Americans don’t need a government controlled, bureaucratic, bloated, corrupt, inherently inefficient and unnecessarily costly healthcare system. And that’s not even considering Obamacare. There are many relatively simple solutions that can make the whole system less costly, complex and more efficient for everyone.
The only problem is that these possibilities may remove some of the potential to promulgate corrupt deals and legislation by Obama and Congress.
A Modest And Effective Health Reform
By Benjamin Zycher
Notwithstanding the election outcome in Massachusetts last month, efforts inside the Beltway to "reform" the health insurance system — that is, to centralize the rules and outcomes of health coverage — will continue, and still may prove successful if the drumbeat for "compromise" with fatally flawed ideas is heeded.
This centralization would be a disaster because government does not have patients. It has interest groups, an eternal truth that casts a shadow long and dark in the context of a federal takeover of the health insurance market.
Decentralization — a reduction in the role of government — is the only path that can lead toward reduced cost pressures and increased choices for patients with vastly heterogeneous needs and preferences.
One straightforward reform that could be adopted quickly is the implementation of a nationally available "entrepreneurs" health coverage policy freed from the many benefit mandates imposed upon the health insurance market.
State governments, responsible for regulating health insurers, for years have required health insurance policies to cover particular services and categories of providers. This means that individuals must pay for such mandated coverage even if they otherwise might choose not to do so.
The average state imposes about 35 such mandates, and a conservative estimate of the marginal cost of each is about 0.3% of premiums. Premiums thus are forced up by about $1,294 per year in the average state for a group (employer-based) family policy, ranging from $260 per year in Idaho, the state with the fewest mandates (8), to $2,486 per year in Rhode Island, the state with the most mandates (62).
The specifics of coverage policies freed from such mandates would be determined by competition in the market. But premiums incontrovertibly would fall.
A new study from the Pacific Research Institute shows that these policies would enroll about 13.6 million individuals now covered by private insurance, and, very conservatively, about 3.2 million of those now uninsured. This represents about 8% of those insured privately or uninsured for the U.S. as a whole, ranging from about 1.6% for Idaho to about 11.9% for Rhode Island.
By eliminating the many benefit and provider mandates now imposed by state laws, entrepreneurs' coverage would reduce the degree to which consumers treat health insurance as a way to shift known costs onto others, rather than as a way to pool the risks of future adverse health events.
This would be an important step toward restoring health insurance as protection against catastrophic events rather than prepayment for anticipated medical services, and so would strengthen incentives to economize on the use of health care resources.
More generally, such a reform would be driven by market forces — the preferences of consumers and the costs faced by insurers — and so would decentralize and depoliticize the system.
Because representative democracy is the art of wealth redistribution, and because resources are limited always and everywhere even (or especially) for the federal government, a system of health coverage centralized in the Beltway inexorably would be transformed into a massive tug-of-war among groups seeking both increased allocations for the treatments in which they are particularly interested, and a shift of costs onto others.
Merely consider the tempest over breast mammograms that erupted late last year. Mammograms, of course, are hardly the only medical service for which there is a constituency, and enactment of centralized "reform" legislation would be the beginning rather than the end of such interest-group competition.
Thus would insurance coverage — and therefore the delivery — of various medical procedures increasingly come to be politicized over time.
A new public policy allowing individuals and groups to escape the constraints imposed by state benefit mandates would have the opposite effect, and thus would represent real reform.
Other important reforms include:
• Elimination of the tax preference that now favors coverage purchased in the group (employer) market over the non-group market.
• A rollback of the rules and tax preferences that induce groups and individuals to purchase expensive coverage with low deductibles, co-payments and out-of-pocket maximums.
• An end to the regulatory restrictions that prevent interstate competition in health insurance.
In greater and lesser degrees, such sensible reforms would decentralize decision-making and unleash the competitive processes that offer consumers expanded choice among myriad alternative insurance contracts, thus improving the efficiency of resource use in the health care sector, and restoring the doctor-patient relationship as the final authority with respect to medical decisions.
• Zycher is a senior fellow at the Pacific Research Institute.
The feeding frenzy by the Federal government and the news media regarding Toyota illustrates the dangers and threats to rights of “non-preferred” groups and companies that a too powerful, corrupt central government presents. It should serve as a warning for all of us including those who may still support Obamacare and government take-overs of other areas of our economy.
You can be sure if this were a problem with GM or Chrysler vehicles which the government presently owns, we would not be witnessing such a spectacle. In fact, these two companies have had decades of history of woefully inferior and flawed vehicles that have been subject to countless recalls yet Congress rarely besmirched them as they are doing with Toyota right now. During most of this period, Toyota has been the paragon of excellence and a great employer for hundreds of thousands of workers.
This is not to say that Toyota is innocent of charges. They are not. But, the Federal government, now with the Democrats in charge, clearly has a severe conflict of interest and is paying back and going to bat for one of its largest and most powerful constituencies, the labor unions. You see, Toyota has its plants in non-union right to work states, a situation that the labor unions and their leaders abhor.
Congress Puts Toyota On Show Trial
Investors Business Daily 02/23/2010
Commerce: Toyota's leaders are in for nasty star-chamber hearings in Congress, with politicians grandstanding and regulators pointing fingers. It's no way to treat a big employer that contributes so much to our economy.
When Toyota first came to the U.S. in the 1950s and took out TV ads in the 1960s, the Japan-based company was ridiculed. How could its dinky little cars compete with the mighty Big Three automakers for the American market?
But by the 1970s, word got out that Toyota was making a superior energy-efficient product and it won the public over.
That success seems to be why Toyota is being singled out for loud hearings by two congressional panels for its recent recall of nearly 650,000 cars. "While Honda recalled 636,000 models last month and Ford recalled more than 4 million vehicles last year, neither company was subjected to a Congressional Hearing," noted Americans for Tax Reform in a statement.
Small wonder then that a Toyota internal memo declared the current climate in Washington is "not industry friendly."
That's a fact.
The problem is that while beating up Toyota may serve the political aims of some, its real effect will be to kill jobs, corrupt any semblance of impartial regulatory action, discourage foreign investment, and defund cities and towns whose tax bases depend much on Toyota dealers. In short, the show trial will make us all poorer.
For starters, Toyota employs over 200,000 Americans across the spectrum of the auto industry. Parts plants, assembly plants, dealerships and repair shops all owe their existence to Toyota.
Already plants are shutting down and employees are being laid off, beyond all proportion to the recall problem, because of the congressional effort to drag Toyota through the mud.
City governments take in significant revenues from these operations. Don't think they won't feel the impact of these hearings.
Yet there's more than a whiff of Saul Alinsky's community organizing principles in this noisy government campaign against Toyota — "Pick a target, personalize it, freeze it, polarize it."
So now Congressional committees are hauling in Toyota's president Akio Toyoda all the way from Tokyo to testify. It's a sorry spectacle because Toyota has tried to be a good corporate citizen.
Recall that the first complaint against Toyota in the 1970s was that it imported cars to the U.S. instead of built them here.
So, Toyota built plants here, employing some 30,000 U.S. citizens directly. In the process, it also subcontracted to American companies — such as the one that makes the pedals in question now — all to make the "Buy American" crowd happy.
Toyota also bowed down to Jesse Jackson's race-baiting corporate shakedowns, giving him much of the $7.8 billion it set aside for "diversity" to hand out to his favored groups for his programs.
Now with the recent events — including Toyota's president making an unprecedented apology for the recall of 8.5 million vehicles with suspect accelerator pedals, a humiliating loss of face in Asian culture — Toyota officials must be wondering why they even tried.
The effort to take them down continues because of one thing the unions — and the union-friendly Obama administration — can't forgive: Toyota's choice of states for its plants, states with good investment climates and nonunion right-to-work laws.
As U.S. rivals like GM and Chrysler survive on government bailout money and continue to employ inefficient and expensive union labor, and their U.S. government owners try to regain market share for them, what better way than to discredit Toyota out of all proportion to its supposed sins by using Alinsky-style tactics?
Evidence is piling up that this is political.
First, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, who has a conflicting dual role as both regulator and owner of rival auto companies, advised Americans not to drive Toyotas.
Now Politico reports that Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee is calling for an investigation of Transportation department officials' e-mails. These may show they improperly conferred with insurance agency officials about congressional testimony to cover up for Transportation Department neglect of its regulatory duties.
In an atmosphere like this, why would Toyota want to invest more, hire more or try to please political powers as a good corporate citizen? Or any other company?
As Congress tries to discredit Toyota and destroy its market share out of all proportion to its transgressions, the ultimate effect will be to hurt America's interests most.
The news media and “our” liberal politicians see themselves as so elitist and righteous that they are resorting to attacking the American people who disagree with their policies. They disparage us as ignorant or benighted simply because we are exercising our Constitutional (and inherent) rights to oppose their far-left positions. Democracy has suddenly become an inconvenience for them as it has made passage of their various bills which would further restrict and control our rights and freedoms and plunder more of our hard earned wealth, nearly impossible.
This is also exactly why they are viciously attacking and denigrating the Tea Party Movement, a grass roots movement that represents an angry middle America. We are sick and tired of politicians imperiously foisting expensive and irresponsibly solutions on us, ransacking ever increasing amounts of the fruits of our labor, and destroying our economy, jobs and freedoms yet they live by another set of rules (including their gold plated healthcare plan), corruptly aggrandize themselves with our tax dollars and evince a general antipathy toward the people who are suppose to be their bosses.
This must stop. These despicable, arrogant, corrupt politicians must be voted out of office ASAP!
As for much of the news media, a boycott of their products and programs can be quite effective. In the following article alone, several of these are quoted from that excoriate Americans that we can place on this list:
Times Magazine, Newsweek, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker
To this we can add other far-left media like: MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS
Money, or the lack of it, talks. Let’s be quite loud on this issue!
Blame Americans First
Democrats lose patience with democracy.
By Matthew Continetti March 1, 2010
What’s the clearest sign the Obama agenda is in trouble? That’s easy: the string of jeremiads in the pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets of fashionable opinion. Unable to tout the administration’s successes, and worried about Republican ascendancy, liberals have assigned responsibility for the mess they’re in neither to their program nor to their methods but to larger, structural faults in American politics and society. Beginning with you.
You aren’t too bright, for one thing. After all, opines Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek, the “biggest culprit” behind “our political paralysis” is the “childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” You simply do not know what’s good for you. “On many issues these days,” writes the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, “the American people are badly confused.” “The people may have spoken,” writes the New -Yorker’s James Surowiecki. “It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.” In a blog post titled “Too Dumb to Thrive,” Time magazine’s Joe Klein cuts to the chase: “It is very difficult to thrive in an increasingly competitive world if you’re a nation of dodos.”
The problem, as Weisberg sees it, is that America “simultaneously demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, and other problems.” Note the myopia. For Weisberg, the only conceivable “action” on any issue is limited to the policy preferences of liberal Democrats. No other options spring to mind.
This is nonsense. Just because the public says the economy is important does not necessarily mean it has to support a stimulus measure that has added massively to the debt without much benefit. Just because the public is concerned with rising health care costs does not mean that it has to support a bill that could alter existing health care arrangements and increase costs in the long-term. Steven Pearlstein writes that Americans “want to do something about global warming.” No they don’t. Global warming came dead last in a recent Pew survey of public priorities.
The reason health care, cap and trade, and the other blocks of Obama’s New Foundation are unpopular isn’t public ignorance. It’s that the public sees them as counterproductive—and in many cases beside the point. The people’s representatives have responded to a variety of signals, from falling poll numbers, to town hall protests, to GOP victories in -Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts. Which is precisely how democracy is supposed to function.
And that’s the problem, says Kurt Andersen in New York magazine. “American democracy has gotten way too democratic.” The “thoughtful, educated, well-off, well-regarded gentlemen” who designed our Constitution “wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves.” But the “populist impulse” abroad in the land today has scared legislators into obeying the people’s demands.
It was not always thus. “In the old days,” Andersen laments, “the elite media really did control the national political discourse” and “presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations” without the public trying to butt in. But there’s no going back now; “maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogenous population of 310 million.”
This liberal uneasiness with democracy is not new. In 2003, in The Future of Freedom, Fareed Zakaria made the case against too much public involvement in government. In 2008, in Hot, Flat, and Crowded, Thomas Friedman dreamed of America becoming “China for a day” so that he could impose his environmental agenda on a truculent populace. In a 2009 New York Times column, Friedman wrote that a dictatorship, “when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today,” has “great advantages” over democratic systems. In the Atlantic Monthly, James Fallows writes that “whatever is wrong with today’s Communist leadership [in Beijing], it is widely seen as pulling the country nearer to its full potential rather than pushing it away.” Nevertheless, the Democrats probably aren’t going to run on “Communist China Does It Better.”
What makes the liberal jeremiads confusing is that they work at cross purposes. On one hand, you’ve got the attacks on the people’s intelligence and representative government. On the other, you’ve got the attacks on American institutions for not being representative enough. Which is it? Are the people the problem, or is their government? According to Fallows, it’s the latter: “Our government is old and broken and dysfunctional, and may even be beyond repair.”
The culprit is the Senate, which gives equal say to states with small populations and requires 60 votes to pass legislation. Fallows says these minority rights have turned the Senate “into a deep freeze and a dead weight.” “America is not yet lost,” Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times, “but the Senate is working on it.” In a Huffington Post blog, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, writes that special interests are “using the filibuster to stop legislation that would benefit the little guy,” whether the little guy likes it or not.
