most importantly, I am not race conscious. I do not require a Black president to know that I am a person of worth and that life is worth living. I do not require a Black president to love the ideal of America .

I cannot join you in your celebration. I feel no elation. There is no smile on my face. I am not jumping with joy. There are no tears of triumph in my eyes. For such emotions and behavior to come from me, I would have to deny all that I know about the requirements of human flourishing and survival - all that I know about the history of the United States of America , all that I know about American race relations, and all that I know about Barack Obama as a politician. I would have to deny the nature of the "change" that Obama asserts has come to America .

Most importantly, I would have to abnegate my certain understanding that you have chosen to sprint down the road to serfdom that we have been on for over a century. I would have to pretend that individual liberty has no value for the success of a human life. I would have to evade your rejection of the slender reed of capitalism on which your success and mine depends. I would have to think it somehow rational that 94 percent of the 12 million Blacks in this country voted for a man because he looks like them (that Blacks are permitted to play the race card), and that they were joined by self-declared "progressive" whites who voted for him because he doesn't look like them.

I would have to wipe my mind clean of all that I know about the kind of people who have advised and taught Barack Obama and will fill posts in his administration - political intellectuals like my former colleagues at the Harvard University 's Kennedy School of Government.

I would have to believe that "fairness" is the equivalent of justice. I would have to believe that a man who asks me to "go forward in a new spirit of service, in a new service of sacrifice" is speaking in my interest. I would have to accept the premise of a man that economic prosperity comes from the "bottom up," and who arrogantly believes that he can will it into existence by the use of government force. I would have to admire a man who thinks the standard of living of the masses can be improved by destroying the most productive and the generators of wealth.

Finally, Americans, I would have to erase from my consciousness the scene of 125,000 screaming, crying, cheering people in Grant Park, Chicago irrationally chanting "Yes We Can!" I would have to wipe all memory of all the times I have heard politicians, pundits, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and intellectuals declare that capitalism is dead - and no one, including especially Alan Greenspan, objected to their assumption that the particular version of the anti-capitalistic mentality that they want to replace with their own version of anti-capitalism is anything remotely equivalent to capitalism.

So you have made history, Americans. You and your children have elected a Black man to the office of the president of the United States , the wounded giant of the world. The battle between John Wayne and Jane Fonda is over - and Fonda won. Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern must be very happy men. Jimmy Carter, too. And the Kennedys have at last gotten their Kennedy look-a-like. The self-righteous welfare statists in the suburbs can feel warm moments of satisfaction for having elected a Black person.

So, toast yourselves, 60s countercultural radicals, 80s yuppies and 90s bourgeois bohemians. Toast yourselves, Black America. Shout your glee, Harvard, Princeton , Yale, Duke, Stanford and Berkeley. You have elected not an individual who is qualified to be president, but a Black man who, like the pragmatist Franklin Roosevelt, promises to - Do Something! You now have someone who has picked up the baton of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. But you have also foolishly traded your freedom and mine - what little there is left - for the chance to feel good.

There is nothing in me that can share your happy obliviousness.
God Help Us all...

Unions Win, We Lose...Again!

2010-01-14T08:24:00.000-08:00

Behind Closed Doors, Unions Win, You Lose

Yesterday, President Barack Obama, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and nine other lawmakers met face-to-face for seven hours to resolve differences between the House and Senate health care bills. At the same time these talks were going on, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, Service Employees International Union President Andy Stern and United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger met with other Obama administration officials in a separate room in the White House. This all comes after these same labor leaders met personally with Speaker Pelosi yesterday, and after they met face-to-face with President Obama in the White House on Monday. Despite then-candidate Barack Obama's explicit promises to the American people, absolutely none of these meetings were open to the public or televised on C-SPAN. In fact, Politico reports: "Those involved in the talks sought to keep details of their progress under wraps."

And just what deals were Big Labor, the leftist majorities in Congress and the Obama administration making behind closed doors? How to pay for President Obama's likely $1 trillion health care plan without raising taxes on one of the President's most loyal constituencies: labor unions. Specifically, Big Labor reportedly has struck a deal with health care negotiators to exempt union members from the 40% excise tax on high-priced health insurance premiums. By some estimates, the tax would hit one in four union members. Now Big Labor will get all of the big government health care spending they always wanted, but they will not have to pay for it.

And Obamacare's Big Labor handouts don't end there. The legislation also sets aside $5 billion to subsidize the costs of employer health benefits for early retirees. As Heritage fellow James Sherk notes, few nonunion employers, of course, pay pension and health benefits for workers to retire at 55. And then there's the small business exemption from the employer mandate for businesses with less than 50 employees. At first this applied to all small businesses, but after aggressive lobbying by Big Labor, non-unionized construction businesses were unexempted. Big Labor lobbyists explicitly admitted they wanted to use Obamacare's job-killing employer mandates as a competitive advantage to drive non-unionized firms out of business.

So where does the White House and Congress propose to regain the revenue lost from exempting unions from the health care excise tax? The people who fund job creation: investors. The Obama administration wants to apply the Medicare payroll tax not just to wages but to capital gains, and for the first time ever, to dividends and other forms of investment income. This tax will hit seniors the hardest since many of them live off their dividend and interest income, in addition to their pension and Social Security checks. But it also hurts us all since high taxes on capital gains, dividends, interest and business income increase the cost of capital, thus depressing investment at the very time the economy needs new investment to grow and create jobs.

Big Labor's high wages and inflexible work rules have already bankrupted our nation's once proud automobile industry. Across the country, their early retirement and exorbitant pensions are bankrupting states. The health insurance excise tax was once the signature health care spending cost cutter of Obama's entire health care plan. Now it has been gutted at the altar of Big Labor power. The big loser in all of these cases is you, the American taxpayer.

What We Need-Congressional Reform Act of 2010

2010-01-12T09:53:00.001-08:00

Congressional Reform Act of 2010

1. Term Limits: 12 years only, one of the possible options below.

A. Two Six-year Senate terms
B. Six Two-year House terms
C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

2. No Tenure / No Pension:
A congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security:
All funds in the Congressional retirement fund moves to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, Congress participates with the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, server your term(s), then go home and back to work. (and just see how fast they get the SS system fixed when they too have to rely on it)
4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan just as all Americans..

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career... The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work. (and again see how fast they come up with a solution when they too have to rely on it)

7. Congress must equally abide in all laws they impose on the American people..

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
(this means ALL as in EVERY)
8. All contracts with past and present congressmen are void effective 1/1/10.

The American people did not make this contract with congressmen, congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career.. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, serve your term(s), then go home and back to work.
(From a forwarded email. Author unknown.)

