Even with his own Party, it is all about Obama. He will throw Democrats under the bus in order to enact his legislation and ideologies.
Obama is a clear and present danger to most!
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We have been calling for impeachment of Obama for a long time for myriad reasons. He presents an unprecedented existential threat to the welfare and survival of America as we have known it in the past – founded on principles of liberty, freedom, equality, justice and individuality and with a non-intrusive government.
In fact, the primary motivation and impetus for the creation of this website was the realization of the threats and risks to a free America that Obama presented combined with a far-left radical Democrat juggernaut in the Senate and House of Representatives. Information needs to be disseminated so we can all be informed and aware of what is transpiring and act accordingly. As we have just recently learned regarding the media collusion in the Journolist scandal, such information has been egregiously manipulated, controlled and even suppressed to support a far-left agenda (and candidate in Obama). The “main stream” media has become a de facto political wing and propaganda source for the Democratic Party and hence, the functioning government.
This is an incredibly dangerous situation for us American citizens and for the survival of our Democracy.
In the following trenchant, thorough and convincing editorial written by Tom Tancredo, who was a five term member of Congress, he calls for the impeachment of Obama. He concisely sums up the immense danger that Obama presents to our country by stating that:
For the first time in American history, we have a man in the White House who consciously and brazenly disregards his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. That's why I say the greatest threat to our Constitution, our safety and our liberties, is internal. Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms.
If we can vote in enough Republicans to take over the House and Senate in November, then we will have what it takes to impeach Obama's - though we may also need to coax our elected officials to pursue this course of action.
The case for impeachment
Obama has violated his oath of office over immigration
Tom Tancredo July 22, 2010
Eleven years ago, like every citizen elected to serve in Congress or any person appointed to any federal position, I swore an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic."
I've always thought it significant that the Founders included domestic enemies in that oath of office. They thought liberty was as much at risk from threats within our borders as from outside, and French political thinker and historian Alexis de Tocqueville agreed with that warning.
In the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the greatest threat to our nation was clear - and foreign. While Islamic terrorism still represents the greatest external threat to America and American lives, the avowed program of the Obama regime has changed the picture in a fundamental way.
For the first time in American history, we have a man in the White House who consciously and brazenly disregards his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution. That's why I say the greatest threat to our Constitution, our safety and our liberties, is internal. Our president is an enemy of our Constitution, and, as such, he is a danger to our safety, our security and our personal freedoms.
Barack Obama is one of the most powerful presidents this nation has seen in generations. He is powerful because he is supported by large majorities in Congress, but, more importantly, because he does not feel constrained by the rule of law. Whether he is putting up the weakest possible defense of the Defense of Marriage Act despite the Justice Department's legal obligation to support existing law; disenfranchising Chrysler and GM bondholders in order to transfer billions of investor dollars to his supporters in the United Auto Workers; or implementing yet a third offshore oil-drilling moratorium even after two federal courts have thrown out two previous moratoriums, President Obama is determined to see things done his way regardless of obstacles. To Mr. Obama, the rule of law is a mere inconvenience to be ignored, overcome or "transcended" through international agreements or "norms."
Mr. Obama's paramount goal, as he so memorably put it during his campaign in 2008, is to "fundamentally transform America." He has not proposed improving America - he is intent on changing its most essential character. The words he has chosen to describe his goals are neither the words nor the motivation of just any liberal Democratic politician. This is the utopian, or rather dystopian, reverie of a dedicated Marxist - a dedicated Marxist who lives in the White House.
Because of the power he wields over budgets, the judiciary, national defense and even health care, his regime and his program are not just about changing public policy in the conventional sense. When one considers the combination of his stop-at-nothing attitude, his contempt for limited government, his appointment of judges who want to create law rather than interpret it - all of these make this president today's single greatest threat to the great experiment in freedom that is our republic.
Yes, Mr. Obama is a more serious threat to America than al Qaeda. We know that Osama bin Laden and followers want to kill us, but at least they are an outside force against whom we can offer our best defense. But when a dedicated enemy of the Constitution is working from the inside, we face a far more dangerous threat. Mr. Obama can accomplish with the stroke of his pen what bin Laden cannot accomplish with bombs and insurgents.
Mr. Obama's actions, not just his words, show the threat he poses. A level of government deficit spending unheard of since World War II and trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see represent an unacceptable threat to our economic security and our children's future. Mr. Obama could be the first president to guarantee that the next generation of Americans has a lower standard of living than their parents.