You can make a persuasive argument that the filibuster has been deployed too frequently in recent years, especially when it has prevented presidents, Republican and Democrat, from staffing their administrations. Nevertheless, the Senate and the filibuster are there for good reasons: to defuse momentary passions that could have unintended and harmful consequences for the country.
The system is designed to ensure broad consensus before Congress enacts major reforms. Such consensus existed during the New Deal and Great Society. And there was consensus behind certain elements of Reagan’s and Bush’s and Clinton’s programs, as well. That was not the case when George W. Bush attempted to overhaul Social Security, however. The public agreed with Bush that there was a problem, but it did not like his solution. It has had the same reaction to Obama’s proposals.
The liberal program is in disarray because liberals have failed to establish general agreement. They have found that simple majorities do not automatically translate into programmatic success. And when they are met with public opposition and institutional resistance, they do what comes naturally. They blame Americans first.
Matthew Continetti is associate editor of The Weekly Standard and the author, most recently, of The Persecution of Sarah Palin (Sentinel Books).
We have come to expect as routine, duplicitous politicians who want to “have it both ways” when dealing with different elements of their constituencies. It is a sad commentary but infinitely true. Unfortunately, like an aggressively metastasizing cancer, this wanton lack of integrity and sincerity has increasingly invaded other areas of our culture that had previously been somewhat respected.
Most recently, we have witnessed the global collusion of numerous scientists involved in the Climategate scandal, manufacturing or cherry picking data in order to fraudulently substantiate their flawed, perverted beliefs and ideologies. If their schemes hadn’t been uncovered, it could have cost this country tens of trillions of dollars and strangled our economy and standard of living.
In the past, you might have figured a Nobel Laureate should be worthy of respect, a person who has achieved so much in their field and who, by definition, has made supreme contributions to the world or society.
No more! It has largely become a sham with many of these individuals possessing the same ethics as your white collar criminal though on a more grandiose scale.
To wit: Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama and Yassar Arafat all receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. And let’s not forget the epitome of corruption and a vacuum of morals, Al (Global Warming) Gore.
There is another member of this pantheon of corrupt and dishonest intellectuals: left wing economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.
It is most evident that in the world we live today, we are forced by circumstances to teach our children to be infinitely cynical, trust no one, and that “facts” including “scientific discoveries” may just be fiction. We can’t believe our Government and have witnessed far too much egregious behavior, absence of integrity, and intellectual dishonesty to trust our teachers, scientists, clergy, etc.
Bush's Deficit Bad, Obama's Deficit Good: So Sayeth Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate
By Larry Elder 02/11/2010
Left-wing economist, Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman hates deficits in tough economic times — when the president of the United States is named George W. Bush.
In a November 2004 interview, Krugman criticized the "enormous" Bush deficit.
"We have a world-class budget deficit," he said, "not just as in absolute terms, of course — it's the biggest budget deficit in the history of the world — but it's a budget deficit that, as a share of GDP, is right up there."
The deficit in fiscal 2004 was $413 billion, or 3.5% of gross domestic product.
Back then, a disapproving Krugman called the deficit "comparable to the worst we've ever seen in this country. ... The only time postwar that the United States has had anything like these deficits is the middle Reagan years, and that was with unemployment close to 10%."
Take away the Social Security surplus spent by the government, he said, and "we're running at a deficit of more than 6% of GDP, and that is unprecedented."
He considered the Bush tax cuts irresponsible and a major contributor — along with two wars — to the deficit. But he also warned of the growing cost of autopilot entitlements:
"We have the huge bulge in the population that starts to collect benefits. ... If there isn't a clear path towards fiscal sanity well before (the next decade), then I think the financial markets are going to say, 'Well, gee, where is this going?'"
Three months earlier, Krugman had said, "Here we are more than 2 1/2 years after the official end of the recession, and we're still well below, of course, pre-Bush employment."
In October 2004, unemployment was 5.5% and continued to slowly decline. At the time, Krugman described the economy as "weak," with "job creation ... essentially nonexistent."
How bad would it get? If we don't get our "financial house in order," he said, "I think we're looking for a collapse of confidence some time in the not-too-distant future."
Fast-forward to 2010.
The projected deficit for fiscal year 2010 is over $1.5 trillion, or more than 10% of GDP. This sets a post-WWII record in both absolute numbers and as a percentage of GDP. And if the Obama administration's optimistic projections of economic growth fall short, things will get much worse.
So what does Krugman say now? We must guard against "deficit hysteria." In "Fiscal Scare Tactics," his recent column, Krugman writes:
"These days it's hard to pick up a newspaper or turn on a news program without encountering stern warnings about the federal budget deficit. The deficit threatens economic recovery, we're told; it puts American economic stability at risk; it will undermine our influence in the world.
"These claims generally aren't stated as opinions, as views held by some analysts but disputed by others. Instead, they're reported as if they were facts, plain and simple."
He continues: "And fear-mongering on the deficit may end up doing as much harm as the fear-mongering on weapons of mass destruction."
Krugman believes Bush lied us into the Iraq War. Just as people unreasonably feared Saddam Hussein, they now have an unwarranted fear of today's deficit.
Questions:
• Didn't Krugman, less than six years ago, call the deficit "enormous"?
• Wouldn't he, therefore, consider a $1.5 trillion deficit at 10% of GDP mega-normous?
• Didn't he describe the economy with 5.5% unemployment as "weak"? Isn't the current economy, at 9.7% unemployment, even weaker?
• If the 2004 deficit was "comparable to the worst we've ever seen in this country," wouldn't today's much bigger deficit cause even more heartburn?
Nope. Now a huge deficit is actually a good thing: "The point is that running big deficits in the face of the worst economic slump since the 1930s is actually the right thing to do. If anything, deficits should be bigger than they are because the government should be doing more than it is to create jobs."
The deficit "should be bigger"?!
Long term, Krugman says, we've got concerns about revenue and spending. But as for now:
"There's no reason to panic about budget prospects for the next few years, or even for the next decade."
In 2004, Krugman warned that without a "clear path towards fiscal sanity" before "the next decade," we faced a "crunch."
Presumably, we now have this "clear path."
Let's review. In 2004, an unhappy Krugman criticized Bush's "weak" economy and "miserable" job creation. Running an "enormous" deficit was a bad thing. Times were awful — "by a large margin" the worst job crash and performance since Herbert Hoover.
Today the deficit is four times as large in an even weaker economy with much higher unemployment. Times are awful. Now, though, the deficit is a good thing and should be even bigger.
Krugman's flip-flop on the deficit demonstrates a modern economic equation. Hatred of Bush + love for Obama = intellectual dishonesty.
In an article posted by Bob Unruh in WorldNetDaily.com on Jan. 29th, he exposed the despicable profligacy and unfettered arrogance of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. As noted:
Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Judicial Watch, which investigates and prosecutes government corruption, show Pelosi incurred expenses of some $2.1 million for her use of Air Force jets for travel over that time.
"Speaker Pelosi has a history of wasting taxpayer funds with her boorish demands for military travel," Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said today. "And these documents suggest the Speaker's congressional delegations are more about partying than anything else."
It may seem tiring and redundant to continue to hear and read about the global warming fraud but in the end if we don’t fight hard enough to figuratively “bury” the issue, the all too willing corrupt and ideological perverted Congressional Democrats and Obama will “bury” us instead with massive taxation and severe restrictions of our choices and activities at all levels. A majority of Americans recognize this political and scientific scam for what it is … and there is surely an over abundance of incriminating evidence.
The following outlines some additional and important revelations regarding this malfeasance.
Climate Flimflam Flaming Out
Investors Business Daily 01/25/2010
Environment: The United Nations makes a claim that can't be supported by science, and U.S. researchers ignore temperature data from frigid regions. The crack-up of the global warming fraud is picking up speed.
With so much of the science behind climate change coming under attack, especially among scientists, it's been a harsh winter for the global warming crowd:
• In late November, thousands of e-mails from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were leaked to the public. The evidence strongly suggests that researchers colluded to prove the global warming scientific "consensus" by rigging, burying and destroying data that ran counter to their political agenda.
• Last week, the public learned that claims made by the U.N.'s International Panel on Climate Change were not based on science, but on speculation. Specifically, the IPCC's 2007 report said the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035 due to man-made global warming.
The claim, used at the U.N. Copenhagen climate change conference in cold and snowy December to rush through a restrictive greenhouse-gas-emissions treaty, was not based on a scientific study. It was based on a telephone call that a reporter had with a scientist who was speculating.
The IPCC has withdrawn the claim. Murari Lal, the scientist who included the contention in the U.N. report, admitted that he knew it wasn't based on peer-reviewed scientific research.
• Also in the last week, it was revealed that U.S. researchers working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are excluding temperature data from cold regions for a database used by the U.N. in its global warming scare campaign.
Canwest News Service, a Canadian agency that also owns a chain of newspapers, reported Friday, "In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.
"Worse, only one station — at Eureka on Ellesmere Island — is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
"The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada."
Canwest also reports that Americans Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, say that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has "reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database" and has "cherry-picked" the stations.
The NASA agency uses data from "sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea — which has a warming effect on winter weather."
In a paper published on the Science and Public Policy Institute Web site, D'Aleo and Smith say the "NOAA ... systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler.
"The thermometers, in a sense, marched toward the tropics, the sea and to airport tarmacs."
• Then, just last weekend, we find that same 2007 IPCC report included another phony claim: that "the rapidly rising costs" of natural disasters since the 1970s is linked to global warming.
British newspapers reported Sunday that that assertion was neither peer-reviewed nor published in a scientific paper when the IPCC report was issued. When the paper that the claim was based on was published in 2008, its authors said:
"We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
Now the IPCC says it is "reassessing the evidence."
All threads of fiction unravel eventually, and the deterioration flies out of control as the end nears.
Is this what we are seeing with the contention that man-made greenhouse-gas emissions are causing the planet to overheat?
We can't see into the future, but this myth has taken so many hits from the truth that its survival is in doubt.
The scientific malfeasance perpetrated by United States weather “researchers” under the auspices of NASA is nothing short of audaciously and abominably corrupt. This should surprise no one as we have already exposed the Climategate fraud perpetrated by the Climate Research Unit in Great Britain in collusion with scientists from around the world. The offense that they have committed is similar to the British based fraud: deleting data that did not support the global warming ideology, cherry –picking data, and largely using monitoring stations in locations which would naturally provide warmer data.
And our politicians wonder why Americans are thoroughly cynical and distrustful of our government in record high numbers? Those scientists involved in this fraud should be fired and receive no benefits. To think that we were so close to having Cap and Trade pass based on manipulated and factitious data for venal, corrupt and ideological purposes which would have cost our country tens of trillions of dollars, dramatically reduced our standard of living, burden future generations with incomprehensible debt and ultimately bankrupt us.
By the way, where is all the liberal media outrage over this outrageous fraud? Have you even seen or heard one story aside from Fox News?
Just another reason the liberal media is fast becoming inconsequential!
A U.S. ClimateGate?
Investors Business Daily 01/22/2010
Hoaxes: Climate researchers and the Weather Channel's founder accuse NASA of the same data manipulation as Britain's Climate Research Unit. Were weather stations cherry-picked to hide the temperature drop?
We recently commented on how our space agency for two years refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has had to repeatedly correct its climate figures.
In a report on global warming on KUSI television by Weather Channel founder and iconic TV weatherman John Coleman, that reticence has been traced to the deliberate manipulation and distortion of climate data by NASA.
As Coleman noted in a KUSI press release, NASA's two primary climate centers, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University in New York City, are accused of "creating a strong bias toward warmer temperatures through a system that dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based."
Joseph D'Aleo, of Icecap.us, said the analysis found NASA "systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude and rural locations." The number of actual weather stations used to calculate average global temperatures was reduced from about 6,000 in the 1970s to about 1,500 today. The number of reporting stations in Canada dropped from 600 to 35.
E. Michael Smith, a computer programming expert who worked with D'Aleo, said he found "patterns in the input data from NCDC that looked liked dramatic and selective deletions of thermometers from cold locations." The more he looked, the more he found "patterns of deletion that could not be accidental."
Stations in places such as the Andes and Bolivia have virtually vanished, meaning, according to D'Aleo, temperatures from these areas are now "determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon." He says it's as if Minneapolis stopped reporting and its average temperature was extrapolated from readings in St. Louis and Kansas City.
Smith argues that the decrease in stations used and the selectivity of locations make NASA's data and conclusions suspect. D'Aleo goes further, saying such cherry-picking and data manipulation are a "scientific travesty" committed by activist scientists to advance the global warming agenda.
To us, it looks like just another example of ideologically driven climate deceit following the Climate Research Unit scandal and the fraudulent claim by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that Himalayan glaciers would soon vanish.
The unadulterated evidence reveals irrefutably that the earth is not in a death spiral of global warming that will destroy humanity and nature. In fact, it appears that over approximately the last ten years there has been a cooling trend. All you need to do is check the trend of worldwide record low temperatures and massive snowfalls including in places which don’t normally experience such events.
This is not to say that man has no effect on the environment which we do. However, the scam being perpetrated in the name of global warming is not based on reality but instead on corrupt and venal motives of individuals, corporations and governments for a multitude of reasons. The most notable face at the forefront of this worldwide fraud is Al Gore who has enriched himself tremendously.