Transparency

2010-01-12T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

$787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs "Created or Saved"

2010-01-12T08:43:00.000-08:00

$787 Billion in Stimulus, Zero Jobs "Created or Saved"

On February 11th, President Barack Obama stood on a windy hilltop in front of a dusty construction site in Fairfax County, Virginia, and promised the American people: "Here in Virginia, my plan will create or save almost 100,000 jobs, doing work at sites just like this one." Standing alongside current Democratic National Committee Chairman and former-Gov. Tim Kaine, the President continued: "Where we're standing, that could mean hundreds of construction jobs. And the benefits of jobs we create directly will multiply across the economy." Eleven months later, none of those promised jobs have been "created or saved." In fact, the Obama administration quietly announced last week that they were dropping the fraudulent "saved or created" terminology altogether.

The failure of Obama's $787 billion stimulus is particularly acute in Virginia where, as Heritage fellow Ron Utt has documented, despite $695 million in allocated infrastructure funding, only 16% of designated projects had begun. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman James Oberstar (D-MN) even publicly complained about Virginia's slow transportation spending, writing to Gov. Kaine: "your state ranks last among all states [51 out of 51, including the District of Columbia], based on an analysis of the percentage of Recovery Act highway formula funds put out to bid, under contract and under way."

But even where infrastructure spending has been spent, the hard evidence shows that there has not been any positive effect on unemployment. According to an Associated Press analysis reviewed by independent economists at five universities, the $20 billion spent nationwide on infrastructure so far "has had no effect on local unemployment rates." And this was just the most recent embarrassing headline for the White House's signature economic policy. Since the first reporting deadline in October, newspapers and other media outlets across the country have identified 94,341 fake jobs reported by the Obama administration as jobs "created or saved" by the stimulus. After the Government Accountability Office issued a report finding "significant reporting and processing problems that need to be addressed," Obama administration spokesman Ed Pound offered this defense of the Obama administration's jobs numbers: "Who knows, man, who really knows."

Now Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag issued a little-noticed memo last month ending the "saved or created" metric and instead directing agencies to count only jobs "funded" by stimulus dollars. But as Harvard University labor economist Lawrence Katz tells ProPublica, this is not really an improvement: "I just think it’s a silly exercise." Instead Katz says a more accurate way to account for the effect of the stimulus is to look at the unemployment numbers put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That is a great idea. The latest BLS report issued last Friday found that the U.S. economy dropped 85,000 jobs in December, bringing the jobs lost total to 2.7 million since the stimulus was passed and 3.4 million since Obama became President. In contrast, the President's White House Council of Economic Advisers had promised total employment of at least 138.6 million by 2010. Actual employment as of December was reported to be 130.9 million, leaving the Obama jobs deficit at 7.7 million.

The problem with infrastructure spending as stimulus, and really government spending as stimulus, is that Congress does not have a vault of money waiting to be distributed. Every dollar Congress injects into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy. No new spending power is created. It is merely redistributed from one group of people to another. Businesses are telling pollsters that among the biggest reasons they are not creating jobs is the prospect of new tax and regulatory burdens. A better solution to reduce unemployment is to simplify and reduce the barriers to business success.

Where's that Transparency?

2010-01-06T08:23:00.000-08:00

From: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )
Editorial Exegesis
"Democratic leaders reportedly plan to forge a final reform bill behind closed doors. They should not be able to get away with hiding public policy from the public it will adversely affect. Both the House and Senate must pass identical bills before the president can sign the legislation into law. When differences pop up, as with separate health care bills, the legislation traditionally goes to a conference committee where lawmakers iron them out. The committees are made up of members from both chambers and often from both parties. The committee meetings have typically been conducted in public, as they should be. They can be moved out of public view only when a majority of conferees, in a vote in an open session, agree to hold closed meetings. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, has called the Democrats' plan to bypass a conference committee a 'shady backroom deal.' An overstatement? Hardly. One House Democratic aide told a blogger that 'this process cuts out the Republicans.' The Democrats fear that if they follow the traditional route, the GOP could use the Senate filibuster rule to shut down the process of organizing the committee. Bypassing a conference committee also cuts out a public that will suffer losses from whatever monstrosity is produced by the cover of darkness. Americans stand to lose their power of choice over health care decisions and be stripped of a significant portion of their earnings to pay for a plan most don't want. They deserve to see in an open forum what is being done to them. Instead, they're likely to get whatever the Democrats want to force on them." --Investor's Business Daily

Thousands Protest Global Warming

2010-01-05T10:34:00.000-08:00

From:http://patriotpost.us/subscribe/

Liberty

2010-01-04T08:55:00.000-08:00

Liberty
"Obama didn't undertake his radical agenda to turn America into a full-blown socialist state because of 'the size of the problems (he) inherited.' That was just a convenient excuse. He has been groomed, mentored and polished for this very task since he was a little boy. He is taking out his grudge against America, an America he views as fundamentally unfair, inequitable, imperialistic and exploitive, but as a powerful resource for change -- if only he can fundamentally transform it. ... Obama's agenda didn't significantly change with the unfolding of the financial crisis that led to TARP. He has had his sights on a single-payer health care system for years. He had plans to 'spread the wealth around' long before TARP became an acronym. He and his wife were trashing America as arrogant and dismissive long before this economic crisis fell into their laps just months before the 2008 election. So, yes, Obama's standing with the American people is related to 'the battles he chose to take on during his first year,' but not in a positive way. Those battles don't qualify as mitigating factors ... because they were undertaken not to improve the economy, but to consummate, in substance, a Cold War victory for the communists after they had otherwise been defeated. The fainthearted among us can blanch at the suggestion that Obama is a Marxist -- and accuse me of name-calling or incivility -- but my intention is not to inflame. It is to communicate the truth in accurate terms to help people understand the magnitude of the threat we face by this assault on our liberties. Obama didn't impose his Draconian stimulus bill or omnibus spending bills to jump-start the economy. He did it to transfer wealth and establish slush funds for re-election. He didn't push cap and trade to reduce 'global warming,' but to bring America down to size with the 'underdeveloped' nations of the world. He didn't obsessively promote Obamacare to improve the economy, 'bend the cost curve' (what a joke!), achieve universal coverage or improve the quality of health care. He did it to amplify the federal government's power over all aspects of our lives. ... Obama isn't even trying to 'get serious about the deficit and spending.' That's a cruel ruse. Look at his projected deficits in the out-years. He is planning on deficits in excess of a trillion dollars from here forward, even after the economy fully recovers. The country cannot sustain this. The public knows it and is outraged and horrified by it. Our children cannot live in freedom if this insane recklessness is not stopped." --columnist David Limbaugh
From: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Coal for Christmas from the Senate

2009-12-24T07:24:00.000-08:00

Coal for Christmas from the Senate

Morning Bell

This morning just after 7 AM EST, the United States Senate passed, again on a straight party-line vote, President Barack Obama’s health insurance bill. Originally scheduled for a 9 PM vote tonight, the bill’s Senate passage is a welcome Christmas gift for a beleaguered White House. However, as the First Family jets off for Hawaii, the American people, liberals, moderates, and conservatives are all saying this bill is closer to a lump of coal in their stocking than real health care reform.