Mr. Obama's most egregious and brazen betrayal of our Constitution was his statement to Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, that the administration will not enforce security on our southern border because that would remove Republicans' desire to negotiate a "comprehensive" immigration bill. That is, to put it plainly, a decision that by any reasonable standard constitutes an impeachable offense against the Constitution. For partisan political advantage, he is willfully disregarding his obligation under Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution to protect states from foreign invasion.
There is no higher duty of the federal government and our elected representatives than to protect our nation from invasion. Multiple reports and testimony before Congress by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials have stated that a porous border with Mexico is "a path" terrorists will use if they can. Some would-be terrorists, including at least one associated with Hezbollah, already have. Recent reports of contacts between Hezbollah and Mexican drug cartels make it all but certain that terrorists intent on destroying us will come across our southwestern border. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for the administration to do everything in its power to keep Americans safe. Our safety is not a bargaining chip for another amnesty - or for any other political objective whatsoever.
Mr. Obama's refusal to live up to his own oath of office - which includes the duty to defend the United States against foreign invasion - requires senators and representatives to live up to their oaths. Members of Congress must defend our nation against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Today, that means bringing impeachment charges against Mr. Obama.
Tom Tancredo is a former member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and five-term member of Congress from Colorado. He serves as chairman of the Rocky Mountain Foundation.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jul/22/the-case-for-impeachment/
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Arizona’s new immigration law S.B. 1070, which has been relentlessly attacked by many liberals and the news media yet is overwhelmingly supported by Americans, is also serving as the prototype for immigration legislation in several other states as discussed below. Americans are sick and tired of the problems associated with illegal immigration: increased crime and violence, massive unreimbursed costs such as for healthcare, education, welfare, and the judicial system which are presently being paid by us through our tax dollars, burdens on our schools and even what is becoming a ubiquitous finding: bilingual signs and communications.
Despite this, the Obama Administration is fighting this law under the pretense that it necessarily requires “profiling”. This is not the true reason, however, as the legislation is essentially a replica of the federal law that adds controls to mitigate the “risk” of profiling. (Of course, liberals want to label “profiling” a racist action when in fact profiling represents the most logical, efficient and prudent way to detect what one is looking for which in this situation, are illegal aliens.)
Among the real reasons that Obama is against the law is for political purposes. He wants more of the Hispanic vote. As we have noted in previous posts, the fact that he would intentionally keep the border unsecured which also affords terrorists the ability to sneak into this country, is inexcusable, irresponsible, contemptuous and actions of what could be termed an anti-President.
Let’s reiterate. Obama resolutely refuses to secure our borders for personal political reasons which consequently places America in much greater jeopardy for future terrorism by allowing terrorist to infiltrate undetected into our country. This also financially burdens all 50 states (or in his mind, 57 states) and their citizens who have to bear all the attendant costs associated with these illegals which is estimated to be around $113 billion per year.
And one more thing. Ideology and narcissism aside, the Obama Administration and some liberal groups state that the cost of deporting the entire illegal alien population would be prohibitively expensive – estimated to be $285 billion over 5 years. The cost for them staying here during these 5 years is $565 billion ($113 billion per year times 5 years).
Interesting! We could actually save $280 billion over these five years if these illegal immigrants were sent back where they came from. That is $56 billion per year in net savings which would then jump to more than $113 billion per year after these first 5 years.
No wonder the federal government is against this: it would save us money instead of being a money losing proposition which the Democrats feel more comfortable with!
Arizona Immigration Law Emerges as Model for Other States
July 7, 2010
Arizona’s immigration law, considered controversial by some and under legal assault by the Obama administration, is fast emerging as a popular model in other states where illegal immigration is a hot-button issue.
And while protests against the law have drawn thousands to marches across the country, polls have consistently showed a majority of Americans favor the get-tough approach against illegal immigration.
At least three other states could pass similar legislation next year, and in many others, like Florida, GOP candidates are filming campaign ads and pushing debates favoring the law.
Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah have each taken steps against illegal immigration, and politicians in the three states are advocating further measures when their legislatures reconvene early next year, according to The Washington Post.
Meanwhile, lawmakers in at least 14 other states drew up bills that permit police officers to question anyone they suspect of being in the county illegally – the core issue of the Arizona law.
But it’s an open question in many of those states whether these bills would make it past sitting governors, many of whom are Democrats. In Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah, however, political factors improve the chances that state legislatures could follow Arizona's lead when they convene in 2011, according to the Post.
Oklahoma was actually the first state, not Arizona, to adopt legislation that was the toughest ever against undocumented immigrants. That happened in 2007. The measure made it a felony to knowingly provide transport or shelter to an illegal immigrant, and blocked illegal immigrants from obtaining driver's licenses and tuition.