As a consequence of Obama’s unwavering adherence to his radical and inimical ideologies, his glaring lack of previous executive experiences, and his prodigious and destructive arrogance and narcissism which preclude him from dispassionately assessing all angles of situations, he has set America to pay dearly this and in coming years. Exacerbating this situation further is his innate corruptness, scheming dishonesty and expressed profound disdain for America and most of its citizens (excluding the chosen minorities in specific and his constituency in general).
If you have any doubt about this, just consider all the mandated minority preferences in Obamacare and other legislation (which are racist and should be unconstitutional), wealth transfer beneficiaries, the dropping of charges against the New Black Panther Party regarding voter intimidation during the Presidential election, and even his racist tact in response to the Henry Gates – Cambridge police office incident, etc.
The following editorial enumerates some of the issues or incidents that Obama’s inept or ideologically blinded responses, attitude or inactions will ultimately lead to bad outcomes for America. Aside from a few exceptions, you won't see incisive assessments like this in the sycophantic liberal news media
Chickens Of '09 Coming Home To Roost In '10
By Victor Davis Hanson
Plenty of our chickens will be coming home to roost this year.
Take foreign relations. In 2009, the new administration assumed that George W. Bush was largely responsible for global tensions. As a remedy, we loudly reached out to our foes and those with whom we had uneasy relationships.
But so far these leaders — like Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Russia's Vladimir Putin — have only interpreted Barack Obama's serial goodwill gestures as weaknesses to be exploited. They play the part of the pushy class bully, we the whiny nerd.
In the waning days of 2009, Iran has announced it has no intention of dismantling its nuclear facilities and ignored the latest Obama deadline to cease. There's no reason not to expect the theocracy to make significant strides in its nuclear program in 2010, while continuing without rebuke to beat and murder democratic dissidents in its streets.
Russia has announced plans to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons — and scoffed at our polite suggestions that it should pressure Iran to stop its nuclear development.
Venezuela brags of its own similar program to come — an act that could threaten all the neighboring democracies in the region.
The administration courted China on a much-heralded Asian tour. President Obama has even said he would be our first "Pacific president."
Unfortunately, China was not impressed. It declined our advice about reducing its carbon footprint and instead reminded Americans that we owe the Chinese people nearly $1 trillion. Expect much more of that hectoring in 2010 as our debt to China grows.
Consider also the threat of Islamic terrorism. In 2009, some in the Obama administration decided "war on terror" was too provocative a label for what might be better dubbed "overseas contingency operations." Apparently, they were thinking a kinder, gentler image would discourage terrorists.
Accordingly, the self-confessed architect of Sept. 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was promised a civil trial in New York rather than a military tribunal normally accorded to out-of-uniform murderous terrorists. Expect a lot of soapbox speechmaking about America's sins during his testimony in 2010.
As part of our efforts to break with the Bush anti-terrorism past, President Obama also vowed he would close the facility at Guantanamo Bay by Jan. 22, 2010 — another deadline that won't be met.
But as 2009 ended, we were reminded that radical Islamic terrorists still want to kill us for who we are, and what we represent, rather than any particular thing we do.
Maj. Nidal Hasan, nursed on radical Islamic doctrine, murdered 12 fellow soldiers and one civilian at Ford Hood, Texas.
Five would-be terrorists with U.S. citizenship were arrested in Pakistan on their way to link up with Islamist militant groups. And Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was stopped in flight from Amsterdam before he could blow up an American passenger jet.
Note that all these recent terrorists were not poor, lived in the hospitable West — and cared little that the Obama administration has been critical of prior U.S. war-on-terror policies.
So, while we assured the world in 2009 that we wouldn't be overzealous in our various efforts to stop terrorists, the terrorists proved that they most certainly would be in theirs to kill us.
Meanwhile, at home we operated on the same naive assumptions. The Obama administration inherited a $500 billion deficit and expanded it threefold. Its planned mega-deficits may well grow the aggregate national debt over the next decade to over $20 trillion.
But the administration's 2009 calculations on how to service the growing red ink are based on continued cheap interest. Yet in 2010, it is likely we will see rising inflation, rising interest rates — and rising costs to the continual self-destructive borrowing.
We were given a financial break on energy prices in 2009. The worldwide recession sent oil down to about $50 a barrel.
But America did little during the year's reprieve to rush into production newly discovered domestic gas and oil fields, to tap existing finds in Alaska, or to license new nuclear plants.
By year's end, oil was creeping back up to $80. If the economic upswing continues, in 2010 it may near its old high of nearly $150 a barrel. Soon we will wish we had done something concrete in 2009 rather than offering more stale rhetoric about wind and solar power.
In other words, 2009 may seem to have ended relatively quietly. But in our foreign relations, in the war against terror, in our massive borrowing and in our energy policies, we created chickens that soon will come home to roost in 2010.
You undoubtedly have learned about the corrupt deal recently consummated between the labor unions, a major constituency of the Democratic party, and the Congressional Democrats in order to shore up their support for Obamacare. This latest outrageous perversion of power will preferentially exclude all members of these labor unions such as of the SEIU from having to pay a hefty 40% punitive tax on health insurance plans whose annual costs exceed a selected annual dollar amount. All other Americans will still be legally coerced to pay this tax PLUS be responsible for the amount the government won’t be collecting from union members!
Further adding insult to injury, it would be egregious enough if this were the only example of such corruption but IT IS NOT! This is the modus operandi of Obama, Reid, Pelosi and the Democrats. Stimulus money going exceedingly disproportionately to the Democrat supporting blue states; blatant disregard for any consideration for tort reform that could save tens of billions of dollars annually from the cost of healthcare – as payback to attorneys who almost monolithically support and contribute to the Democratic party; the Sen. Ben Nelson Nebraska Cornhusker kickback and Sen. Mary Landrieu Louisiana Purchase bribe – using our tax dollars – in order to acquire critical support for the passage of the healthcare legislation; ETC.
THIS CORRUPTION, ARROGANCE AND CONTEMPTUOUSNESS BY DEMOCRATS MUST BE STOPPED!!
We must unite in our cause and vote them out of office as soon as possible!
Another rank deal
By Rich Lowry January 15, 2010
What happens when the irresistible force of the Democratic urge to tax runs up against the immovable object of Democratic loyalty to the labor unions? Another ugly deal in a health-care bill that already was a grotesquerie of payoffs to favored politicians and interests.
The levy in question is a 40 percent excise tax on high-end employer-provided insurance plans that -- typically -- has been sold as a tax on "the rich." It's called the "Cadillac tax," a name redolent of corporate executives cackling in their Escalades over their cushy benefits.
The unions, which make it a point to negotiate generous insurance plans with their employers (to the point of bankrupting them), were chagrined to learn that for purposes of this tax, they're among the rich. They howled in terms that could have been drawn from Henry Hazlitt's free-market classic "Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics."
The excise tax is supposed to be paid by evil insurers and employers. Except in this one case affecting their self-interest directly, the unions see through the fiction and understand that the tax will trickle down onto them. How disorienting to hear unions implicitly recognize that corporations ultimately don't pay taxes, their customers and employees do.
"While the excise tax is slated to be imposed on the insurers on so-called high cost plans, the tax will be passed on to enrollees in the form of higher premiums, co-pays or reduced benefits," a coalition of public-employee unions wrote congressional leaders. "Characterizing this tax proposal as a 'Cadillac tax' is a misnomer. It hits the average blue collar and white collar employee."
The unions also bristled at a fairly typical trick of liberal taxation -- bracket creep. The Cadillac tax affects few people when it begins in 2013. Since it's not indexed to account for the ever-rising expense of health care, though, it will catch more and more people over time.
This is why New York Times columnist Bob Herbert called it "a middle-class tax time bomb," and Nancy Pelosi made an oblique reference to President Obama breaking his promise not to increase taxes for anyone making less than $250,000 a year. Obama's support for the Cadillac tax not only violates that forlorn pledge, but also directly contradicts one of his chief lines of attack against John McCain in the 2008 campaign.
McCain wanted to end the tax exemption for employer-provided insurance coverage and compensate people with a tax credit to buy their own plans -- a systematic approach to controlling costs and increasing choice. Obama's plan will increase costs and reduce choice, but he needs $150 billion in revenue over 10 years to try to make it look deficit-neutral so he's -- as he put it in his unrelenting anti-McCain ads -- "taxing health benefits for the first time in history."
But pressure from the unions has now forced the White House to agree to raise the $23,000-per-household threshold of the tax slightly and -- more importantly -- exempt insurance plans that are the product of collective-bargaining agreements until 2018. This Labor Loophole stands in the finest tradition of the Louisiana Purchase and the Cornhusker Kickback. With no possible public-policy justification, it puts the awesome power to tax and spend at the service of nakedly political ends.
Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that taxes are the price of civilization. In this case, taxes are the price of not belonging to a group that pours countless millions of dollars into the Democratic coffers. Under the Cadillac tax, there's one set of rules for the Service Employees International Union and another for everyone else.
Obama is currently haranguing the banks so he doesn't get pegged as a "Wall Street Liberal." The more dangerous rubric for him is a "Washington Liberal," a politician knee-deep in the special-interest politics of the Beltway as he pushes an unpopular agenda of rapid government expansion. Obama's style of politics has gone from inspiring to revolting in the space of a year.
We are all aware and incensed at the unparalleled contemptuous that Congress in general and certain individuals in particular (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Barney Frank, John Murtha, etc.) have for the American public and even the democratic process. They are running the government as a dictatorial aristocracy, imposing legislation on unwilling citizens seemingly at times by fiat. They are cognizant of their unfettered, completely unstoppable powers which is further abetted and protected by a sycophantic far left news media (except for Fox News).
The Democrats have a super-majority in the Senate which makes any legislation they formulate filibuster proof. To add insult to injury, they will use whatever means necessary to pass their bills – heavy handed threats, illegal procedural maneuvers, specious information and interminable corruption and bribery (using our tax dollars) as we have witnessed in their attempting to pass Obamacare.
One glimmer of hope is present and it involves the special election being held in Massachusetts this coming Tuesday, January 19th to determine who will fill the vacant Senate seat previously held by Ted Kennedy. The Republican candidate for Senator, Scott Brown, an extremely intelligent, shrewd, articulate and photogenic conservative aided by prodigious grassroots support of angry voters not only from Massachusetts but also from across the country, has incredibly turned this race into a statistical tie in the nation’s most liberal state. This is a manifest indictment and rejection of the policies and attitudes of the Obama Administration and the Congressional Democrats.
We all need to give Scott Brown our firm support – financially and verbally – IMMEDIATELY! Contact everyone that you know in Massachusetts and friends who know voters there. They must be informed of the supreme importance of this election and need to vote for Republican candidate Scott Brown. Financial contributions can be made through the following websites:
The following video detailing the perfidy, deception, arrogance, contemptuousness and corruptness of Obama and the Democrats is eminently provocative, both emotionally and intellectually. The dramatic, percussive music redolent of the testosterone suffused "Batman Returns" themes helps deliver a powerful and serious message that should serve to galvanize outraged Americans to take productive actions to depose our imperious Democratic politicians. Maybe some of these same elitists will begin to appreiciate the magnitude of our fury and realize that they are here as our elected representatives to serve us – not rule over us!
As the ObamaCare legislation is being scrutinized by the public, innumerable insidious, discriminatory, restrictive, unconstitutional, and generally outrageous clauses and mandates are being discovered that were intentionally hidden because they were either “illegal”, reflective of corruption or egregiously bad for the public. We also suspect that not one politician who voted for the legislation has read the entire bill. What unalloyed arrogance! These contemptuous politicians all need to be voted out office at their next elections.
More Reasons For Killing Off Health Reform
Phyllis Schlafly 12/29/2009
New reasons emerge almost daily as to why ObamaCare can and must be defeated.
1. Americans oppose ObamaCare by almost 2 to 1 in the latest CNN poll. Other polls show lopsided opposition to passing either the Senate or House health care bill.
Public opinion is against the bill because of its obscene costs in higher taxes, burdensome debt, anti-freedom mandates, rationing and reduced care for seniors. The American people have awakened to the fact that ObamaCare is transformational legislation that will drag us against popular will into European-style socialism.
2. The Democrats' double-counting of ObamaCare's financial benefits has been exposed as a colossal lie. Harry Reid told the Senate that his bill strengthens our future by both "cutting our towering national deficit by as much as $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years" and "strengthening Medicare and extending its life by nearly a decade."
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) refuted that assertion. CBO said the claim that ObamaCare would provide these benefits simultaneously "would essentially double-count a large share of those savings and thus overstate the improvement in the government's fiscal position."
3. ObamaCare is unconstitutional because of its mandate that all individuals must carry "approved" health insurance and all businesses must give health insurance to their employees whether or not the company can afford it. "Universal" coverage will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service with power to punish those who don't have such a plan.
Constitutional lawyers say the Commerce Clause does not give Congress authority to force Americans to buy health insurance as a condition of living in the U.S. because personal health insurance is not "commerce." The CBO wrote that "a mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action"; the Supreme Court has never upheld any requirement that an individual must participate in economic activity.
4. Since the Senate bill imposes sharp limits on health insurance companies' ability to raise fees or exclude coverage, it likely will force many of them out of business. ObamaCare is unconstitutional because it violates the Bill of Rights protections against takings without just compensation and deprivation of property without due process of law.