The American Public Does Not Want This Bill: When the American people first turned their attention to President Obama’s health care plan, bare majorities of the American public told pollsters they supported his health care reform plan. But as the debate wore on, and the American people looked past the rhetoric and examined the details of Obama’s proposal, support for the legislation steadily declined. By mid July, more Americans opposed than supported the plan. Now that the House and Senate have both approved separate versions of the bill, strong majorities of Americans now oppose Obama’s plan.

The Left Does Not Consider This Bill Real Reform: We have already documented the strong opposition figures like former-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have to what has come out of the Senate. But now powerful members of the House of Representatives, Democrats with actual votes in Congress, are also voicing their strong objections to the Senate bill. House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY) wrote on op-ed for CNN yesterday including: “[U]nder the Senate plan, millions of Americans will be forced into private insurance company plans, which will be subsidized by taxpayers. That alternative will do almost nothing to reform health care but will be a windfall for insurance companies. Is it any surprise that stock prices for some of those insurers are up recently? … Supporters of the weak Senate bill say ‘just pass it — any bill is better than no bill.’ I strongly disagree — a conference report is unlikely to sufficiently bridge the gap between these two very different bills. It’s time that we draw the line on this weak bill and ask the Senate to go back to the drawing board. The American people deserve at least that.”

Moderates Are Disgusted by This Bill: Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), who voted for the House version of Obamacare after getting Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to take taxpayer funding of abortion out of the bill, tells National Review Online: “This shouldn’t be a bill where you use hush money. This isn’t an appropriations bill where you try to get the best projects for your state. … I’ve spoken with a half-dozen members in the last 48 hours, and they’re all really concerned with the Senate bill. We all agree: We’ve lost our objective with health care. Where you live should have nothing to do with the quality or cost of your coverage.”

Conservatives Want Real Reform: Detailing the increased health costs, the trillions in new spending, the billions in new taxes, the loss of Americans’ current health insurance, and the damage it would do to our national debt, Heritage’s health care team concludes their analysis of the Senate bill: “The Senate bill would impose enormous costs on the American people, totaling at least $2.5 trillion for the first 10 years. After the first 10 years, as costs escalated, Congress would need to impose additional major tax increases and impose major cuts in benefits to pay for this health care agenda. The American people want and need health reform, but the Senate bill is clearly not what they have in mind.”

Do not let this Christmas Eve Senate disaster get you down. There is still hope Obamacare will be stopped. The White House is already downplaying expectations, telling selected media outlets that negotiations between the House and Senate over their major policy differences may slip into February. Considering the House is not back in session till January 12th, the Senate till January 18th, and that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) will need at least a weak to score the bill, the American people will have plenty of time to educate themselves further. So take heart: today’s Christmas Eve vote may just be Obamacare’s high water mark.

Obama's Last Minute Christmas Shopping

2009-12-23T08:35:00.000-08:00

Obamacare's Consitutional Problems Proliferating

2009-12-23T08:28:00.000-08:00

(Finally, some Republicans are growing a spine and challenging this atrocity for its constitutionality! The legal memo by Heritage is worth a read, especially if you're a constitution buff like I am.)

The Morning Bell

WEDNESDAY, DEC. 23, 2009

After the Democrats cleared the second of three 60 vote hurdles last night, Republicans ceded enough debate time back to the majority so that passage of Obamacare through the Senate will take place n Christmas Eve at 8 AM. Conservatives have every right to be disappointed that Senate Republicans did not force the maximum amount of debate possible. But they can take heart in a key point of order that will be voted on later today. Sponsored by Sens. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and John Ensign (R-NV), that vote will lay the groundwork for the possible legal dismantling of Obama’s health program.

As we’ve detailed before, the very core of the Senate health plan includes an unprecedented expansion of the power of the federal government over the lives of every American. For the first time in history, every American would be forced to buy federally regulated and approved health insurance or face a $750 fine. As the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) wrote in 1994: “A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.” The individual mandate and other questionable measures in the bill raise serious questions as to whether Obamacare could survive a Constitutional test:

Enumerated Powers: Article I allocates to Congress “[a]ll legislative powers herein granted,” which means that some legislative powers were intended to remain beyond Congress’s reach. The Supreme Court recognized and affirmed this fundamental principle from the earliest days of the republic, as Chief Justice Marshall famously observed: “The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those limits may not be mistaken, or forgotten, the constitution is written.” Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress given the power to mandate that an individual enter into a contract with a private party or purchase a good or service. Democrats have pointed to both the general welfare taxing power and the commerce clause as possible justifications for the mandate, but as a recent Heritage Legal Memorandum details, neither justification withstands scrutiny.(http://www.heritage.org/Research/LegalIssues/lm0049.cfm?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Morning%2BBell)

5th Amendment: The Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution reads in part: “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Sen. Ensign will argue today: “The Democrats’ health reform bill would require an American citizen to devote a portion of income – his or her private property – to health insurance coverage. … But, Mr. President, if a Nevadan does not want to spend his or her hard-earned income on health insurance coverage and would prefer to spend it on something else, such as rent or a car payment, this new requirement could be a “taking” of private property under the Fifth Amendment.”

Racial Discrimination: On December 10th, the United States Commission on Civil Rights sent a letter to the Senate regarding racially discriminatory provisions in Obama’s health plan. The letter reads: “No matter how well-intentioned, utilizing racial preferences with hope of alleviating health care disparities is inadvisable both as a matter of policy and as a matter of law. … Ensuring that all Americans, regardless of race, have access to quality health care requires both creativity and hard-nosed attention to data. It also requires staying within the requirements of the Constitution. The current race-based provisions of the Senate Health Care bill display none of these qualities.”

Unequal State Treatment: Speaking to Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) described Sen. Ben Nelson’s (D-NE) deal to support Obamacare in exchange for a bailout Nebraska’s Medicaid costs as “disappointing, sleazy, unconstitutional.” Graham is not the only one examining Cornhusker Kickback. The Attorneys General of Alabama, Colorado, Michigan, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas and Washington state are jointly investigating the deal to see if special treatment for only one state in the nation at the expense of the other 49 violates the Constitution.

The leftist majority in the Senate is likely to vote down the DeMint/Ensign constitutional point of order, but the very objection itself will help build a record that courts will look at when determining whether or not Obamacare is unconstitutional. The Senate is not the final arbiter of whether or not the laws it passes are consistent with the United States Constitution. That question was settled over 200 years ago in Marbury v. Madison. Although it is always difficult for the Supreme Court to thwart what is perceived to be the popular will, polling consistently shows that this legislation faces strong popular opposition. If that remains true after enactment, the majority of the Justices who are inclined to preserve the enumerated powers scheme and adhere to the original meaning of the text will have little inclination or incentive to stretch the Constitution to reach so decidedly unpopular and far-reaching a law as this one.