The lawmaker responsible for the measure, Republican state Rep. Randy Terrill, has said he wants to go even further with another bill next year that would seize property from businesses that knowingly employ undocumented immigrants.
Terrill cited the arrest of an alleged Mexican drug cartel member last week as evidence that an "Arizona-plus" measure is needed urgently. He said the effect of Arizona's law had been to push illegal immigrants "straight down Interstate 40" toward Oklahoma, according to the Post.
In South Carolina, GOP Gov. Mark Sanford touted a comprehensive set of new measures against illegal immigration as the strictest yet when he signed it into law in 2008. The measure forced businesses to check the immigration status of their workers.
Harboring and transporting illegal immigrants also became a state crime. State lawmakers want to build on it and were quick this year to draw up an Arizona-style bill, introducing it less than a week after the Arizona measure had been signed.
"We had a bill that was introduced this year that was very similar to the final version of the Arizona legislation. It was too late for us to move on it, but I have every expectation a new bill will be introduced in January," Republican state Sen. Larry Martin told the Post.
"As long as an officer has a lawful reason to question someone, and then a suspicion develops [that] they are an undocumented person, then I think our law enforcement folks ought to be able to pursue that," he said.
In Utah, pro-immigrant advocates fear that new legislation clamping down on illegal immigration is inevitable next year. Several lawmakers there are advocating a crackdown, according to the Post.
On paper, Arizona's controversial new immigration law is not that different from the federal version. But the key difference is this: Arizona wants every illegal immigrant caught and deported. The federal government says treating all 11 million of the nation's illegal immigrants as criminals would overwhelm the system.
In its lawsuit challenging the Arizona law, the Justice Department says its policy is to focus on dangerous immigrants: gang members, drug traffickers, threats to national security. Law-abiding immigrants without documentation would largely be left alone.
Homeland Security officials say the government cannot possibly find, arrest and deport everyone who is here illegally. And trying to do so would also upset a balance crafted by Congress that takes into account humanitarian interests and foreign relations.
But proponents of the Arizona solution insist that's no reason not to try. And they say the state's toughest-in-the-nation law is a reasonable way to start.
"If it's really the case that they don't have enough resources to enforce the laws that Congress has passed, it would seem it's incumbent on them to go back to Congress and ask for more resources," said Steven Camarota, research director at the center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors stricter enforcement of immigration laws. "But since they don't do that, it sort of undermines the argument."
Arizona's new law is nearly identical to federal immigration law. At issue is how it is enforced. The federal government says the state law is unconstitutional because it usurps federal authority to protect U.S. borders and American citizens. Arizona counters that the federal government is not doing its job, which forces state officials to step in.
State lawmakers argue that the federal government already enlists local authorities to identify illegal immigrants who have been arrested for other crimes. The new law, they say, just extends that to police patrols.
The federal government says the law goes too far by making it a state crime to be in Arizona illegally and requiring police to question the immigration status of anyone they encounter who is believed to be undocumented.
The furor over the Arizona law is overblown, Camarota said Wednesday. It does not envision mass deportations or roundups, just a slow but steady pressure on illegal immigrants to leave Arizona — either for their home countries or for another state.
The number of illegal immigrants in the country fell for the first time this decade in 2007, and dropped another 800,000 between 2008 and 2009, primarily due to the recession and increased enforcement efforts.
As of January 2009, an estimated 10.8 million people were in the country illegally, 1 million less than the 2007 peak, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Deportations have been increasing, climbing from 185,944 in 2007 to 387,790 last year.
Many critics argue the federal government cannot selectively enforce immigration law, but it's common for law enforcement at all levels to prioritize. Small-time pot dealers do not receive the same level of investigation or prosecution as big-time heroin traffickers. The government has also tolerated medical marijuana in 14 states.
But Arizona's law has brought selective enforcement — and the differences that exist even among police agencies — into clearer focus.
Those differences are stark, even in the Phoenix metro area. Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris says in an affidavit supporting the federal suit that he will probably have to move detectives focused on violent crime to street patrol because regular officers will be busy enforcing Arizona's new law.
But Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has been at the forefront of the effort to empower local authorities to enforce immigration laws, routinely assigns deputies to crime sweeps where they target illegal immigrants.
The federal government is worried that other states will follow Arizona's lead, overwhelming federal agencies with non-criminal illegal immigrants who will cost the government millions to deport.
A March study by the liberal Center for American Progress estimated that deporting the entire illegal immigration population and securing the borders would cost $285 billion over five years.
In the government lawsuit, officials with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection declared they will be forced to shift resources from major cases to minor ones if the law goes into effect as scheduled on July 29.