5. Other ObamaCare provisions blatantly legislate racial and other forms of discrimination. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights sent two letters to the president and congressional leaders warning about the obnoxious requirements for racist and sexist quotas.
The Senate bill requires that "priority" for federal grants be given to institutions offering "preferential" admissions to minorities (race, national origin, sex, sexual orientation and religion).
Institutions training social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, behavioral pediatricians, psychiatric nurses and counselors will be ineligible for federal grants unless they enroll "individuals and groups from different racial, ethnic, cultural, geographic, religious, linguistic and class backgrounds, and different genders and sexual orientations."
6. Obama's claim that "everybody" will now be covered creates few winners but lots of losers. Universal health insurance will be achieved by forcing young people to pay the additional costs (insurance for the youngest third of the population would rise by 35%), and by restricting and rationing care for the elderly.
7. According to columnist Robert Samuelson, the "wild card is immigration." From 1999 to 2008, 60% of the increase in the uninsured occurred among Hispanics, and Obama's refusal to close our borders will make this problem more costly every year.
8. ObamaCare gives Medicare bureaucrats the power to ration health care by forcing doctors to prescribe cheaper medical devices and drugs. In the recent case of Hays v. Sebelius, the court ruled that Medicare doesn't have the right to make this rule, but ObamaCare takes jurisdiction away from the courts to hear any appeal from decisions of the new Medicare Commission.
The "stick" applied to primary-care doctors is imposing financial penalties if they refer too many patients to specialists. The "carrot" is financial rewards to doctors who give up small practices and join into larger medical groups or become salaried employees of hospitals or other large institutions.
9. The Senate bill contains at least a dozen of what can be described as bribes. Sen. Mary Landrieu received a $300 million increase in Medicaid funding for her state (known as the Second Louisiana Purchase), and a $100 million bribe to Sen. Ben Nelson gives Nebraska a permanent exemption from the costs of Medicaid expansion.
10. The Senate bill even has a four-page section artfully written to enable Acorn to get federal health care grants. This section describes grant recipients as "community and consumer-focused nonprofit groups" having "existing relationships ... with uninsured and underinsured consumers."
The following list formulated by Judicial Watch is one that no politician wants to appear on: the ten most corrupt Washington politicians of 2009. Nine of the ten are Democrats with three being part of the Obama Administration. Fortunately for these latter three (President Obama, Sec. of Treasury Tim Geithner and Atty. General Eric Holder), there is not a list for the ten most incompetent Washington politicians because they would also populate this one as well!
Judicial Watch Announces List of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians” for 2009
Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2009 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The list, in alphabetical order, includes:
1. Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT): This marks two years in a row for Senator Dodd, who made the 2008 “Ten Most Corrupt” list for his corrupt relationship with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and for accepting preferential treatment and loan terms from Countrywide Financial, a scandal which still dogs him. In 2009, the scandals kept coming for the Connecticut Democrat. In 2009, Judicial Watch filed a Senate ethics complaint against Dodd for undervaluing a property he owns in Ireland on his Senate Financial Disclosure forms. Judicial Watch's complaint forced Dodd to amend the forms. However, press reports suggest the property to this day remains undervalued. Judicial Watch also alleges in the complaint that Dodd obtained a sweetheart deal for the property in exchange for his assistance in obtaining a presidential pardon (during the Clinton administration) and other favors for a long-time friend and business associate. The false financial disclosure forms were part of the cover-up. Dodd remains the head the Senate Banking Committee.
2. Senator John Ensign (R-NV): A number of scandals popped up in 2009 involving public officials who conducted illicit affairs, and then attempted to cover them up with hush payments and favors, an obvious abuse of power. The year’s worst offender might just be Nevada Republican Senator John Ensign. Ensign admitted in June to an extramarital affair with the wife of one of his staff members, who then allegedly obtained special favors from the Nevada Republican in exchange for his silence. According to The New York Times: “The Justice Department and the Senate Ethics Committee are expected to conduct preliminary inquiries into whether Senator John Ensign violated federal law or ethics rules as part of an effort to conceal an affair with the wife of an aide…” The former staffer, Douglas Hampton, began to lobby Mr. Ensign's office immediately upon leaving his congressional job, despite the fact that he was subject to a one-year lobbying ban. Ensign seems to have ignored the law and allowed Hampton lobbying access to his office as a payment for his silence about the affair. (These are potentially criminal offenses.) It looks as if Ensign misused his public office (and taxpayer resources) to cover up his sexual shenanigans.
3. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA): Judicial Watch is investigating a $12 million TARP cash injection provided to the Boston-based OneUnited Bank at the urging of Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank. As reported in the January 22, 2009, edition of the Wall Street Journal, the Treasury Department indicated it would only provide funds to healthy banks to jump-start lending. Not only was OneUnited Bank in massive financial turmoil, but it was also "under attack from its regulators for allegations of poor lending practices and executive-pay abuses, including owning a Porsche for its executives' use." Rep. Frank admitted he spoke to a "federal regulator," and Treasury granted the funds. (The bank continues to flounder despite Frank’s intervention for federal dollars.) Moreover, Judicial Watch uncovered documents in 2009 that showed that members of Congress for years were aware that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were playing fast and loose with accounting issues, risk assessment issues and executive compensation issues, even as liberals led by Rep. Frank continued to block attempts to rein in the two Government Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs). For example, during a hearing on September 10, 2003, before the House Committee on Financial Services considering a Bush administration proposal to further regulate Fannie and Freddie, Rep. Frank stated: "I want to begin by saying that I am glad to consider the legislation, but I do not think we are facing any kind of a crisis. That is, in my view, the two Government Sponsored Enterprises we are talking about here, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are not in a crisis. We have recently had an accounting problem with Freddie Mac that has led to people being dismissed, as appears to be appropriate. I do not think at this point there is a problem with a threat to the Treasury." Frank received $42,350 in campaign contributions from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac between 1989 and 2008. Frank also engaged in a relationship with a Fannie Mae Executive while serving on the House Banking Committee, which has jurisdiction over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
4. Secretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner: In 2009, Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner admitted that he failed to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes from 2001-2004 on his lucrative salary at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), an organization with 185 member countries that oversees the global financial system. (Did we mention Geithner now runs the IRS?) It wasn’t until President Obama tapped Geithner to head the Treasury Department that he paid back most of the money, although the IRS kindly waived the hefty penalties. In March 2009, Geithner also came under fire for his handling of the AIG bonus scandal, where the company used $165 million of its bailout funds to pay out executive bonuses, resulting in a massive public backlash. Of course as head of the New York Federal Reserve, Geithner helped craft the AIG deal in September 2008. However, when the AIG scandal broke, Geithner claimed he knew nothing of the bonuses until March 10, 2009. The timing is important. According to CNN: “Although Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told congressional leaders on Tuesday that he learned of AIG's impending $160 million bonus payments to members of its troubled financial-products unit on March 10, sources tell TIME that the New York Federal Reserve informed Treasury staff that the payments were imminent on Feb. 28. That is ten days before Treasury staffers say they first learned ‘full details’ of the bonus plan, and three days before the [Obama] Administration launched a new $30 billion infusion of cash for AIG.” Throw in another embarrassing disclosure in 2009 that Geithner employed “household help” ineligible to work in the United States, and it becomes clear why the Treasury Secretary has earned a spot on the “Ten Most Corrupt Politicians in Washington” list.
5. Attorney General Eric Holder: Tim Geithner can be sure he won’t be hounded about his tax-dodging by his colleague Eric Holder, US Attorney General. Judicial Watch strongly opposed Holder because of his terrible ethics record, which includes: obstructing an FBI investigation of the theft of nuclear secrets from Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory; rejecting multiple requests for an independent counsel to investigate alleged fundraising abuses by then-Vice President Al Gore in the Clinton White House; undermining the criminal investigation of President Clinton by Kenneth Starr in the midst of the Lewinsky investigation; and planning the violent raid to seize then-six-year-old Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint in order to return him to Castro’s Cuba. Moreover, there is his soft record on terrorism. Holder bypassed Justice Department procedures to push through Bill Clinton’s scandalous presidential pardons and commutations, including for 16 members of FALN, a violent Puerto Rican terrorist group that orchestrated approximately 120 bombings in the United States, killing at least six people and permanently maiming dozens of others, including law enforcement officers. His record in the current administration is no better. As he did during the Clinton administration, Holder continues to ignore serious incidents of corruption that could impact his political bosses at the White House. For example, Holder has refused to investigate charges that the Obama political machine traded VIP access to the White House in exchange for campaign contributions – a scheme eerily similar to one hatched by Holder’s former boss, Bill Clinton in the 1990s. The Holder Justice Department also came under fire for dropping a voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party. On Election Day 2008, Black Panthers dressed in paramilitary garb threatened voters as they approached polling stations. Holder has also failed to initiate a comprehensive Justice investigation of the notorious organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which is closely tied to President Obama. There were allegedly more than 400,000 fraudulent ACORN voter registrations in the 2008 campaign. And then there were the journalist videos catching ACORN Housing workers advising undercover reporters on how to evade tax, immigration, and child prostitution laws. Holder’s controversial decisions on new rights for terrorists and his attacks on previous efforts to combat terrorism remind many of the fact that his former law firm has provided and continues to provide pro bono representation to terrorists at Guantanamo Bay. Holder’s politicization of the Justice Department makes one long for the days of Alberto Gonzales.
6. Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)/ Senator Roland Burris (D-IL): One of the most serious scandals of 2009 involved a scheme by former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to sell President Obama’s then-vacant Senate seat to the highest bidder. Two men caught smack dab in the middle of the scandal: Senator Roland Burris, who ultimately got the job, and Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, emissaries for Jesse Jackson Jr., named "Senate Candidate A" in the Blagojevich indictment, reportedly offered $1.5 million to Blagojevich during a fundraiser if he named Jackson Jr. to Obama's seat. Three days later federal authorities arrested Blagojevich. Burris, for his part, apparently lied about his contacts with Blagojevich, who was arrested in December 2008 for trying to sell Obama’s Senate seat. According to Reuters: “Roland Burris came under fresh scrutiny…after disclosing he tried to raise money for the disgraced former Illinois governor who named him to the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Barack Obama…In the latest of those admissions, Burris said he looked into mounting a fundraiser for Rod Blagojevich -- later charged with trying to sell Obama's Senate seat -- at the same time he was expressing interest to the then-governor's aides about his desire to be appointed.” Burris changed his story five times regarding his contacts with Blagojevich prior to the Illinois governor appointing him to the U.S. Senate. Three of those changing explanations came under oath.
7. President Barack Obama: During his presidential campaign, President Obama promised to run an ethical and transparent administration. However, in his first year in office, the President has delivered corruption and secrecy, bringing Chicago-style political corruption to the White House. Consider just a few Obama administration “lowlights” from year one: Even before President Obama was sworn into office, he was interviewed by the FBI for a criminal investigation of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich’s scheme to sell the President’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. (Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and slumlord Valerie Jarrett, both from Chicago, are also tangled up in the Blagojevich scandal.) Moreover, the Obama administration made the startling claim that the Privacy Act does not apply to the White House. The Obama White House believes it can violate the privacy rights of American citizens without any legal consequences or accountability. President Obama boldly proclaimed that "transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency," but his administration is addicted to secrecy, stonewalling far too many of Judicial Watch's Freedom of Information Act requests and is refusing to make public White House visitor logs as federal law requires. The Obama administration turned the National Endowment of the Arts (as well as the agency that runs the AmeriCorps program) into propaganda machines, using tax dollars to persuade "artists" to promote the Obama agenda. According to documents uncovered by Judicial Watch, the idea emerged as a direct result of the Obama campaign and enjoyed White House approval and participation. President Obama has installed a record number of "czars" in positions of power. Too many of these individuals are leftist radicals who answer to no one but the president. And too many of the czars are not subject to Senate confirmation (which raises serious constitutional questions). Under the President’s bailout schemes, the federal government continues to appropriate or control -- through fiat and threats -- large sectors of the private economy, prompting conservative columnist George Will to write: “The administration's central activity -- the political allocation of wealth and opportunity -- is not merely susceptible to corruption, it is corruption.” Government-run healthcare and car companies, White House coercion, uninvestigated ACORN corruption, debasing his office to help Chicago cronies, attacks on conservative media and the private sector, unprecedented and dangerous new rights for terrorists, perks for campaign donors – this is Obama’s “ethics” record -- and we haven't even gotten through the first year of his presidency.
8. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA): At the heart of the corruption problem in Washington is a sense of entitlement. Politicians believe laws and rules (even the U.S. Constitution) apply to the rest of us but not to them. Case in point: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her excessive and boorish demands for military travel. Judicial Watch obtained documents from the Pentagon in 2008 that suggest Pelosi has been treating the Air Force like her own personal airline. These documents, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, include internal Pentagon email correspondence detailing attempts by Pentagon staff to accommodate Pelosi's numerous requests for military escorts and military aircraft as well as the speaker's 11th hour cancellations and changes. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi also came under fire in April 2009, when she claimed she was never briefed about the CIA's use of the waterboarding technique during terrorism investigations. The CIA produced a report documenting a briefing with Pelosi on September 4, 2002, that suggests otherwise. Judicial Watch also obtained documents, including a CIA Inspector General report, which further confirmed that Congress was fully briefed on the enhanced interrogation techniques. Aside from her own personal transgressions, Nancy Pelosi has ignored serious incidents of corruption within her own party, including many of the individuals on this list. (See Rangel, Murtha, Jesse Jackson, Jr., etc.)