The Six Key Issues the House Must Cave On Before Obamacare Becomes Law

2009-12-22T07:29:00.000-08:00

The Morning Bell

TUESDAY, DEC. 22, 2009

The Six Key Issues the House Must Cave On Before Obamacare Becomes Law

This morning at around 8 AM, the Senate passed, again on a straight party-line vote, Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-NV) manager’s amendment to the Senate’s version of Obamacare. This keeps the Senate on pace to pass the bill at 9 PM on Christmas Eve despite the fact that Americans overwhelmingly opposed the legislation. But even after the Senate gives President Barack Obama his $2.5 trillion Christmas present, the bill, assuming it is to be considered in regular order, still must go through a House and Senate conference.

President Barack Obama attempted to downplay differences between the House and Senate bills telling American Urban Radio Networks yesterday: “The Senate and the House bills are 95 percent identical. There’s five percent differences, and one of those differences is the public option. This is an area that has just become symbolic of a lot of ideological fights. As a practical matter, this is not the most important aspect to this bill.” We’ll let President Obama fight with his base abut how important a strong public option is to health reform, but a government run plan is just one of six key differences between the House and Senate bills:

Soak the Rich or Tax Everybody: The Senate bill relies heavily on a new excise tax on high cost health plans: a 40 percent tax on plan exceeding $8,500 for an individual and $23,000 for a family. The AFL-CIO and SEIU both call this a tax on working families. The Senate bill also includes a new premium tax on all insurers and the CBO confirms that the cost of this tax will be passed on to all Americans with private insurance. The House bill depends on a heavy new income tax targeted at top-earning taxpayers and small businesses. The 5.4 percent tax on individuals with incomes above $500,000, and on families with incomes above $1 million, is structured in a way that over time more and more Americans will be hit by this tax and small business owners would be particularly affected.

Employer Mandate Penalties: The Senate bill imposes a $750 penalty per worker on employers of 50 or more who are not covered by the federally approved package of health benefits. The Senate mandate has other strange consequences. If an employer offers coverage, but an employee is eligible by virtue of income to qualify for taxpayer subsidies and entry into the state-based health insurance exchange, the employer is also penalized. In other words, employers are penalized for hiring people at the poverty level, even if they offer health insurance. The House bill imposes a direct requirement on employers to offer federally-qualified health care coverage to their employees or pay a payroll tax on a sliding scale up to 8 percent. Both the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Businesses have come out against the bills.

Individual Mandate Penalties: The Senate bill requires individuals to purchase a government approved plan or pay a $750 penalty, beginning in 2014. The tax penalty, indexed for inflation, would increase over time. The House bill requires individuals to pay a penalty of 2.5 percent of their income, depending on the size of their income, for not obtaining federally-approved health care coverage.

Weak or Strong Public Plan: The Senate bill establishes a new set of “multi-state” private health plans sponsored by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the agency that administers the federal civil service — that would compete against private health plans in the state based exchanges that are mandated by the provision of the Senate bill. In contrast, the House bill includes an explicit public plan.

Medicaid Expansion: The left may complain that there is no government-run option in either bill, but both the House and Senate bill accomplish over half their additional health insurance coverage through Medicaid expansion. The Senate bill would require states to expand their Medicaid programs to cover all Americans up to 133 percent Federal Poverty Level. The House bill would require states to expand their Medicaid programs to 150 percent FPL, the same level suggested in earlier versions of the Senate HELP Committee bill. Both Democrat and Republican Governors are against this state budget-busting welfare expansion.

Taxpayer Funded Abortion: The President promised that there would be no federal funding for abortion. In the House bill, by virtue of the Stupak-Pitts amendment, there is a genuine firewall between federal funding and abortion coverage. In the Senate bill, by virtue of the agreement between Senate Majority leader Harry Reid and Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), there is no such firewall. For the “pro-life” forces on both sides of the aisle, the Nelson language appears to fall short of the House language.

These are all major policy differences that go to the core of the Obama health care plan. For each option, choosing one version over the other will have huge consequences for the American people. But since Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) have threatened to veto the bill if any significant changes are made by the House in conference, it is most likely the Senate will prevail on every issue. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) might even just save herself and the leftist majority in the House the embarrassment and pass the Senate bill as is. After all, the Obama administration wants a bill, any bill, and doesn’t really care what is actually in it.

Obama on Precipice

2009-12-21T10:29:00.001-08:00

The Health Care Fight Has Just Begun

2009-12-21T08:17:00.000-08:00

The Morning Bell

MONDAY,DEC 21, 2009

The Health Care Fight Has Just Begun

The months long drama over the fate of President Barack Obama's health care plan ended at 1 AM this morning when the Senate voted 60 - 40, on a strictly party line vote, to end debate on Majority Leader Harry Reid's (D-NV) manager's amendment; a mere 38-hours after it had been unveiled to the American public. With Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) threatening to veto the bill if any significant changes are made by the House in conference, it is virtually guaranteed that this is the version of Obamacare that will be signed by the President before his State of the Union address in January.

Final passage of this health bill will be historic, but not in the way President Obama intended. Never before has such a large restructuring of the U.S. economy been passed on a straight party-line vote. Never before has legislation so unpopular with the American people been passed on a straight party-line vote. Never before has the fate of one-sixth of our economy been so dependent on backroom deals and payoffs the full extent of which may not be known for years.

To defend this abomination of a bill yesterday on the Sunday shows, the White House did not send Health Reform director Nancy-Ann DeParle or Budget director Peter Orszag. Instead they sent White House sent political consultant David Axelrod to defend the bill on three of the five top Sunday shows. But there simply is no defending the policy substance of this bill:

Busts the Federal Budget: According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the amended Reid plan would reduce the federal budget deficit by $132 billion over the period 2010 to 2019, but that is a mirage. The CBO can only score what the Senate tells them they will do, not what everyone knows they actually will do. For example, the Senate bill cuts Medicare fees for doctors by 20% starting in 2011. Nobody believes these cuts will be allowed to happen. By changing just that provision, Obamacare ends up adding $196 billion to the deficit in the first 10 years and $765 billion in the second decade.

Busts State Budgets: According to The Fiscal Survey of States, 31 states cut higher education and 26 states cut K-12 education in 2009. This is because Medicaid and education are almost always any states two highest budget items, and states cannot touch the entitlement to Medicaid. Obamacare only increases state Medicaid obligations thus further bankrupting states. This is why Sen. Nelson demanded a permanent Medicaid bailout for Nebraska in exchange for his vote. Other states like Hawaii, Vermont, and Massachusetts also won key federal bailouts for their health programs. Who are the losers? All the other that are forced to pick up the $1 billion tab.

Increases Health Care Costs: Throughout the health care debate, President Obama promised reform that would "bend the cost curve down" on health care spending. But according to the President's own the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMMS) the Senate does exactly the opposite, actually driving health care costs up by adding $234 billion to national health expenditures.

Endangers Americans Quality of Care: President Obama used to promise that "If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan." But as the CBO confirmed this month 10 million Americans will be forced out of their current health insurance plan should Obamacare become law. Even worse, CMMS has reported that Obamacare's $493 billion in Medicare cuts could force as many as one-in-five health care providers into insolvency thus forcing them out of the Medicare program.