Five other lawsuits, filed by immigrant-rights groups, the American Civil Liberties Union and individuals, are already before a federal judge in Phoenix. The federal challenge filed Tuesday is expected to be transferred to the same judge, who has hearings set for next week on requests to block the law from taking effect.
The federal lawsuit focuses on a core constitutional concern — balancing power between the states and the federal government. More specifically, the issue centers on the long-running "pre-emption" legal argument that says federal law trumps state law.
The government sidestepped concerns about the potential for racial profiling and civil rights violations most often raised by immigration advocates. Experts said those are weaker arguments that do not belong in a federal legal challenge.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this story.
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/US-Immigration-Enforcement-Lawsuit/2010/07/07/id/364048
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The estimated costs of illegal immigration to the American people annually is $113 billion per year - not chump change. This burden is borne unwillingly by the taxpayer and by definition could be considered to be indentured servitude or slavery. Simply put, we are forced to work to benefit the welfare of someone else, without choice.
Why should we be mandated to pay the costs of individuals who are not citizens here, have broken the law, increased the crime rate, have a deleterious effect on the education of our citizens and then have the audacity to call us racist and intolerant?
In many states, the cost of services for them exceeds the budget shortfall. That is, get rid of these costs and these states will be able close their budget deficits, be more fiscally sound and maybe even reduce the tax rate.
Obama and Congressional Democrats have abdicated their responsibility to resolve this problem in order to gain maximal political benefit (from voters of the Hispanic community). They need to be voted out of office this coming November.
Illegal Immigration Costs U.S. $113 Billion a Year, Study Finds
Ed Barnes FoxNews.com July 06, 2010
The cost of harboring illegal immigrants in the United States is a staggering $113 billion a year -- an average of $1,117 for every “native-headed” household in America -- according to a study conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
The study, a copy of which was provided to FoxNews.com, “is the first and most detailed look at the costs of illegal immigration ever done,” says Bob Dane, director of communications at FAIR, a conservative organization that seeks to end almost all immigration to the U.S.
FAIR's opponents in the bitter immigration debate describe the organization as "extremist," though it is regularly called upon to testify before Congress.
Groups that support immigration reform immediately attacked FAIR's report and pointed out that it is the polar opposite of the Perryman Report, a 2008 study that found illegal immigration was actually a boon to the American economy. It estimated that illegal immigrants add $245 billion in Gross Domestic Product to the economy and account for 2.8 million jobs.
The FAIR report comes as President Obama moves immigration reform to the top of his agenda, and it is likely to be a rallying point for those who oppose the president. At a speech Thursday at American University in Washington, D.C., Obama argued that the entire immigration system is broken and needs sweeping reforms. Among the changes he said are needed is "a path for [farm] workers to earn legal status," which the president's critics called an opening for a new amnesty program.
FAIR's report argues that there are two choices in the immigration debate: “One choice is pursuing a strategy that discourages future illegal migration and increasingly diminishes the current illegal alien population through denial of job opportunities and deportations. The other choice,” it says, “would repeat the unfortunate decision made in 1986 to adopt an amnesty that invited continued illegal migration.”
The report states that an amnesty program wouldn’t appreciably increase tax revenue and would cost massive amounts in Social Security and public assistance expenses. An amnesty “would therefore be an accentuation of the already enormous fiscal burden,” the report concludes.
The single largest cost to the government of illegal immigration, according to the report, is an estimated $52 billion spent on schooling the children of illegals. “Nearly all those costs are absorbed by state and local governments,’ the report states.
Moreover, the study’s breakdown of costs on a state-by-state basis shows that in states with the largest number of illegals, the costs of illegal immigration are often greater than current, crippling budget deficits. In Texas, for example, the additional cost of immigration, $16.4 billion, is equal to the state’s current budget deficit; in California the additional cost of illegal immigration, $21.8 billion, is $8 billion more than the state’s current budget deficit of $13.8 billion; and in New York, the $6.8 billion deficit is roughly two-thirds the $9.5 billion yearly cost of its illegal population, according to Jack Martin, the researcher who completed the study.
"The most important finding of the study is the enormous cost to state and local governments due to lack of enforcement of our immigration laws,” Martin wrote.
The report found that the federal government paid $28.6 billion in illegal related costs, and state and local governments paid $84.2 billion on an estimated 13 million undocumented residents. In his speech, Obama estimated that there are 11 million.
But FAIR's critics said the report wrongly included American-born children of undocumented workers in its study.