9. Rep. John Murtha (D-PA) and the rest of the PMA Seven: Rep. John Murtha made headlines in 2009 for all the wrong reasons. The Pennsylvania congressman is under federal investigation for his corrupt relationship with the now-defunct defense lobbyist PMA Group. PMA, founded by a former Murtha associate, has been the congressman's largest campaign contributor. Since 2002, Murtha has raised $1.7 million from PMA and its clients. And what did PMA and its clients receive from Murtha in return for their generosity? Earmarks -- tens of millions of dollars in earmarks. In fact, even with all of the attention surrounding his alleged influence peddling, Murtha kept at it. Following an FBI raid of PMA's offices earlier in 2009, Murtha continued to seek congressional earmarks for PMA clients, while also hitting them up for campaign contributions. According to The Hill, in April, "Murtha reported receiving contributions from three former PMA clients for whom he requested earmarks in the pending appropriations bills." When it comes to the PMA scandal, Murtha is not alone. As many as six other Members of Congress are currently under scrutiny according to The Washington Post. They include: Peter J. Visclosky (D-IN.), James P. Moran Jr. (D-VA), Norm Dicks (D-WA.), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), C.W. Bill Young (R-FL.) and Todd Tiahrt (R-KS.). Of course rather than investigate this serious scandal, according to Roll Call House Democrats circled the wagons, "cobbling together a defense to offer political cover to their rank and file.” The Washington Post also reported in 2009 that Murtha’s nephew received $4 million in Defense Department no-bid contracts: "Newly obtained documents…show Robert Murtha mentioning his influential family connection as leverage in his business dealings and holding unusual power with the military.”
10. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY): Rangel, the man in charge of writing tax policy for the entire country, has yet to adequately explain how he could possibly "forget" to pay taxes on $75,000 in rental income he earned from his off-shore rental property. He also faces allegations that he improperly used his influence to maintain ownership of highly coveted rent-controlled apartments in Harlem, and misused his congressional office to fundraise for his private Rangel Center by preserving a tax loophole for an oil drilling company in exchange for funding. On top of all that, Rangel recently amended his financial disclosure reports, which doubled his reported wealth. (He somehow “forgot” about $1 million in assets.) And what did he do when the House Ethics Committee started looking into all of this? He apparently resorted to making "campaign contributions" to dig his way out of trouble. According to WCBS TV, a New York CBS affiliate: “The reigning member of Congress' top tax committee is apparently ‘wrangling’ other politicos to get him out of his own financial and tax troubles...Since ethics probes began last year the 79-year-old congressman has given campaign donations to 119 members of Congress, including three of the five Democrats on the House Ethics Committee who are charged with investigating him.” Charlie Rangel should not be allowed to remain in Congress, let alone serve as Chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, and he knows it. That’s why he felt the need to disburse campaign contributions to Ethics Committee members and other congressional
In the following expose, Michelle Malkin uncovers and delineates some of the more notable examples of corruption perpetrated by the Senate this past year. Such actions are reprehensible and should not be tolerated by us. These entrenched criminals need to be ousted!
Senate Payoffs Top 2009 Tree Of Corruption
By Michelle Malkin
Democrats are right: Sleazy bribes and pork payoffs didn't start with their government health care takeover bill. They've been doling out taxpayer-funded goodies for votes all year. Harry Reid's latest Cash for Cloture deals are the culmination of a shopping spree at our expense.
Go back to January and February. The multitrillion-dollar stimulus bill was the mother of all legislative Christmas trees. The ruling party used the economic downturn to redistribute wealth from struggling Americans to favored congressional districts, phantom districts and special interests from golf-cart makers to beauty salons.
According to a new study from George Mason University, Democratic districts have raked in nearly twice as much porkulus money as GOP districts — without regard to the actual economic suffering and job loss in those districts. In fact, the researchers found that far more stimulus money went to higher-income areas than to lower-income areas.
That includes Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's backyard — where a $54 million no-bid contract was awarded to a firm with little experience to relocate a luxury Bay Area wine train due to flood concerns.
And it includes Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, which reaped the single biggest earmark — $1 billion for the FutureGen near-zero emissions "clean coal" plant earmark championed by disgraced Democrat and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin.
And it includes Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's backyard — where he secured billions in high-speed rail stimulus earmarks from which he plans to fund a pie-in-the-sky public transportation line from Los Angeles to Las Vegas.
When taxpayers objected to business as usual masquerading as economic recovery, New York Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer sneered: "You lost." He jibed on the Senate floor while wagging a grabby finger, "And let me say this to all of the chattering class that so much focuses on those little, tiny, yes, porky amendments: The American people really don't care."
The "American people" Schumer was referring to, of course, were the privileged minority of stimulus beneficiaries — not the rest of us "chattering" dissenters stuck with the bill for those billions in "little, tiny, yes, porky amendments."
No legislation has been immune to congressional shakedown.
After the Congressional Black Caucus balked loudly enough, Democratic Rep. Barney Frank — chairman of the House Financial Services Committee — larded up the majority's Wall Street regulatory "reform" bill with $4 billion in payoffs to minority special interests — including former failed Air America radio partner Inner City Broadcasting Corp.
The cash-strapped firm is run by Percy Sutton, a New York City crony of Charlie Rangel's and Al Sharpton's. The money will come out of the ever-morphing TARP bank bailout fund — which went from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, then to a life insurance company bailout and on to an auto-supplier bailout.
Leading the charge for the Cash for Cronies of Color drive: California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, who had already extracted $12 million in TARP funds for OneUnited, a minority-owned bank that is one of her key campaign donors and a company in which both Waters and her husband own massive amounts of stock.
Which brings us to the wealth redistribution scheme disguised as health reform.
In addition to the infamous $300 million "Louisiana Purchase" for Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu and the (at least) $45 million "Cornhusker Kickback" for sellout Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Reid threw around other, less-publicized gobs of cash for cloture votes to cut off debate and ram the bill through.
He tossed in a Hospital Helper of $100 million to Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., whose re-election bid is in hot water. There are bennies for insurance companies and hospitals in Michigan, and "frontier freebies" for hospitals in Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Combined with Nebraska's tab, the exclusive clique's payoffs will cost taxpayers at least $1.2 billion over 10 years.
There's also an Acorn/community organizer-friendly provision for minority health bureaucracies that was sought by Sen. Roland Burris, D-Ill. And there's a $10 billion socialized medicine sop to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders for "community health clinics" serving in essence as universal health care satellite offices.
"We are talking about a revolution," Sanders enthused during the Senate's sneaky Sunday session.
No, revolution will come when taxpayers have a chance to kick these reverse Santa Clauses posing as saviors out of office.
The magnitude of corruption, bribery with our tax dollars and complete contempt and disregard for the wishes of the American people that occurred in the process of trying to legislate healthcare reform is essentially unprecedented in national politics. Congress’ responses to questions of Constitutionality of some of the mandates and clauses are dismissive. Obama and these Democrats are telling us: We don’t give a damn about what you want or don’t want and we will do as we please.
As we have been warming for a long time, this has become a dictatorial government that will trample over our rights and freedoms, steal and deal our tax dollars, and impose at will whatever legislation they deem important in order to satisfy their ideological goals.
We must do whatever it takes to reclaim our country!
Forever Gone
Investors Business Daily 12/22/2009
DeMint: Is health care reform even constitutional? AP Photo
Any law can be repealed, but the Democrats' radical health bill contains unprecedented language that could wreck the U.S. health system permanently. It's one of the dirtiest tricks yet.
'Page 1,020" — it may soon be a mantra for one of the most disturbing abuses of legislative power in history. In setting up an Independent Medicare Advisory Board, that page of the Senate health overhaul bill passed in the dead of night early Monday says, "It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection."
This enters the realm of "hyperlaw" or "laws on steroids."
As Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., pointed out on the Senate floor, it isn't lawmaking, but rather "creating a Senate rule that makes it out of order to amend or even repeal the law."
DeMint is "not even sure that it's constitutional," since it affects "the fundamental purpose of Senate rules: to prevent a tyrannical majority from trampling the rights of the minority or of future Congresses."
Clearly liberal Democratic leaders will stoop to record depths to expand the federal government's powers.
Public support plummets well down into the 30s? They don't bat an eyelash.
Mandating an individual's purchase of a private service like insurance tramples the Constitution? Just watch them do it.
Bribe Senators Tom, Dick and Ben? Here's the cash.
As John Steele Gordon noted in Commentary, the Medicaid bribe that bought the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., is so unprecedented it may not withstand constitutional muster.
According to Gordon, "one could argue that Nebraskans will be getting what amounts to a rebate on federal taxes through the backdoor of lower state taxes," which might violate Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution requiring government collections to be "uniform throughout the United States."
As Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid admits, "I don't know that there's a senator that doesn't have something in this bill that isn't important to them," adding that "if they don't have something in it important to them, then it doesn't speak well of them."
That is the arrogance of the mind-set dominating the legislative and executive branches: Your money is really theirs, to be handed out like a Mob-backed union boss toting a bag of cash on the waterfront.
When you put together Medicare and Medicaid recipients, government employees and contractors, and active and former military members and their dependents, over 40% of Americans receive government-subsidized health care. The Democrats' health care revolution would up that to a solid majority of our citizens.
American history shows that once an entitlement is enacted, it's next to impossible to erase. Catastrophic health care for seniors, passed 20 years ago, is the only such program ever repealed; the 1996 welfare reform severely limited that socially destructive entitlement.
The statists may now finally have bitten off more than they will be able to chew politically. If Republicans act like Republicans and convince the populist Tea Party movement not to go the suicidal third-party route, the coming public backlash will see to it that the greatest health care system in the world is not gone for good.
Look for demonstrators to start burning copies of Page 1,020 the way '60s radicals used to burn their draft cards.
The ever increasing magnitude of anger that is being generated by American citizens in response to what we see as an imperious, arrogant, dictatorial government is nothing short of remarkable. We are being treated contemptuously by a Government that disregards the will of the people, seeks to tax us to oblivion and “legally” redistribute the fruits of our labors, and aims to insinuate itself in every activity of our daily lives, restricting our freedoms and rights. Our present political and socioeconomic milieu is far more dire and repressive than what the Colonists contended with under King George just before the American Revolution.
Unfortunately, we are in the midst of a political perfect storm which threatens the whole underpinnings of our culture, rights, freedoms, and economic system. Our government has been hijacked by the extreme far left which has malevolent intentions for America. It has a super-majority that is essentially unstoppable legislatively but is also willing to employ corrupt, heavy handed tactics if warranted. Complicit in this and facilitating the situation is the vast majority of the press whose role in the past had always been to serve as a watchdog to protect the average American and keep the government more honest and in check.
Millions of Americans are not only concerned by our present situation but also by the perceived malignant intentions of our government starting with Obama on down. The rhetoric of these politicians is indisputably incongruous with their legislative actions whether it pertains to healthcare reform, the national debt or even our rights. These Democrats and radicals are actively and aggressively seeking to destroy the free America we knew and instead, transform it into a pseudo-dictatorship with the likes of Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Frank and Schumer at the helm.
It is imperative that we all understand the gravity of our present circumstances and then aggressively and pertinaciously act in whatever manner necessary to oppose and reverse this course. Unfortunately, with the Government’s relentless consolidation of power by means of unfettered legislative actions, a political solution may be difficult if not impossible to obtain.
We must do whatever it takes to reclaim our country!
The following article brilliantly, insightful and thoroughly explains why what we see as illogical actions by Obama and other “representatives of the people” are instead intentional, calculated, rational but malignant moves that can and may destroy America. This is a must read!
Cloward-Piven Government
By James Simpson
It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government. Since then, the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck television show, Bill O'Reilly, and now Mark Levin.
The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his Discover the Networks for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:
The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The "Cloward-Piven Strategy" seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.
Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America who taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May 1966 Nation magazine article titled "The Weight of the Poor," they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.
The result, they predicted, would be "a profound financial and political crisis" that would unleash "powerful forces ... for major economic reform at the national level."
They implemented the strategy by creating a succession of radical organizations, most notable among them the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with the help of veteran organizer Wade Rathke. Their crowning achievement was the "Motor Voter" act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 with Cloward and Piven standing behind him.
As we now know, ACORN was one of the chief drivers of high-risk mortgage lending that eventually led to the financial crisis. But the Motor Voter law was another component of the strategy. It created vast vulnerabilities in our electoral system, which ACORN then exploited.
ACORN's vote registration scandals throughout the U.S. are predictable fallout.
The Motor Voter law has also been used to open another vulnerability in the system: the registration of vast numbers of illegal aliens, who then reliably vote Democrat. Herein lies the real reason Democrats are so anxious for open borders, security be damned.
It should be clear to anyone with a mind and two eyes that this president and this Congress do not have our interests at heart. They are implementing this strategy on an unprecedented scale by flooding America with a tidal wave of poisonous initiatives, orders, regulations, and laws. As Rahm Emmanuel said, "A crisis is a terrible thing to waste."
The real goal of "health care" legislation, the real goal of "cap-and-trade," and the real goal of the "stimulus" is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves except in their ability to deliver power. They and will make matters much worse, for that is their design.
This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized, and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat. As Barney Frank said, "the middle class will be too distracted to fight."
These people are our enemies. They don't use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined, and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.