Forces Americans to Pay for Abortions: Despite the inclusion of the Nelson amendment, when the federal government's role over the financing and delivery of health care grows, as it does under this bill, a requirement to segregate premiums that cover abortion services would be merely cosmetic in practice.

$400 Billion in New Taxes: From taxes on employment to taxes on tanning beds, Obamacare is funded with over $400 billion in new taxes at a time of double digit unemployment, including $29 billion in taxes on 19 million Americans who still will not receive any health insurance.

A "Starter Home" for Government Run Health Care: While technically not a public option, this scheme will have the same results. By giving unprecedented power and authority to the Director of Office of Personal Management, the multi-state plans created in the bill will simply become the government plan. Single payer advocate Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) is even calling the bill a "starter home" for further reform.

This bill will only make every single problem with out health care system worse: higher spending, higher deficits, and worse care. Former-Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean said on Meet the Press yesterday, "[This bill] simply sets us on a track in this country which is expensive and where we're going to have lots more political fights." Dean is dead on. President Barack Obama's signature on this health care bill settles nothing: it is only the beginning of a much larger health care fight.

Donkeys on the Precipice of making history

2009-12-18T21:48:00.001-08:00

Christmas Spirit

2009-12-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

The Left's Righteous War Against the Individual Mandate

2009-12-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

The Left’s Righteous War Against the Individual Mandate

Explaining why he would vote against the Senate version of Obamacare if he were a Senator, former-Democratic National Committee Charmian Howard Dean told MSNBC last night: “You’re going to be forced to buy health insurance from a company that is going to take on average of 27% of your money … and there is no choice about that. If you don’t buy that insurance you are going to get a fine.” For this heresy, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs suggested Dean was irrational, and asked: “I would ask Dr. Dean, how better do you address those who don’t have insurance: passing a bill that will cover 30 million who don’t currently have it or killing the bill?”

Later in the day, the successor organization to Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, Democracy for America, shot back at the White House, blasting out an e-mail that reads:

What they are actually talking about is something called the “individual mandate.” That’s a section of the law that requires every single American buy health insurance or break the law and face penalties and fines. So, the bill doesn’t actually “cover” 30 million more Americans - instead it makes them criminals if they don’t buy insurance from the same companies that got us into this mess.

And Dean’s DfA is not alone. Markos Moulitsas, the founder of one of the largest liberal blogs on the web, wrote Tuesday:

My take is that it’s unconscionable to force people to buy a product from a private insurer that enjoys sanctioned monopoly status. It’d be like forcing everyone to attend baseball games, but instead of watching the Yankees, they were forced to watch the Kansas City Royals. Or Washington Nationals. It would effectively be a tax — and a huge one — paid directly to a private industry. Without any mechanisms to control costs, this is yet another bailout for yet another reviled industry.

And firedoglake, the progressive blog that led the campaign to run Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) out of the Democratic Party, calls an individual mandate without a public option “Unacceptable For Moral, Political, And Policy Reasons” explaining:

The health insurance Americans are forced to purchase will not be affordable. Middle class families (making 300%-400% of FPL) will only get subsidies sufficient to make the premiums for the second cheapest insurance at the low quality silver level (70% actuarial) cost 10% of their income. … The individual mandate in this bill is nothing more than government-enforced private taxation on behalf of large, for-profit corporations. It would be just one more step toward corporate serfdom.

Conservatives have been making nearly identical critiques of the individual mandate since the beginning of the debate. Of course, we differ with the left on whether the public option would solve the above problems, but both progressives and conservatives are now in complete agreement that the current Senate bill would be a health care disaster for Americans. And the American people agree. In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, the American people oppose Obamacare 51% to 44%. But when asked about specific provisions of health care reform, guess which aspect is the least popular: the individual mandate. A full 57% Americans told NBC News they do not want Obamacare to create “a law that requires everyone to have health insurance coverage.” With only 38% of Americans supporting it, the individual mandate is the least popular portion of the bill.

Finally let’s not forgot that it wasn’t long ago that candidate-Barack Obama was also against the individual mandate. During his February 21, 2008 debate with then-Senator Clinton, Obama said: “Now, Massachusetts has a mandate right now. They have exempted 20 percent of the uninsured because they have concluded that that 20 percent can’t afford it. In some cases, there are people who are paying fines and still can’t afford it, so now they’re worse off than they were. They don’t have health insurance and they’re paying a fine.” According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Senate Obamacare bill would do the exact same thing, forcing 19 million Americans to pay $29 billion in taxes/fines and receive no health care in return. No wonder the left is yearning for candidate-Obama they had instead of the President Obama they have.

Season's Greetings

2009-12-16T14:25:00.000-08:00

To All My Democrat Friends:

Please accept with no obligation, implied or explicit, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low-stress, non-addictive, gender-neutral celebration of the winter solstice holiday, practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion of your choice, or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasion and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all. I also wish you a fiscally successful, personally fulfilling and medically uncomplicated recognition of the onset of the generally accepted calendar year 2010, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great. Not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country nor the only America in the Western Hemisphere. Also, this wish is made without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith or sexual preference, gender assignment, of the wishee.

To My Republican Friends:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Why Switzerland Has The Lowest Crime Rate in The World

2009-12-14T09:34:00.000-08:00

Copenhagen Cartoon

2009-12-14T09:28:00.001-08:00

From: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )

Who Are The Real Global Warming Deniers?

2009-12-14T09:25:00.001-08:00

From: The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )
For the Record
"The hacked emails from the global warming center of the universe -- the Climate Research Unit at Britain's East Anglia University -- could be the climatology equivalent of discovering the bones of Jesus. If the veracity of the emails is confirmed and if they contain evidence of data 'trickery,' as some global warming skeptics have suggested, their content could perhaps point to a vast cover-up of scientific evidence that some believe will disprove the 'doctrine' of man-made climate change. So who are the real flat-earthers? Are they the ones who won't listen to any evidence except that which supports their cult-like faith, or are they the growing number who say the science is anything but settled and needs more study? Leonard Weinstein has scientific credentials no reasonable person can deny. Dr. Weinstein is a former senior research scientist who worked more than 30 years at the NASA Langley Research Center. He is now senior research fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace. Last April, he wrote an essay 'Disproving the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) Problem'.... Dr. Weinstein wrote: 'In order to support a theory, specific predictions need to be made that are based on the claims of the theory, and the predictions then need to happen.' He lists six theories on which the AGW model is based and then proceeds to dismantle each of them. ... Dr. Weinstein concludes: 'The final question that arises is what prediction has the AGW made that has been demonstrated, and that strongly supports the theory. It appears that there is NO real supporting evidence and much disagreeing evidence for the AGW theory as proposed. That is not to say there is no effect from Human activity. Clearly human pollution (not greenhouse gases) is a problem. There is also almost surely some contribution to the present temperature from the increase in CO2 and CH4, but it seems to be small and not a driver of future climate. Any reasonable scientific analysis must conclude the basic theory wrong!!'" --columnist Cal Thomas

Action Plan for Senate Health Care Bill

2009-12-11T12:07:00.000-08:00

(Posted with permission. Original post can be found at:
http://thefuturehistory.blogspot.com/2009/12/87-about-senate-health-care-bill.html
Thank you Larry Gott!)