“The single biggest 'expense' it attributes to unauthorized immigrants is the education of their children, yet most of these children are native-born, U.S. citizens who will grow up to be taxpaying adults," said Walter Ewing, a senior researcher at the American Immigration Council. "It is disingenuous to count the cost of investing in the education of these children, so that they will earn higher incomes and pay more in taxes when they are adults, as if it were nothing more than a cost incurred by their parents."
He added that “the report fails to account for the purchasing power of unauthorized consumers, which supports U.S. businesses and U.S. jobs” and that it “ignores the value added to the U.S. economy by unauthorized workers, particularly in the service sector.”
Martin said FAIR expected that criticism, but that because the children are a direct result of illegal immigration, their inclusion was both fair and reasonable.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/07/02/immigration-costs-fair-amnesty-educations-costs-reform/
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Andrew Klavan discusses DE or Democrat Embarrassment, a malady that affected around 70 million voters during the Presidential election.
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"Remember in November"
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This is Democratic Congressman Pete Stark of California
He is just one more example of the arrogance, condescension and disdain that the Democrats have for the American people. They comport themselves as royalty and treat the public as guttersnipes.
This must not be tolerated by us. We need to clean house of these cancers - starting in November.
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The above image, posted on www.imaksim.com, captures the essence of the depravity and arrogance (with humor), that suffuses our government under total Democrat control.
For the large interactive image with descriptions, click here
URL http://www.imaksim.com/large/128-party.html
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In another example of unprecedented government intrusion and control in our life, Congressional Democrats have allowed the EPA to have unprecedented powers that would, in essence, regulate and control our lives and habits employing their specious claim that CO2 is a pollutant. This is a disingenuous, surreptitious and depraved means to enact Cap and Trade without the necessary votes and without the detrimental appellation.
This is a direct attack on our freedoms, wealth, and livelihoods and could cost the United States trillions of dollars.
It is just another example of why it is extremely imperative that Republicans take control of the House and Senate in November – to revoke the EPA’s unfettered powers.
Cap-And-Traitors
Investors Business Daily 06/11/2010
Politics: The Senate just claimed the title of the world's most delusional body by refusing to strip unelected EPA bureaucrats of the power to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. This was the day freedom died.
One wonders why we have a Congress at all. The 53 profiles in cowardice that could not get a cap-and-tax bill through the U.S. Senate voted Thursday to let the Environmental Protection Agency keep the unprecedented power Congress did not expressly give it. It is power that the EPA arrogated to itself through regulation to control every aspect of the American economy and our very lives.
This country was born over anger at taxation without representation. Regulation without representation may spark another revolt come November. The Tea Party movement began precisely because of such arrogant disregard for the wishes of the American people. Unlike health care reform, this time the cowardly lions of the Senate couldn't even do it themselves and ceded their authority to the EPA.
It was only a motion to proceed to consideration of Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski's resolution (S.J. Res. 26) which, under a forgotten provision of the Contract With America, lets legislators veto a "major rule" by any regulatory agency within 60 days of publication. It needed just 51 votes; it got 47.
All 41 Republicans, including newbie Scott Brown of Massachusetts, voted not to shred the Constitution. The motion attracted, for various reasons, the votes of six Democrats — Mary Landrieu, Blanche Lincoln, Ben Nelson, Mark Pryor, the departing Evan Bayh and even Jay Rockefeller, who for once chose jobs over ideology.
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin accused the Republicans of choosing "political science over the real science," even after the EPA's junk science based on the manipulation of data by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been exposed as a manufactured fraud.
The case for climate change has collapsed — a fact recognized, finally, by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who, with Democrat John Kerry and independent Joseph Lieberman, once hoped to work out some kind of compromise legislation with a token nod to domestic energy production.
Last week, Graham told reporters he would vote against the climate bill he helped author. "The science about global warming has changed," Graham told reporters Wednesday on why he was backing an energy bill by Sen. Dick Lugar. "I think they've oversold this stuff, quite frankly. I think they've been alarmist and the science is in question."
Hardly a profile in courage, since the legislation wasn't going anywhere, but welcome aboard nonetheless. The science behind cap-and-trade is not only in question, it's nonexistent. The Earth is demonstrably cooling, and the trend will likely continue for decades, according to scientists who don't tamper with the data.
So delusional are Senate Democrats that California's Barbara Boxer, in trying to advance her own failed cap-and-tax bill, said on the Senate floor: "I'm going to put in the record ... a host of quotes from our national security experts who tell us that carbon pollution leading to climate change will be over the next 20 years the leading cause of conflict, putting our troops in harm's way." So, forget that Iranian nuke.