It is time we fully internalized and digested this fact, with all its ugly ramifications. These people have violated countless laws and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so -- the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant. Their spending is off the charts and will drive us into hyperinflation, but it could be rescinded, had we the political power. These policies are toxic, but they could be stopped and reversed, had we the political power. Their ideologies are poisonous, but they could be exposed for what they are, with long jail sentences as an object lesson, had we the political power.
Every single citizen who cares about this country should be spending every minute of his or her spare time lobbying, organizing, writing, and planning. Fight every initiative they launch. It is all destructive. If we are to root out this evil, it is critical that in 2010 we elect competent, principled leaders willing to defend our Constitution and our country. Otherwise, the malevolent cabal that occupies the government today will become too entrenched.
After that, all bets are off.
Businessman and Examiner.com columnist Jim Simpson is a former White House staff economist and budget analyst.
On Monday, Dec. 7th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid repugnantly, contemptuously and irresponsibly compared Republican opponents of the healthcare reform with those individuals who supported slavery in the 1800’s before the Civil War. This racist and destructive vituperation should not be uttered by any member of Congress but having the Senate Majority Leader perpetrating such an offense is intolerable. He should be censured immediately and mandated to make an official retraction.
Unfortunately, the vitriol and intolerance by the Democrats of opposing points of view has become the norm with the most egregious offenders being the “leaders” of the Democratic Party including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Chris Dodd, Barney Frank, Charles Schumer and, of course, Barack Obama . These individuals have been corrupted by power and seek to acquire absolute power over the American people. They are not legislating as in a benign democracy but rather as in an oppressive totalitarian government.
We must relentlessly work to remove these corrupt politicians from office. Vigorously support the Tea Parties and alternative candidates before we reach the point of no return which we are fast approaching
and IMPEACH OBAMA!
Reid Compares Opponents of Health Care Reform to Supporters of Slavery
FOXNews.com December 07, 2009
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took his GOP-blasting rhetoric to a new level Monday, comparing Republicans who oppose health care reform to lawmakers who clung to the institution of slavery more than a century ago.
The Nevada Democrat, in a sweeping set of accusations on the Senate floor, also compared health care foes to those who opposed women's suffrage and the civil rights movement -- even though it was Sen. Strom Thurmond, then a Democrat, who unsuccessfully tried to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and it was Republicans who led the charge against slavery.
Senate Republicans on Monday called Reid's comments "offensive" and "unbelievable."
But Reid argued that Republicans are using the same stalling tactics employed in the pre-Civil War era.
"Instead of joining us on the right side of history, all the Republicans can come up with is, 'slow down, stop everything, let's start over.' If you think you've heard these same excuses before, you're right," Reid said Monday.
"When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said 'slow down, it's too early, things aren't bad enough.'"
He continued: "When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted they simply, slow down, there will be a better day to do that, today isn't quite right.
"When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today."
That seemed to be a reference to Thurmond's famous 1957 filibuster -- the late senator switched parties several years later.
Reid's office stood by the remarks, with spokesman Jim Manley saying Republicans have "done nothing but obstruct health care" in the Senate.
"Today's feigned outrage is nothing but a ploy to distract from the fact they have no plan to lower the cost of health care, stop insurance company abuses or protect Medicare," Manley said.
But Republicans said they were genuinely appalled. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said Reid's remarks were over the top.
"That is extremely offensive," he told Fox News. "It's language that should never be used, never be used. ... Those days are not here now."
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who on the Senate floor read from this FoxNews.com article and asked that it be placed in the record, called on Reid to return to the floor and, if not apologize, at least explain what he meant.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., suggested Reid was starting to "crack" under the pressure of the health care reform debate.
"I think it's beneath the dignity of the majority leader," Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said. "I personally am insulted."
A real repugnant scammer who has immorally stolen more than $100 million using his political connections, deceptions of the public, manipulations of data and corrupt colluding scientists. Now with passage of Cap and Trade a possibility, possible mandates from a Copenhagen Treaty, Americans may be on the hook for trillions of dollars.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has issued new recommendations regarding obtaining mammograms that are irresponsible, shocking and not evidenced based but are concordant with requisite rationing for Obamanocare. The following editorial assesses this morally corrupt pronouncement.
Rationing's First Step
Investors Business Daily 11/18/2009
Health Care: A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn't that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn't work.
We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing. New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise.
Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the Health and Human Services Department as a "best practices" study group, was shouting its concern about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a 1% drop in the number of women regularly undergoing such screening and prevention.
The task force was saying that women older than 40 should get a mammogram every one to two years. It found that frequent screening lowered death rates from breast cancer mostly for women ages 50 to 69. But that was then, and this is now.
"We're not saying women shouldn't get screened. Screening does save lives," Diana Petiti, task force vice chairman, said of the recommendations published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. "But we are recommending against routine screening."
Now the panel recommends that women in their 40s stop having routine annual mammograms and that older women should cut back to every two years. The concern allegedly is that too frequent testing can result in increased anxiety, false positives, unneeded follow-up tests and possibly disfiguring biopsies. Preventing breast cancer and saving lives almost get lost in the new analysis.
"I have a particular concern in this case about who was involved in this task force," says Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., who was a heart surgeon in private life. "There are no surgeons or oncologists who deal directly with breast cancer or even radiologists. ... I've seen far too many young women develop late-stage breast cancer because they didn't have adequate screening."
Little, if anything, has happened medically in the last six months to cause such a shift. A lot, however, has happened politically as a health care overhaul has limped forward on life support. The Congressional Budget Office has been busy pricing these various bills, a process that includes screening and prevention.
As we have warned, the growing emphasis seems to be on cost containment rather than quality of care. About 39 million women undergo mammograms each year in America, costing the health care system more than $5 billion.
"The American Cancer Society continues to recommend annual screening using mammography and clinical breast examination for all women beginning at age 40," says Otis Brawley, its chief medical officer. "Our experts make this recommendation having reviewed virtually all the same data reviewed by the USPSTF, but also additional data that the USPSTF did not consider."
Daniel Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School, says: "Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and those idiots want to do away with it. It's crazy — unethical, really."
This, sadly, appears to be the future of medicine under government-run health care. Aside from taxes on insurers, providers and device manufacturers, we'll be up to our eyeballs in cost-effectiveness boards that will decide who gets what tests and treatments, when and if. These are only recommendations for now, but they are the shape of things to come.
If these egregious errors were due to the irresponsibility of your surgeon, he or she would lose their license to practice medicine. In contrast, politicians and lawyers (often the same animal) divorce themselves from any personal responsibility and are not subject to legal actions. Elections are too infrequent to be of immediate consequence.
So the results are ... More of the same incompetence, arrogance, greed, corruption,self-serving legislation and wasting of our money!
A “Climategate” has been exposed with the recent public release of hacked e-mails and data revealing that the global warming hysteria is founded on egregious, expansive multinational fraud using manufactured (fake) data in order to support the position. It has been perpetrated by collusion among well connected and influential individuals (Al Gore and more) who used this movement for wealth, power and ideological reasons.
With all this now public, Sen. James Inhofe (R. – Oklahoma) is launching an inquiry into this global warming scandal.
View: ‘Bigger Than ACORN’: Senator Launches Inquiry Into Leaked ‘Climategate’ Emails
There has been a tremendous and increasing amount of suspicion regarding the validity of the global warming data and related theory. The vitriol, threats, power maneuvering by proponents of global warming and their heavy handed suppression of opposing views strongly intimated that something was amiss in all this. The predicted climactic manifestations of this warming theory have been no shows. Instead, record temperature lows are being set around the globe and we have had the quietest hurricane season in years. (See The Lies, Deceptions and Suppression of Information in Order to Facilitate Passage of the Cap and Trade Fraud)
Governments, some businesses and selected individuals (Al Gore) combined stand to make trillions of dollars and further aggrandize their power by perpetuating this green movement fraud. If the Cap and Trade were to pass and be implemented, we would be paying thousands of dollars more per year in taxes and have countless restrictions in rights, freedoms, choices and activities of daily life. Our standard of living would plummet.
Through perseverance and ingenuity, possibly by hacking into critical computers containing climate “data” and correspondences, this whole fervent (self-serving) global warming movement has been exposed as a massive fraud, a scientific corruption of unparalleled magnitude.
The following article outlines this major discovery of the “smoking gun” evidence of fraud and cover-ups regarding global warming.
The Great British Climate Fraud
by James Delingpole
It has been described as the "greatest scientific scandal of the modern age." The story broke last Thursday when a person unknown -- some say it was a hacker, others an inside-leak job -- broke into the servers at Britain's Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and published at least 61megabytes of confidential data on a Russian website.
Despite efforts in liberal quarters to play the story down as a criminal issue of no great consequence, the blogosophere almost instantly recognized it as political dynamite: perhaps even the final nail in the coffin of Al Gore's increasingly expensive theory that the world is rapidly overheating due to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
Why? Because the Climate Research Unit in the windswept fenlands of Eastern England -- together with its sister unit in the West of England, the Hadley Centre in Exeter, Devon -- is one of the primary information sources used by the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Not only have its resident scientists, computer modelers and statisticians been heavily involved in drafting the IPCC's three reports; but its global temperature records (known as HadCrut) are one of the IPCC's four official sources of data.
If the CRU's data and scientific staff were shown to be unreliable, it would call into question the very basis of the IPCC's doom-laden predictions of rising sea levels and inexorably-rising temperatures due to man-made CO2.
And to judge by the leaked data -- over a decade's worth of documents and emails -- "unreliable" may be a rather polite way of putting it. As Australian blogger Andrew Bolt puts it, the CRU may well be guilty of "conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more."
The emails reveal a variety of dubious practices, quite contrary to what might reasonably be expected of a world-renowned climate research institution lavishly funded by the UK government. These include:
1.) Manipulation of evidence. In one email, the CRU's director, Professor Phil Jones apparently confesses to having played with data – most unscientifically – in order to achieve his desired end. "I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline." (Professor Jones has defended himself, somewhat disingenuously you might think, by saying that "trick" – in the world of science – has no negative connotations).
2.) Concealing private doubts about whether the world is really heating up. One scientist expresses his frustration that the global temperatures are not behaving as he feels they ought to behave: "The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."
3.) Destruction of evidence (following a Freedom of Information request – almost certainly an illegal activity): "Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."
4.) Fantasizing violence against prominent climate sceptic scientists: "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.'
5.) Gloating over news of the death of a prominent climate-change skeptic, Australian John L Daly, founder of the Still Waiting For Greenhouse site: “In an odd way this is cheering news.”
6.) Attempting to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (ie the period from about 900 to about 1200 when global mean temperatures were considerably warmer than they are now): "……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back…."
7.) And, perhaps, most damningly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority: “I think we have to stop considering “Climate Research” as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board…What do others think?”
Climate change "skeptics" have long had their suspicions about the reliability of CRU. Among the first to voice these was Steve McIntyre, the statistician who exposed the “Hockey Stick” curve – the now utterly discredited graph initially used by the IPCC (and Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth) to suggest that global temperatures had risen more sharply at the end of the 20th century than at any time in the previous thousand years. (This meant ignoring the Medieval Warm Period – hence the email quoted above).
Over a period of several years, McIntyre sought to acquire from the CRU the raw data used to fuel its computer models of climate Armageddon but was constantly rebuffed. (At one stage, CRU told him that the data had been "lost"). When finally he did get hold of it, he discovered the samples used to have been flawed; just as years earlier, he had showed that the Hockey Stick computer model had been programmed with an algorithm so that whatever information you put into it, it would always come up with the same scary-looking Hockey Stick shape.
But the "Climategate" scandal is a step beyond this. Where before it was only possible to accuse the CRU of being foolish, what these emails prove beyond reasonable doubt is that it has been guilty of conspiracy too. And it is a conspiracy which implicates a good many of the world's leading AGW-promoting scientists, not just in Britain but in the US and beyond.
Besides Professor Jones, the director of the CRU (and a doughty defender in several papers of the Hockey Stick curve) the emails implicate many more of those scientists most deeply involved in drafting the IPCC's reports. They include Dr Keith Briffa, a 'lead author' on the IPCC's 2007 report; Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Ben Santer, a pro-AGW scientist at the US government's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – and the man responsible for the notorious claim in the IPCC's second report that "the balance of evidence suggests that there is a discernible human influence on climate change"; and Dr Michael Mann, the physicist-turned-climate-scientist at the University of Massachusetts who created the infamous 'Hockey Stick' graph.
What is commonly misunderstood amid the IPCC's vaunted claims that its reports are approved by "2,500 scientists" is that only a tiny number – perhaps 53 in all – were actually responsible for drafting the sections predicting global eco-disaster due to AGW. These 53 scientists are a close knit circle, peer-approving one another's pro-AGW papers, banding together to shut out any dissenting voices. Almost all of them are close to the CRU; many are implicated in the offending emails.
This is what makes Climategate so significant. It is the smoking gun that climate "skeptics" have long been searching for. Or indeed, as one retired US climatologist Dr Tim Ball puts it, a "whole battery of machine guns".
Congress has not demonstrated any evidence that its worsening addiction to spending our tax dollars will be sated. Exacerbating this problem is its constant search for ways to further increase taxes to feed its inimical habit. We the hard-working sacrificing taxpayers are always the losers.