Monday, December 7, 2009
87. About the Senate Health Care Bill
An Action Plan!

This blogpost has around 1200 words. In comparison, the Senate version Health Care Bill has around 500,000 words, and if it passes into law, will eventually cost the American taxpayers more than $3,000,000 per word.

Now do I have your attention?

Dear Friends and Family,

This may take you some time. It took George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, and John Hancock some time to do their part also. This will take you less time (and blood, and sweat, and tears) than it took them.

Please consider these things about the Senate version of the Health Care Bill:

After the introduction to the bill, the index of the bill and the bill's title, finally on page 15, we find the first 63 words of the bill itself:

"Part A of title XXVII of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 300gg et seq.) is amended (1) by striking the part heading and inserting the following: ‘‘PART A—INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP MARKET REFORMS’’; (2) by redesignating sections 2704 through 2707 as sections 2725 through 2728, respectively (3) by redesignating sections 2711 through 2713 as sections 2731 through 2733, respectively . . . "

The rest of the bill is not much better, although it does lapse into readable (but not understandable) English for large sections before relapsing into gobbledygook. But here's the thing: It is no more understandable to the Senators than to you, since very few (if any) of them have read all of it, and many of them have read none of it. And furthermore, it will be equally incomprehensible to the government bureaucrats who will have eventual control over our health costs and medical procedures, especially if and when you become a senior (and you all are heading in that direction!).

Link to the Bill text: The Senate version Health Care Bill
(Read a page or two at random and see if you can understand it)

You may have heard that the Senate version of the Health Care Bill is being rushed through the Senate by the Democratic Party leadership and may be voted on before Christmas. You may also wonder why no Republican Senator is planning on voting for the bill. It is not because they do not want to help the needy, it is because they do not want to harm the already-hurting American taxpayer further, and because this Health Care Bill is the largest appropriation of governmental power in the history of the United States.

Here is why the taxpayer should be concerned: The stated cost is $847,000,000,000 (in case you’ve lost track of all those zeros, that is $847 billion dollars). But the true cost over the next 10 years will actually approach $2,500,000,000,000 ($2.5 trillion dollars). The true cost is more than $1 billion dollars per PAGE (the bill contains 2074 pages of legal gobbledygook), and more than $3,000,000 per WORD! !

Many people think this will be funded with “government money”, or, sadly, as some uninformed people have seriously suggested, “with Obama money”. But I have news for you: the U.S. government and the President have no money. And I mean that two different ways:

First, if it could be shown that the U.S. government has money, it is actually our money which has been transferred to the government through a variety of taxation devices. So the government has no money that is not actually our money.

Second, the U.S. government has no money because it is basically bankrupt. If the government were a person, or a corporation, or a state like California, it would have to eventually file for bankruptcy. It owes MUCH MORE than it has the ability to pay.

So the cost of the Government Health Care Bill will be paid by … taxpayers. That is, you and me, our children, and our grandchildren.

Whether you consider yourself a conservative or not, I ask you to thoughtfully consider sending your U.S. Senators, and certain other selected U.S. Senators, an email requesting them to vote NO to this giant bloated takeover of our nation’s health care system.

NOTE: The news on Weds 12/09 is saying:
"Senate Democrats reach agreement on health plan." This is not so! The vote has not yet happened, and many Senators are still undecided. Please proceed on and act, but the time is getting short!

Here is the email that I sent to 19 special situation U.S. Senators:

Dear Senator (fill in last name)

Please vote NO for the Senate Health Care Bill. This is not the change that 70% of American taxpayers want. It's way too expensive, and causes too much harm to Seniors.

Try again for 250 pages, and $250 billion dollars. This will keep about 90% of things the same (the way we like it now) and will permit health care for the 15-20 million uninsured citizens who both need it and want it.

Millions of us are waiting to see who will stand with us and VOTE NO to this bill, bloated both with words and dollars. You have often voted with those of us who want less spending and less government intervention. Thank you, and we ask that you vote with us again!

Below is a list of these 19 U.S. Senators who fall into three special target catagories:
1. Democrats who sometimes vote for conservative issues like fiscal responsibility and against overspending,
2. Democrats who seem to be in tight races and might possibly lose their current Senate seat if they vote for this bill,
and 3. A few Republicans who every once in a while vote with the liberal tax-and-spend position (we want to discourage these defectors).

The other 81 Senators to which I sent no email are either (a) Republicans who will definitely vote AGAINST the bill, or (b) Democrats who will definitely vote FOR the bill. It’s these 19 in-between Senators that we want to contact and hopefully convince to vote "NO".

All the following senators can be easily contacted via this website:
http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
Click on [Choose a Senator] to bring up each Senator and their email address ("web form"), and then click that to bring up each Senator’s respective email form. Then fill it all out and send it to each one of these 19 Senators.

(D): Democrat (R): Republican (I): Independent

Michael Bennet – D – Colorado
Evan Bayh – D – Indiana
Blanche Lincoln – D – Arkansas
Tim Johnson – D – South Dakota
Diane Feinstein – D – California
Joseph Lieberman – I – Connecticut
Ben Nelson – D – Nebraska
Mary Landrieu – D – Louisiana
Bill Nelson – D – Florida
Olympia Snowe – R – Maine
Susan Collins – R – Maine
Arlen Specter – D – Pennsylvania
Mark Begich – D – Alaska
Lisa Murkowski – R – Alaska

The above 14 are “MUST” contacts.

The following 5 are less likely to vote against the bill,
but yours might be the email that turns the tide!
(currently incoming emails are running 60 to 80% against the bill)

Mark Pryor – D – Arkansas
Kent Conrad – D – North Dakota
Claire McCaskill – D – Missouri
Thomas Carper – D – Delaware
Byron Dorgan – D – North Dakota

Most people do not act because they don't know how to act. Now you have no excuse.

Should you just copy and send my email? Probably not, although you have my okay to reword it. Better that you should touch on the same issues in your own words. Notice I have not explicitly threatened the senators, but have tried to show tough love, because these are senators that sometimes vote conservatively (or else, are dangerously close to losing their seats in 2010). And, note that I have indicated my willingness to be reasonable in insuring certain citizens who at present have no health insurance (note the word "citizens").

Also notice that my Senator email is less than 140 words. Most of the Senator’s email sites allow about 1000 words. But I’m hoping to get mine read. Even mine looks pretty long. If you can reduce the issues down to 75-100 words, GO FOR IT!

Feel free to contact me via our email, or my blog, or by phone 214-823-5688.

May God bless you, and may God bless America!