This is a Congress full of hypocrites who complain about executive branch power under Republicans but are willing to give the EPA unprecedented power because they don't have the votes for cap-and-trade. "Who elected the Environmental Protection Agency?" asked Wyoming Republican John Barrasso. It is a question we, and the voters, ask too.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/537154/201006111858/Cap-And-Traitors.aspx
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As Investors Business Daily stated the case:
“A Mexican cartel plots to blow up a dam — in Texas! Another pack of Mexican terrorists takes cash from Hugo Chavez. And what is Washington wringing its hands about? Why, racism in Arizona.”
We suspect that a more immigration reform would be addressed quite expeditiously, responsibly and respectfully if the object of Mexican cartel’s terrorism acts were instead the White House and Congress. Instead, Obama and the Democrats are using the issue to divide the nation and corruptly obtain votes from the Hispanic community.
Bordering Disaster
Investors Business Daily Posted 06/04/2010
National Security: A Mexican cartel plots to blow up a dam — in Texas! Another pack of Mexican terrorists takes cash from Hugo Chavez. And what is Washington wringing its hands about? Why, racism in Arizona.
If still more proof is needed that the border needs to be secured, the latest threats emerging from Mexico should do the trick. Together, they signal that the country's war could advance to a more savage stage.
Last month, the Los Zetas paramilitary drug cartel tried to blow up the Falcon Dam near Zapata, Texas, on the Rio Grande River. The motive was to destroy a smuggling route controlled by the rival Gulf Cartel. Had it succeeded, 534 billion gallons of water could have been unleashed onto a region of 4 million people.
The plot was primitive, and U.S. lawmen took preemptive steps to foil it. But it showed motive, and the threat remains.
On Friday, Texas Gov. Rick Perry called it a reminder that more federal resources are needed to secure the border. Perry said he hoped he never had to tell U.S. officials "we told you so" after a major attack.
Moreover, the threat is no longer just over smuggling routes. Last Tuesday, the Washington Examiner quoted Mexican and U.S. intelligence sources as saying Mexico's Ejercito Popular Revolucionario (EPR), a Marxist terror organization aligned with drug cartels, is secretly receiving funds from Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.
The group seeks to overthrow the Mexican government while engaging in drug trafficking, much as the FARC guerrillas do in Colombia. What's disturbing here is not just EPR's growing ties to the drug trade — which in time could lead to an alliance with the Zetas. It's the threat to Mexico's democracy, as well as the group's expertise in destroying infrastructure like gas lines, which EPR did in 2007.
FARC itself has also begun operating in Mexico, cutting out drug trafficking middlemen to forge closer ties with Mexico's cartels. StrategyPage, an intelligence forecaster, warned that FARC could begin launching attacks against the U.S. from Mexico in an effort to stop the U.S. from helping Colombia in its war on drugs back home.
These blood-chilling scenarios aren't fantasies. They are signs of an emerging threat that gets little attention from U.S. lawmakers. Instead of focusing on making the border secure, they play partisan political games, pandering to potential voting blocs by dangling amnesty in front of illegal immigrants, grandstanding against Arizona's effort to enforce federal law and coming up with one excuse after another for not erecting a border fence.
As illegal armed groups plot to blow up infrastructure even in this country, Democrats in Congress are more concerned about an illegal immigrant getting his feelings hurt if a police officer in Arizona asks him to show some ID.
Such distractions create opportunities for Mexico's already-odious drug traffickers to be even more ambitious.
The developments from Mexico parallel what happened in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s, before that country got a grip on how to defeat drug lords.
As drug lords such as Medellin cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar became rich and powerful, their depredations became increasingly callous and casual. Trying to murder a politician, Escobar blew an Avianca 727 out of the sky in 1989, killing 110 people.
To destroy court records that could have meant extradition to the U.S., he teamed up with the Marxist terrorist group M-19 to blow up Colombia's supreme court building, killing 11 justices in 1985 to make sure the papers burned.
He also played politics, aligning with left-wing lawyers and human rights activists, claiming fealty to the poor and victimhood for himself on the human rights front. After Escobar's demise in 1993, political terrorist groups such as FARC took his place.
Now we have Mexican cartels and terrorists emerging in the same pattern. The plot on the border dam and Chavez's funding of Marxist narcoterrorists are an emerging menace that demands immediate attention. Mexican groups like EPR and the drug cartels find only advantage in Congress' indifference to security and laugh at its political priorities.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/536460/201006041853/Bordering-Disaster.aspx
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The incessant left wing attacks on Arizona’s new immigration law are ideologically based emotional rants void of substantive facts. If these demagogues and uninformed parroting protestors availed themselves to examine the law they would note that it is essentially identical to the federal law which the federal government has chosen to largely ignore – for political reasons.