Pelosi and other Democrats in Congress are now considering VAT as a mother lode of more tax receipts. This stealth tax would be severely oppressive and non-transparent to the taxpayer and prone to political and ideological abuse. What VAT is, why it is dangerous and why it must never be implemented here are discussed in the following article.
VAT Would Be One Big Tub Of Trouble
By Wayne Crews and Ryan Young
Ask a man on the street what VAT means. After giving you a strange look, he'll probably give an answer along the lines of "a large tub." In a way, he'd be right: America's on-again, off-again move towards a Value Added Tax (VAT) is a metaphorical large tub, into which huge but nearly untraceable amounts of money will disappear.
A VAT is a tax on each stage of production, calculated according to how much value each producer adds to its products.
In the search for ways to reduce the record $1.4 trillion federal budget deficit, the VAT has occasionally popped up. In May a spokesman for President Barack Obama's budget director, Peter Orszag, expressed openness to the idea. Just last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on "Charlie Rose" that a VAT was "on the table."
It should be taken off. The root cause of the deficit is too much spending, not too little taxing. Putting a new tax on top of what we already pay is the wrong approach.
As far as taxes go, the VAT is especially destructive. If Congress is going to increase taxes, installing a VAT is one of the worst options.
For one, it would require roughly doubling the size of the IRS. Fifteen years ago, CBO estimated compliance and administrative costs for a VAT at $8.5 billion annually. That figure can safely be placed at more than $10 billion by now. The IRS' entire budget is currently $11.4 billion.
VATs are also untransparent. When traditional sales taxes are added to the goods we buy, we know the amount simply by looking at our receipts.
But VATs are hidden. Since manufacturers pay them in advance, they are factored into the prices consumers pay. VATs do not show up on receipts.
Knowing how much we are taxed is a fundamental right that preserves our ability to challenge excess government in a constitutional republic. A VAT would take that away.
Americans work more than one-third of the year for federal, state, and local governments before keeping a dime for themselves. We can still know, to the penny, how much we pay by looking at our pay stubs and old 1040 and state income-tax returns.
This transparency is one of the few checks that citizens have against runaway tax increases. Because a VAT is so easily hidden, consumers can shoulder a massive tax burden and not know it. VATs are fundamentally unfair.
They are also needlessly complex. The U.S. tax code is already over 100,000 pages. The last thing taxpayers need is another layer of complexity. They need simplification. International experience with VATs shows that, even if they are simple at first, they quickly grow into Hydra-headed monsters.
Not too long ago, France was roiled with controversy over whether dandruff shampoo constitutes a medicine taxable at 5.5%, or a cosmetic taxable at 18.6%. There are more pressing issues that deserve our attention.
Most countries with VATs have at least three different rates. Politically incorrect products are hit with punitive rates. Danish car buyers, for example, pay the standard 25% VAT, plus a special 105% VAT on the first $11,000 of the car's value, plus a third VAT of 180% on any remaining value.
All in all, Danes pay roughly triple retail price for their cars. An American VAT would make it easier for environmental activists to give U.S. car buyers similar treatment.
VAT rates also tend to go up over time, not down. Twenty-nine OECD countries currently have a VAT; 20 of them have increased their VAT rate over time. The average rate for newly introduced VAT rates in Europe was 5%. Now the average European VAT is more than triple that — 17.7%.
Taxpayers are overburdened as it is. The best way to reduce budget deficits is to cut spending. VATs should be avoided at all costs. They are complex. They are untransparent. They are hidden. They are vulnerable to special-interest tinkering. They are prone to increases. They should be rejected.
Video: Pelosi Asserts That it's 'Fair' to Jail People Without Health Insurance
The arrogance, haughtiness and condescension displayed by Pelosi and her cronies to the citizens of this country as exemplified in this video are unparalleled. Why? Because they know that they have full and effectively unopposed power in the government and the unwavering near unanimous support of the news media. They can pretty much do whatever they want with little consequence or so they think.
As Thomas Jefferson sagely noted over 200 years ago:
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny
When the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Who is going to stop them?
If we want to save our country from fascism and tyranny and protect our rights and freedoms, we must immediately, persistently, effectively and aggressively oppose these corrupt, power-crazed, contemptuous politicians.
The tea parties were a good start… but Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et.al. need to start fearing us a lot more!
The following press release by Jim DeMint unveils his brilliant plan of seeking an Amendment to the United States Constitution which will set term limits for U. S. Senators and U.S. Representatives. In a very lucid and concise fashion he presents a very convincing case for this action.
November 10, 2009 - WASHINGTON, D.C. - Today, U.S. Senator Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina) introduced an amendment to the United States Constitution that would apply term limits to all members of Congress, limiting U.S. Representatives to three terms and U.S. Senators to two terms in office. The amendment is cosponsored by U.S. Senators Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), and Sam Brownback (R-Kansas). As an amendment to the Constitution, it would require a two-thirds majority vote approval in the House and Senate and must be ratified by three-fourths of the states.
"Americans know real change in Washington will never happen until we end the era of permanent politicians," said Senator DeMint. "As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buyoff special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork – in short, amassing their own power. I have come to realize that if we want to change the policies coming out of Congress, we must change the process itself. Over the last 20 years, Washington politicians have been reelected about 90% of the time because the system is heavily tilted in favor of incumbents. If we really want to put an end to business as usual, we’ve got to have new leaders coming to Washington instead of rearranging the deck chairs as the ship goes down.”
Senator Coburn added, “The best way to ensure we are truly a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, is to replace the career politicians in Washington with citizen legislators who care more about the next generation than their next election. The power of incumbency has created an almost insurmountable advantage for Washington politicians. Incumbency allows politicians to raise millions of dollars in campaign funds in exchange for earmarks. Incumbency gives Congress the power to raise money for itself – Congress just approved itself an increase of nearly $250 million from the U.S. Treasury that members will spend to promote themselves. Finally, with redistricting incumbents can choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. Term limits is the best way to break this cycle.”
“Some say only long-serving, seasoned elites have the skills to lead the people, but that’s exactly what we have today and how do you think it’s working out for us?” said Senator DeMint. “It wasn’t the ‘people’ who gave us a $12 trillion debt, an IRS tax code seven times longer than the Bible, over 1,700 departments of the federal government, trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see, $100 trillion long-term shortfall in Social Security and Medicare, the Wall Street and auto bailouts, and the pending health care takeover.
“This nation can no longer afford these entrenched men and women who enjoy lives of luxury wholly insulated from the consequences of their major policy failures.
“I want to be clear: demanding that reformers adopt self-imposed term limits is a recipe for self-defeat on this issue. We lost the battle for term limits after the 1994 Republican Contract with America because we forced our best advocates for reform to go home, while the big-spending career politicians waited them out. We must have term limits for all or term limits will never succeed. Only when we apply the same rules to all will we be able to enact vital bipartisan reforms.
“Term limits will increase legislative turnover, expand the field of candidates who run for office, and instill transparency and accountability in our public officials. By ratifying this amendment, we can end the tremendous advantage enjoyed by incumbents in Washington, break long-lasting ties to special interests and lobbyists, and transform Congress from the body of career politicians that it has become, to a chamber of true citizen legislators,” said Senator DeMint.
Obama is using the White House as a venue for far left, anti-American influence peddling and for accruing greater power for the imposition of radical ideology on Americans. That is, of course, when Obama is there and not away playing golf or at another Democratic political fundraising event.
According to the intentionally limited information released by the Obama Administration regarding White House visitors, Andy Stern who is president of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), has visited at least 22 times already. The far left anti-American billionaire George Soros, of Moveon.org and more fame, has been there at least twice already.
Meanwhile, General Stanley McChrystal, who is the U.S. commander for our troops in Afghanistan and who more than two months ago had recommended an increase of troops there if we are to stand a chance to win the conflict, can’t seem to get an appointment with Obama. Our courageous troops are being killed or maimed in the conflict while Obama attends to his pleasures and anti-American ideologies.
We have mentioned numerous times that while the Democrats aver that the Obamanocare/Pelosicare legislation is just about healthcare reform, it unequivocally isn’t. This is an indisputable unconstitutional theft of Americans’ healthcare rights and choices as well as their hard earned income. It is a government confiscation of another 17% of our GDP as well as a payback for political support of the Democrats to labor unions and trial attorneys in particular.
Buried within an even more bloated 1900 page document is a proviso in Section 2531 which rewards trial attorneys by creating disincentives for states that are attempting or have already implemented laws aimed at reducing extortionist medical-legal settlements.
"A state is not eligible for the incentive payments if that state puts a law on the books that limits attorneys' fees or imposes caps on damages."
Characterizing this, IBD note that “… states that have the “nerve” to rein in frivolous medical malpractice lawsuits — and that's 85% of them, according to a Harvard study — would be punished if they also established medical courts where health care experts, rather than untrained juries, settle injury disputes based on actual medical science.”
Once again, the Democrats are legislating what is in their best interest and not what is best for all Americans.
According to sources, Obama’s most frequent visitor to the White House is none other than Andy Stern who is the president of the SEIU (Service Employees International Union). This should surprise few people given the quasi(?) corrupt, mutually beneficial role each has had for the other particularly regarding power, influence and money. Like a vast majority of Obama’s personally selected radical, America hating czars and his long history of associations with far-left radicals and terrorists, Stern is ideologically compatible.
Unfortunately, this is another piece of the puzzle for this far left cabal that can further facilitate its goals of transforming America into essentially a socialist/communist “USSA”.
It goes without saying that the goals and ideology of these all of these individuals are extremely bad for America. We must stop them and reverse course before it is too late or there will ultimately be a very high price to pay.
“The latest villain in the politicians' demagogic fantasyland is private health insurance. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused private insurers of making "immoral profits." And they're a prime target for taxes to pay for the health care revolution Congress and the White House have planned.
But in fact, as we pointed out recently in these pages, this is an industry that actually lags many others in the U.S. economy. Plenty of other sectors of private industry are doing far better.
And some of the things Washington has planned — in particular a "public option" — would leave private insurers bankrupt.”
The following editorial exposes the fallacy of the belief that insurance companies are reaping exorbitant profits. It also should serve as a warning that no dissenting or politically out of favor individual, group or industry is exempt from the demagoguery and the vicious, punitive and morally corrupt attacks by an ever more powerful neo-fascist government.
An article published in the Los Angeles Times entitled "Obama aide had stint at Freddie" exposed and explored Rahms Emanuel's employment on Freddie Mac's Board of Director's during a period that ultimately led to its collapse. His was a patronage appointment and the remuneration for his brief period was scandalous. Of course, this story has remained largely hidden. Thwarting further investigations is the Obama Administration's arrogant and unwarranted refusal to release notes from Freddie Mac board meetings despite requests through the Freedom of Information Act. This is not a matter of national security ... only a risk to another corrupt, arrogant, power hungry member of his inner circle.
"Obama aide had stint at Freddie"by Bob Secter and Andrew Zajac
Before its portfolio of bad loans helped trigger the housing crisis, mortgage giant Freddie Mac was the focus of a major accounting scandal that led to a management shake-up, huge fines and scalding condemnation of passive directors.
One of those board members was Rahm Emanuel, now chief of staff to President Obama. Emanuel earned at least $320,000 for his 14-month stint at Freddie Mac.
Emanuel plays a critical role in addressing the nation's mortgage woes and fulfilling the administration's pledge to impose responsibility on the financial world -- the type of responsibility that appeared to be absent at Freddie Mac.
Emanuel, 49, is a veteran Democratic strategist and fundraiser who served three terms in the U.S. House after helping elect President Clinton and serving as his White House political director. The Freddie Mac money was part of $16 million that Emanuel earned in three years as an investment banker a decade ago.
Clinton appointed him to the Freddie Mac board in February 2000.
The board met no more than six times a year. Unlike most directors, Emanuel was not assigned to any of the board's working committees, according to company proxy statements. A spokeswoman for Emanuel disputed that.
Emanuel and other new directors qualified for more than $300,000 in stock and options plus a $20,000 annual fee, records indicate.
During Emanuel's stint on the board, Freddie Mac executives told the board of a plan to use accounting techniques to maximize profits that the government-chartered firm was reaping from risky investments, a 2003 investigative report found.
The report by Armando Falcon Jr., director of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, found that the goal was to shift earnings into the future, ensuring that Freddie Mac would appear profitable for years. Falcon noted that this action boosted executives' subsequent annual bonuses.
Falcon criticized the board for its acquiescence, saying it "became complacent" and "failed to make adequate inquiries of management and obtain sufficient information upon which to make decisions." His criticism was little noticed at the time.
The ensuing scandal forced Freddie Mac to restate $5 billion in earnings and pay $585 million in fines and legal settlements.
Many of those same risky investment practices eventually brought the firm to the brink of insolvency and led to its seizure last year. The Bush administration pledged to inject up to $100 billion to keep the firm afloat, and the Obama administration has doubled that commitment.
Freddie Mac reported recently that it lost $50 billion in 2008. So far it has tapped $14 billion of the government's guarantee and said it soon would need an additional $30 billion to keep operating.
Like its larger government-chartered cousin, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac was created by Congress to promote home ownership, though both are private corporations with shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The two firms hold stakes in half the nation's residential mortgages.
Because of Freddie's federal charter, the board in Emanuel's day was a hybrid of directors elected by shareholders and those appointed by the president.
In his final year in office, Clinton tapped three pals: Emanuel, Washington lobbyist James Free and Harold Ickes, a former White House aide instrumental in Hillary Rodham Clinton's initial Senate campaign. Free's appointment was for four months and Ickes' for three months.