Larry

Job Creation for Dummies

2009-12-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

Alexander's Essay – December 10, 2009

Job Creation for Dummies
"Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread." --Thomas Jefferson
Barack Obama outlined his Recovery.gov version 2.0 on Tuesday of this week, saying, "My economic team has been considering a full range of additional ideas to help accelerate the pace of private sector hiring. We held a jobs forum at the White House..."

Indeed, Obama held a much-publicized "jobs" confab last week, ostensibly to obtain ideas about how to create (and save?) more of them. This exercise in futility was fodder so he could feign having sought advice from some people who actually create jobs.

However, most of the 135 invitees were from federal, state and local government, academic institutions, labor unions and not-for-profits. Alas, he did toss in a few folks from the private sector where job creation actually occurs. He told them, "I'm confident that people like you ... can come up with some additional good ideas on how to create jobs."

Additional good ideas?

I suspect Obama was suggesting that some of his proposals thus far have been good ideas. Unfortunately, despite all the jobs Obama claims to have saved or created with his $787 billion "stimulus" package, unemployment has increased from 7.6 percent when he took office, to 10 percent.

Setting aside the absurdity of his pet "saved or created" construction, it seems to me that if he had actually created jobs, unemployment would be somewhere under 7.6 percent. But Democrat math never ads up. Fact is, there has been a net loss of at least 3.4 million jobs under the "Obama recovery."

"We're not going to get anything useful out of [this summit]," concluded Peter Morici, from the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business. Obama and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner "really don't know what to do."

What an understatement.

Investor's Business Daily analyzed cabinet posts of administrations over the last century and determined that prior to Obama, Kennedy and Carter had the lowest number of appointees from the private sector, about 30 percent in each administration.

As only 8 percent of Obama's key appointees are from the private sector, precious few of them have actually created or understand how to create non-government jobs.

Needless to say, there was widespread skepticism about this jobs summit, so Obama sent out his senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, to do some pre-emptive Bush-blaming.

"We inherited an economic meltdown 10 months ago," claimed Jarrett. "[Obama] moved boldly to get us back on track with a variety of measures."

Oh really? Fact is, then-Senator Obama and his Democrat colleagues went to great lengths to undermine the U.S. economy for political expedience.

As for critics of Obama's socialist economic philosophy, Jarrett issued this challenge: "I would say to those critics, we welcome your ideas. We embrace all good ideas and I think critics should stop saying what won't work and come forward with what will work."

Well, OK! As the owner of an Internet publishing company, and manager of several other business ventures, here are some good ideas that will work -- in fact, ideas that have proven to work.

First: Let's clear up a misconception: Government does not create jobs because it does not create wealth. Government is a consumer of wealth, not a producer.

As my colleague and noted economist Thomas Sowell writes: "What does it take to create a job? It takes wealth to pay someone who is hired, not to mention additional wealth to buy the material that person will use. But government creates no wealth. Ignoring that plain and simple fact enables politicians to claim to be able to do all sorts of miraculous things that they cannot do in fact. Without creating wealth, how can they create jobs? By taking wealth from others, whether through taxation, selling bonds or imposing mandates. However it is done, transferring wealth is not creating wealth. When government uses transferred wealth to hire people, it is essentially transferring jobs from the private sector, not adding to the net number of jobs in the economy."

As Heritage Foundation's Conn Carroll notes, "every dollar Congress 'injects' into the economy must first be taxed or borrowed out of the economy."

And, to add insult to injury, government is an extremely inefficient consumer of wealth, with up to 70 percent of income-transfer program (a.k.a., welfare program) budgets going to bureaucratic overhead.

Second: Taxes do not create jobs. Taxes eliminate jobs.

Higher income taxes to pay for more government spending and debt, higher business taxes associated with CO2 production, and higher individual taxes to pay for ObamaCare will push the nation from recession to depression.

Take all of these tax-and-spend proposals off the table.

Ronald Reagan inherited a deep recession from the Carter administration. President Reagan cut taxes, and the resulting 25-year economic growth cycle produced 35 million new jobs and increased government revenues by almost 30 percent -- the largest peacetime economic expansion in history.

Third: Regulations do not create jobs. Regulations eliminate jobs by choking productivity and stemming wealth production, thus disabling job creation.

There is no corner of the U.S. economy that isn't currently regulated by the central government, and consequently, the cost to business and consumers is staggering.

This week, as Obama administration officials were in Copenhagen selling out the U.S. economy to the cap-n-tax crowd, his EPA director, Lisa Jackson, declared back home that carbon dioxide -- the stuff we humans exhale when we breathe -- poses a danger to the environment. This means that new regulations on business and industry are on the way, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by consumers.

The CO2 regulations, as I have argued previously, have everything to do with centralizing economic control and nothing to do with climate change, and Obama should be more concerned about the U.S. economic climate than bogus global climate change predictions.

To supplement economic recovery by deregulation, a thoughtful president might also push for tort reform. While all those dollars spent defending frivolous lawsuits might create more trial lawyers, they cost real Americans real jobs.

Fourth: Government spending does not create jobs. Government spending eliminates jobs.

According to Obama, "There are those who claim we have to choose between paying down our deficits on the one hand, and investing in job creation and economic growth on the other -- but this is a false choice." He then went on to say, that we must "spend our way out of this recession."

Horse pucky.

Unprecedented deficit spending for unsustainable entitlements, and accumulation of national debt, now at more than $12 trillion, poses an enormous threat to our economic future. Obama's proposals will add $13 trillion in deficit spending over the next 10 years.

There are only three ways to cut that debt: Raise taxes, inflate the dollar or cut government spending.

The first two will destroy any semblance of economic recovery. Only the latter will strengthen the U.S. economy and create jobs.

The president should hold the line on discretionary spending and enact spending caps enforced by a balanced budget amendment, as first proposed by Reagan and blocked by Democrats every time it comes up.

Fifth: Protectionism does not create jobs. Protectionism hinders job growth.

Start by approving stalled trade agreements with Colombia, South Korea, and Panama. After all, 95 percent of consumers on our planet live outside the U.S. We need unfettered access to those markets. Even the Obama administration acknowledges that every percentage point increase in exports creates more than 250,000 jobs in the U.S.

In summary, what Obama can do to help me, and all private-sector employers, create new jobs is this: Get out of our way.

Of course, Obama and his ilk will consider none of my proposals because they think government is the solution, not the problem.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden, Obama's point man for jobs, has been making the rounds and spinning yarns about what his grandfather had to say about recessions and depressions.

"My grandpop used to have an expression. We're from Scranton. He said, 'Joey, when the guy in Dixon City' -- a small town above Scranton -- 'is out of work, it's an economic slowdown. When your brother-in-law is out of work, it's a recession. When you're out of work, it's a depression.'"

Biden's grandfather must've been Harry Truman. "When your neighbor is out of work, it is a recession. When you are out of work, it is a depression," said Truman back in 1958. In 1980, Reagan shrewdly amended that chestnut: "A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. A recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his."