Meanwhile, Arizonans are under assault from these illegals and the Mexican drug and smuggling trade and must protect themselves since the federal government has abdicated its Constitutional responsibility.
Cafferty Blasts Obama and the Dems For the Arizona Law
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The Veterans Administration Hospitals, run by the Federal government, are notoriously horrific on myriad accounts and has been so for years. Negligence, poor patient care, disarray, confusion, bureaucracy are just a few adjectives that can begin to describe the “quality” or lack thereof associated with the VA. And this is just a fraction of the size that Obamacare will be.
So Obama and Congressional Democrats really believe that they can used this along with what has been learned from the Medicare program and the Post Office to provide outstanding care that exceeds what we have now, to more individuals and for less?
Wrong!!
As we have reiterated numerous times, Obamacare is not about healthcare. It is all about government control, power and spreading the wealth around.
Obamacare must rescinded or rendered impotent!
VA Claims Office Takes SNAFU to a New Level
Jana Winter FOXNews.com April 19, 2010
Last month, a decorated Gulf War hero received a letter from the Veterans Affairs Administration that said: We are working on your claim for menstrual disorder. He was surprised -- but not as much as one might think.
Last month, a decorated Gulf War hero received a letter from the Veterans Affairs Administration that said: We are working on your claim for menstrual disorder.
There was just one problem: The claim was submitted for fibromyalgia.
Make that two problems: The claim was submitted by Glenn McBride, a 40-year-old man from Roanoke, Va., who most definitely does not get menstrual cramps.
It's a bad sign when your health insurance provider can’t figure out which gender reaches for the Midol. (Hint: it's the one without the prostate.)
The Department of Veterans Affairs is notorious for bungling health care benefits, and its Roanoke regional office, which handled McBride's claim, has long been considered among the worst.
In September 2009 a surprise inspection found the office was collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucratic incompetence. Literally.
Its filing system — floor-to-ceiling stacks of overfilled file cabinets and loose claims folders — weighed twice as much as the building's structure allowed, threatening the lives of everyone inside. Inspectors also found missing and improperly filed, stored and processed claims, among other problems. The regional office was ordered to overhaul the health care processing center completely.
By last month, six months later, there should have been some improvement. Instead, McBride received a letter that included this perplexing request for additional information:
"On the VA Form 21-4138, Statement in Support of Claim you sent on October 8, 2009, you included menstrual disorder. Please specify what you intended to claim for this condition."
McBride, whose 14 years of Army service included a combat tour with one of the most highly decorated units during Desert Storm -- and did not include any complaints about menstrual cramps, so far as he can recall -- insists this was not just a clerical error. He says it's one more example of the VA ignoring or messing up claims in order to avoid paying benefits.
"If the VA does not actually recognize the request, they do not have to give the award," he said. "Sort of like a perverted form of 'See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.' Most people just throw up their hands in frustration and walk away at this point. That is the VA's plan."
The VA, asked to comment about McBride's complaint, issued a statement in which it said:
"The Department of Veterans Affairs' (VA) mission is to be an advocate for Veterans. VA has a responsibility to assist Veterans during the claims process. Part of that duty is to include all possible issues that a Veteran references in his or her initial claim package. VA regrets any confusion that Mr. McBride's claim may have caused. VA Regional Office employees have reached out to Mr. McBride to clarify the confusion, determine the types of issues he wants to claim, and identify any outstanding concerns that he may have."
Jim Strickland, a veterans advocate who writes a regular health care benefits column on VAWatchdog.org and has his own benefits-related Web site, said he wasn't at all surprised to learn of McBride's "menstrual" letter. "There are 57 regional offices and every one is operating in total chaos and in crisis," he said. "Full frontal mass chaos. Every day."
Contacted in the middle of the week, Strickland said he'd already received two e-mails from veterans who were mailed the records of other veterans. And he provided his most ridiculous example of a nonsensical claims letter, one that managed to try to collect debt and to discuss overpaying the same debt -- at the same time.
For Gulf War veterans who fought during a certain time period, certain health conditions are considered presumptive, meaning that such a high percentage of that group has been diagnosed with the condition it's presumed that it was caused by military service, and coverage is automatically granted. Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, is a presumptive one for McBride.
Because of his years of experience dealing with the VA, McBride likes to provide as much information as possible when he submits claim forms. (He also gets a signed and time-stamped receipt upon delivery.) When he sent in his claim for fibromyalgia, he typed clearly at the top of the form: "This form is an official request for SERVICE-CONNECTION for FIBROMYALGIA." He included an extract of a VA "fast letter" regarding presumptive conditions — basically providing the VA with its own policy on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. "Menstrual disorder" is included in the VA's list of symptoms.