Falcon found that presidential appointees played no "meaningful role" in overseeing the company and recommended that their positions be eliminated.
Former President George W. Bush voluntarily stopped making such appointments after Falcon's assessment of their uselessness.
John Coffee, a law professor and expert on corporate governance at Columbia University, said the financial crisis at Freddie Mac was years in the making and fueled by chronically weak oversight by the directors. The presence of presidential appointees on the board didn't help, he added.
"You know there was a patronage system, and these people were only going to serve a short time," Coffee said. "That's why [they] get the stock up front."
Financial disclosure statements that are required of U.S. House members show Emanuel made at least $320,000 from his time at Freddie Mac. Two years after leaving the firm, Emanuel reported an additional sale of Freddie stock worth between $100,001 and $250,000.
Sarah Feinberg, a spokeswoman for Emanuel, said there was no conflict between his stint at Freddie Mac and Obama's vow to restore confidence in financial institutions and the executives who run them. At the same time, Feinberg said, Emanuel now agrees that presidential appointees to the Freddie Mac board "are unnecessary and don't have long enough terms to make a difference."
In an interview, Falcon said that the Freddie board did most of its work in committees. Proxy statements that detailed committee assignments showed none for Emanuel, Free or Ickes during the time they served in 2000 or 2001. Most other directors carried two committee assignments each.
But Feinberg said she believed Emanuel served on committees that oversaw Freddie Mac's investment strategies and mortgage purchase activities. She acknowledged she had no documents to back up that assertion.
The Obama administration rejected a Tribune request under the Freedom of Information Act to review Freddie Mac board minutes and correspondence during Emanuel's time as a director. The documents, obtained by Falcon for his investigation, were "commercial information" exempt from disclosure, according to a lawyer for the Federal Housing Finance Agency.
Emanuel's board term expired in May 2001, and soon after he launched his congressional bid. He joined the House in January 2003 and was named to the Financial Services Committee, where he also sat on the subcommittee that oversaw Freddie Mac. A few months later, longtime Chief Executive Leland Brendsel was forced out and the committee and subcommittee launched hearings to sort out the situation. Emanuel skipped every hearing, congressional records indicate.
Feinberg said Emanuel recused himself "from deliberations related to Freddie Mac to avoid even the appearance of favoritism, impropriety, or a conflict of interest."
The following op-ed was written by well respected physician, Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. In it, Dr. Vliet delineates her vehement opposition to the present healthcare reform.
In the 2008 campaign, we heard healthcare in this country is “broken” and must be “reformed.” We heard “healthcare reform” would be the signature piece of an Obama Presidency. We were promised no new taxes on anyone earning less than $250,000 per year. We heard promises of transparency in government. We heard promises of a White House that would listen to all. Now that President Obama and a Democratic majority are in office, what have we gotten?
The healthcare proposals have become a massive power grab to control your money, your health options, your businesses, your liberty, and ultimately your life. It is not about insuring the poor.We already have Medicaid to cover the poor.
What the Democratic majority is doing to healthcare in this country is a crime. Punishment won’t fall on Congress and the President, who are excluded from the healthcare proposals. Punishment falls on the American people, especially the elderly.
Word of a new “stealth” strategy to ram healthcare “reform” through the Senate raises even more cause for alarm and adds to the crime of this massive power grab. The plan appears to be for Senator Majority Leader Reid to merge the two Senate bills that have passed out of committee, and attach them as an amendment to a House TARP bill, already passed by the House but curiously gathering dust in the Senate. Once the Senate votes on this “TARP” bill with the healthcare amendment tucked neatly inside, the healthcare punishment is a “done deal” without further debate. Such an abuse of power and due process would be an unforgiveable crime against the American people, perpetrated by the very people elected to represent us.
Instead of “health insurance for all,” the House and Senate healthcare bills have become punishment for all. Here is the list of Americans who face the healthcare “reform” punishment:
- Punishment for the sick. Those who have medical expenses each year will no longer beable to deduct those expenses on taxes until the expenses reach 10% of adjusted gross income (AGI). The current deduction is set at expenses above 7.5% of AGI, so the Senate plan now ADDS a 2.5% tax on those who are already paying out of pocket for medical expenses. Clearly, if someone is spending more than 7.5% on medical costs,that person is ill. The Senate bill makes the sick even sicker from the stress of having to pay more taxes!
- Punishment for the elderly. Medicare cuts of 404 BILLION is the latest figure released by the Senate; earlier the White House budget office said $500 Billion – more than a full year’s Medicare budget – would have to be cut from Medicare. How can anyone begin to think these cuts will not penalize the elderly by delaying, rationing, or denying treatment?
- Punishment for young people. Young healthy people who do not buy government mandated insurance will be punished with the form of a excise tax – reported amounts have been from $1900 to $3800 per person.
- Punishment for anyone not paying the excise tax. The IRS fine for non-payment of tax can be $25,000 and a year in jail. So those who are punished by the new tax risk being accused of a tax crime if they don’t buy government-mandated insurance and who don’t pay the penalty tax.
- Punishment for insurance companies. Companies providing “generous health insurance plans” will be hit with a 35% tax.
- Punishment for consumers who buy “generous” health insurance policies, as the tax on insurance companies is passed on to purchasers.
- Punishment for those who buy their own health insurance…a new 40% tax. Does it really make sense to punish the responsible people who take care of their own healthcare bills?
- Punishment for low income seniors, Hispanics, and Blacks who will lose their Medicare Advantage program under the new proposals.
- Punishment for those with Health Savings Accounts – HSAs will be extinct.
- Punishment for specialists who serve mainly elderly patients, such as cardiologists and oncologists. Such specialists are slated to have their reimbursements for services slashed by 44% under the Senate bill.
- Punishment for medical device makers in the form of new taxes (a tax that will be passed on to consumers).
- Punishment for all doctors, who are required to purchase expensive new computersystems and software to convert to Electronic Medical Records to meet the 2014 mandates in the Stimulus Bill.
- Punishment for those who value their medical privacy. The Stimulus Bill requires all physicians, beginning in 2014, to send patients’ medical records directly to the federal health czar without further permission from patients.
- Punishment for all 50 State governments. Already running at a deficit with the recession, State governments face catastrophic increases in costs with Medicaid costs being shifted to them by the Federal government under the new proposals.
- Punishment for everyone, due to Speaker Pelosi’s proposal for a National Sales Tax (also called a VAT) to pay for healthcare reform. This new tax would hit everyone hard in a recession, and would be on TOP of existing state and local sales taxes.
- Punishments for all. All, that is, except the exempted elite: members of Congress, the President and his family, trial lawyers, and Unions (SEIU, AFL-CIO, and others). The exempted elite retain their private care while becoming the very ones who force more taxes, penalties, higher costs as punishment on the rest of us.
This reminds me of the Soviet Union when I visited there in 1974 and 1975. The Soviet ruling elite were the only ones with cars, comfortable apartments…and access to the best healthcare.
I understand at a personal and professional level the perils of government-run healthcare. I have patients in my practice who have come many countries with government run healthcare that doesn’t address women’s unique health needs. I live in a state with a large Native American population, whose healthcare under the Indian Health Service, run by the federal government, has been abysmal. I have personally had an emergency hospitalization in England. I am walking today because I had the best spine surgery care in the world at Johns Hopkins. If I had lived in Britain, or Canada, or Europe and had to wait for MRIs and surgery, I would paralyzed from the neck down.
I will never agree that nationalized healthcare anywhere provides better quality of care than we have in the United States. I am not alone. Recent polls by different organizations have found that 80-90% of M.D.’s and D.O.’s oppose government-controlled healthcare.
Don’t be fooled by the American Medical Associations endorsement of Obamacare. Only 17% of practicing physicians actually belong to the AMA. Last week’s “white coat” photo op at the White House was a carefully selected group of 2008 campaign donors “Doctors for Obama.” They were NOT anymore representative of practicing physicians across this country than the AMA.
The American people should be even more alarmed by a recent Investors Business Daily poll: 45% of doctors who responded said they would retire or resign from medicine rather than practice medicine under government control. Who will take care of patients then?
The proposed healthcare plans are the most massive transfer of power to the executive branch of government that has ever occurred or has even been contemplated. This concentration of power in the executive branch violates the Constitutional requirement for balance of power, and for separation of powers among the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of government.
This crime against the American people is far worse than the Stamp Act levied by King George.
That was the final straw that set off the first American Revolution.
The Nevada Secretary of State, Ross Miller who is a Democrat, revealed to Eric Shawn on FOX News that ACORN was hiring convicts who were still incarcerated. Some of these individuals were convicted of identity theft yet their hob was to be canvassing for voters. This is akin to having a sexual predator partying with a room full of provocatively attired cheerleaders who have been plied with alcohol.
With evidence discovered in ACORN offices, officials in Nevada believe this corrupt practices involved individuals who were much higher up in ACORN. They also believe that there is more than sufficient evidence to obtain convictions.
We can see that this organization and its culture are inherently corrupt from top to bottom and across the country. Their illicit partisan activities including voter fraud and ballot stuffing are to be condemned in particular because they can ultimately affect elections and with it, our rights. Yet despite all of this known information, the Democrats who are the beneficiaries of the group’s support, resolutely persist in sending lewd amount of tax dollars to this group. Unbelievably, the stimulus bill that was approved earlier this year allocated right billion dollars to ACORN!
Video: ACORN Hired People "Still In Prison" For ID Theft
A Republican state legislator released documents September 29th which he alleges reveal that the community-organizing group ACORN focused on helping Democrats in three legislative races in the November 2008 election and had developed a game plan to "take power” in Oklahoma within five years.
The documents, which include legislative district maps and various forms, were recovered from computers abandoned by ACORN workers in Oklahoma City, said Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City. Also found was a script apparently used in Houston to go door-to-door to encourage voters to vote for Barack Obama in November 2008.
We wonder how many elections ACORN has corruptly and illegally affected in addition to its widespread illicit activities.
There has been a tremendous amount of information revealed recently by a few enterprising and brave private citizens conducting undercover sting operations that detailed the pervasive and extreme culture of corruption within ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). It was no secret that corrupt and illegal activities were being conducted by this large organization. However, because of their radical and left wing ideology, Congress and most of the media actively chose to ignore the group and even suppressed information especially as related to Obama’s association with them. Aside from Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and a few others at Fox News, their illicit activities have remained egregiously uninvestigated.
In her June 25th, 2008 Blog, Michelle Malkin presaged the publicity and notoriety that ACORN would be associated with particularly with regard to Barack Obama and his ascendancy on the national political scene. She wrote that: “This left-wing group takes in 40 percent of its revenues from American taxpayers — you and me — and has leveraged nearly four decades of government subsidies to fund affiliates that promote the welfare state and undermine capitalism and self-reliance, some of which have been implicated in perpetuating illegal immigration and encouraging voter fraud.”
With regard to the relationship with Obama, she noted that: “He cut his ideological teeth working with ACORN as a “community organizer” and legal representative. Naturally, ACORN’s political action committee has warmly endorsed his presidential candidacy. According to ACORN, Obama trained its Chicago members in leadership seminars; in turn, ACORN volunteers worked on his campaigns. Obama also sat on the boards of the Woods Fund and Joyce Foundation, both of which poured money into ACORN’s coffers. ACORN head Maude Hurd gushes that Obama is the candidate who “best understands and can affect change on the issues ACORN cares about” — like ensuring their massive pipeline to your hard-earned money.”
There is a pervasive “culture of corruption” and lack of ethics within the Democratic Party that is inexcusable, abhorrent and should not be tolerated. Even more egregious is the involvement of many high ranking members. For starters, there is Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) who obtained sweetheart mortgage deals from Countrywide Financial while he was Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Tim “TurboTax” Geithner became Secretary of the Treasury despite Congress knowing beforehand that he had filed several false tax returns. Then there are the other members of Obama’s Administration that were known tax cheats before their successful confirmations. The fact that Obama nominated these individuals knowing their ethical and legal failings is despicable and confirms his abject ethical “standards”.
Nancy Pelosi has been involved in many shady schemes including modification of legislation that exempted DelMonte Foods StarKist Tuna, which is based in her district, from minimum wage requirements for their workers at the same time her husband owned seventeen millions dollars worth of its stock. This is the quintessential conflict of interest case. A smaller potato in the scheme of things, ex-Representative William Jefferson, Democrat from Louisiana, was convicted in August of 11 of 16 counts of corruption including four on bribery, three counts for money laundering, three for of wire fraud and one for racketeering. As you may remember, he was the politician who was caught hiding $90,000 in his freezer.
The Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.) situation is even more perturbing as it involves years of known corruption, ethical violations and tax fraud. Despite this, he remains the Chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee. Pelosi and her ilk can’t find it in themselves to relieve him of his Chairmanship at minimum. The House Ethics Committee (an oxymoron) can’t seem to complete their investigation despite spending over a year’s time. His violations are so numerous and significant that even the New York Times and the Washington Post have called for his resignation. Wow!
It seems that the only priority that Congressional Democrats have regarding ethics and behavior is trying to investigate and censure or expel Representative Joe Wilson (R.- S.C.) for calling Obama (the liar) a liar during his speech on healthcare.
These same immoral, corrupt, power hungry and arrogant politicians expect us to trust them controlling our healthcare system among other issues? Hopefully, it will be a cold day in Hell before that happens!
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