So, maybe Obama was smart for not inviting me to his jobs summit, because I would have been screaming from the rooftop that a recovery is when Barak Obama loses his job. For that, in all likelihood, is the only proposal that will result in true job creation.

Footnote: On Obama's recovery.gov website, there is a link to "report fraud, waste and abuse." When understood in the proper context of our Constitution, all of Obama's proposals constitute fraud, waste and abuse, so I recommend you report it!

Semper Vigilo, Fortis, Paratus et Fidelis!

Mark Alexander
From: "The Patriot Post (www.patriotpost.us/subscribe/ )"

Obamacare is Seriously Unconstitutional

2009-12-10T07:58:00.000-08:00

The Morning Bell

THURSDAY, DEC. 10, 2009

Obamacare is Seriously Unconstitutional

On October 23rd, a reporter asked Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” Speaker Pelosi shook her head and before moving on to another question replied: “Are you serious? Are you serious??” Pressed for a more substantive response later, Pelosi’s press spokesman admonished the reporter: “You can put this on the record. That is not a serious question. That is not a serious question.”

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) disagrees. In 1994, the CBO said of an individual mandate to buy health insurance:

A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action. The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.

As much as Speaker Pelosi may wish otherwise, the CBO is dead on: the Supreme Court has never validated a federal power as intrusive as forcing all Americans to purchase a service due to their very existence. Sure, the Supreme Court has said that Congress may regulate a farmer’s production of wheat even if he never plans to distribute it off of his farm, and the Supreme Court has said Congress may ban the possession of Marijuana even if it is for personal use, but never before has the Supreme Court said the power to regulate commerce enabled Congress to force an individual to do something just because he existed.

In fact, the Supreme Court has always been clear that the Commerce clause must have some limits. In United States v. Lopez (1995), the Court struck down the Gun-Free School Zones Act, which attempted to reach the activity of possessing a gun within a thousand feet of a school. In United States v. Morrison, it invalidated part of the Violence Against Women Act, which regulated gender-motivated violence. In both cases, the Court found the regulated activity in each case to be noneconomic; it was outside the reach of Congress’s Commerce power, regardless of its effect on interstate commerce. The case for the constitutionality of the individual mandate is far weaker than either of these two cases. Congress was at least trying to regulate an individual’s activity in the cases above. But the mandate does not purport to regulate or prohibit activity of any kind, whether economic or noneconomic. To the contrary, it purports to “regulate” inactivity.

If the individual mandate is Constitutional, then Congress could do anything. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; require us to grow wheat (10 bushels each), or pay someone else to grow your share; require us to buy whatever they want.

Many on the left immediately point to state mandates that drivers purchase car insurance as proof of a mandate that all Americans buy health insurance is not new. But car insurance mandates are distinguishable in at least four ways: 1) they are state requirements and states have broader constitutional authority than the federal government; 2) they apply to drivers only, not all Americans (e.g. passengers are not required to carry insurance); 3) drivers use public roads; 4) states only require drivers to insure against injury to other drivers, not to insure themselves against personal injury.

Yesterday The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies released a Legal Memorandum written in conjunction with Georgetown University Law Center Professor Randy Barnett and Nathaniel Stewart explaining: Why the Personal Mandate to Buy Health Insurance Is Unprecedented and Unconstitutional. Introducing the paper, Sen. Orrin Hatch noted:

James Madison said that if men were angels, no government would be necessary and if angels governed men, no limits on government would be necessary. Because neither men nor the governments they create are angelic, government and limits on government are both necessary for ordered liberty. Politics may tell us what we want to do, but the Constitution tells us what we may do and we must keep those separate. The ends do not justify the means for one simple reason – liberty. Liberty requires limits on government power, it always has and it always will.

Someone needs to explain this concept to Speaker Pelosi. Seriously.

Obama the Czar-Maker Becomes the Ultimate Czar

2009-12-08T08:39:00.000-08:00

An innocent young girl rises from her bed in a dry, barren wasteland and watches as an earthquake violently splits the land around her, while a tornado rips apart a metropolis far in the distance. A tidal wave rushes toward her, and she jumps to a tree branch with no time to spare, avoiding a horrific death. She awakens from her nightmare, screaming in fear, and then solemnly implores the viewer, “Please help the world.” This exploitative video from the environmental left shockingly debuted yesterday at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference and is likely the first of many assaults on the senses employed to gin up support for a global climate treaty that would lead to an even more apocalyptic end for the U.S. economy.

Those disaster-movie-style scare tactics are an act of desperation necessary to sway the public’s wavering opinion on the notion of man-made climate change, particularly in light of the Climategate scandal, which exposed the dirty dealings of global warming “experts” who evidently deleted, doctored and destroyed inconveniently true data that rendered their climate change theories bunk and not beyond question. But where public opinion can’t be manipulated with fear mongering and lies, political victory will be won with the brute force of federal regulation.

Yesterday, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared carbon dioxide to be a dangerous pollutant under the Clean Air Act, granting itself authority for an enormous, unprecedented regulatory undertaking that would greatly expand the EPA’s power. Because 85 percent of the U.S. economy operates on fossil fuel, the EPA would essentially have the ability to regulate every aspect of life in America – and it would be able to enact draconian climate-change policies without any accountability to American voters.

The EPA’s actions are a regulatory end-run around a politically-unpopular Democratic Senate who may not be able – or willing – to deliver on cap-and-trade climate change legislation. A lack of a mandate from home might have been an embarrassment for President Barack Obama, who otherwise would have arrived next week at Copenhagen empty-handed, unable to tout climate change progress from back in the States. However, as The Wall Street Journal opines this morning:

President Obama isn’t about to let a trifle like democratic consent impede his climate agenda. With cap and trade blown apart in the Senate, the White House has chosen to impose taxes and regulation across the entire economy under clean-air laws that were written decades ago and were never meant to apply to carbon.

The un-democratic EPA ruling drew applause from the powers that be at Copenhagen, who saw the ruling for what it is – a despotic, unilateral decision designed to move a global environmental agenda forward, despite the lack of consent from the governed. An article on the Copenhagen Conference Web site declared, “US body aids Copenhagen conference,” and Yvo de Boer, the head of the secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “This is very significant in the sense that if (…) the Senate fails to adopt legislation (on emissions), then the administration will have the authority to regulate.”

Senator John Kerry (D-MA), too, applauded the EPA’s power grab and cautioned that the agency’s actions should send a message to Congress that if they don’t act, the President will have the authority to act anyhow, so they better get on board the train before it leaves the station without them. Quoth Kerry:

The message to Congress is crystal clear: get moving. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration is more than justified to use the EPA to impose new regulations.

Obama the czar-maker becomes the ultimate czar.

The Heritage Foundation is keeping a close eye on the Copenhagen Conference, and two of its experts, Ben Lieberman and Steven Groves, will be among a handful of conservatives on site for the proceedings. They have already authored several articles and videos on the conference, and they will be video blogging from Copenhagen. You can follow them at Heritage’s Copenhagen Consequences Web site.