"The VA just breezed right through the facts and settled on the obscure," McBride said. "The Roanoke office clearly hasn't changed."
Strickland says the problem at the root of letters like McBride's is a bonus structure paid out to VA claims employees.
"The more work, the better the bonus is," he said. "It's strictly volume, not quality driven. There is no accountability whatsoever.
"The art of the Teflon Jacket has been perfected at our VA. They are really totally invulnerable to your criticism."
When the editor of VAWatchdog.org posted an April Fools Day joke -- "VA DOCTOR TRIES TO GIVE PROSTATE EXAM TO WOMAN
VETERAN (April Fool); VA physician: 'Nobody told me the patient was a female. How the hell was I supposed to know that?'" -- McBride sent in his "menstrual" letter.
It was posted on the same site under the heading, "Today's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? award goes to the VA's Roanoke, Virginia Regional Office."
The site's editor describes the award:
"Every now and then we get a story about the VA that just can't be. But, it is! Because, remember, we're not dealing with regular people ... we're dealing with the VA. That's when we throw up our hands and scream at the sky:
"'Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?'"
Which is longhand for: WTF.
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/04/19/veterans-health-claims-menstrual-disorder/
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Now that Obamacare has passed, we are discovering more of the outrageous dictates that were part of the legislation. The article below contains just a few of the tax related issues some of which were previously publicized. One tax in particular which is galling is a 3.8 % tax on all real estate transactions.
The greedy, corrupt tentacles of the federal government are reaching everywhere for more money to feed its spending addiction.
(Note: The following article was written in Washington State so "Washingtonians" refers to residents of that state)
Health law’s heavy impact
Paul Guppy March 28, 2010 The Spokesman-Review Washington State
In the days leading up to the dramatic late-night vote on President Barack Obama’s health plan, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it …” Now that ObamaCare has passed, it is slowly dawning on people what the new law means for the country and for Washington state.
ObamaCare sweeps away a host of state regulations and permanently alters our state’s insurance market. From now on, the federal government will manage the health care of all Washingtonians. The 2,700-page law contains a complex web of mandates, directives, price controls, tax increases and subsidies.
Federal officials will now decide what kind of insurance people in Washington must have, what medicines will be covered, what treatments are allowed and which are not. Early reports indicate, however, that President Obama, Vice President Biden, the Cabinet, senior members of Congress and leadership staff are exempt.
The new law falls well short of universal coverage. ObamaCare will leave about 6 percent of Washington residents without coverage. The measure is conservatively expected to cost $2.4 trillion in its first full decade. Thousands of older Washingtonians will lose their Medicare Advantage coverage, and the state’s 120,000 Health Savings Account holders may need to buy new policies or face stiff penalties.
Washington residents will begin paying ObamaCare taxes this year, while most benefits don’t start until 2014. The law includes some 19 new taxes. Here’s a rundown of what Washingtonians can expect in the coming years.
Penalties on individuals. Individuals will pay a yearly penalty of $695, or up to 2.5 percent of their annual income, if they cannot show they have purchased a government-approved health policy.
Penalties on families. Families will pay a yearly penalty of $347 per child, up to $2,250 per family, if parents cannot show they have purchased a government- approved policy.
Penalties on employers. Business owners with more than 50 employees must buy government- acceptable health coverage or pay a yearly penalty of $2,000 per employee if at least one employee receives a tax credit.
Tax on investment income. ObamaCare imposes a 3.8 percent annual tax on investment income of individuals making $200,000 or more and on families making $250,000 or more. The new tax is not indexed to inflation, so more people will fall under it each year. Seniors on fixed incomes and people with IRAs and 401(k) plans will be hit particularly hard.
Tax on “Cadillac” health plans. Starting in 2018, imposes a 40 percent annual tax on health care plans valued at $10,200 for individuals and $27,500 for families.
Medicare tax increase. Requires single people earning $200,000 or more and couples earning $250,000 or more to pay an additional 0.9 percent in Medicare taxes.
Tax on Home Sales. Imposes a 3.8 percent tax on home sales and other real estate transactions. Middle-income people must pay the full tax even if they are “rich” for only one day – the day they sell their house and buy a new one.
Tax on medical aid devices. Creates a new 2.9 percent tax on medical aid devices. Certain items intended for personal use are exempt.
Tax on tanning. Imposes a 10 percent tax on services at tanning salons. Business owners will collect the tax from customers and send it to the federal government. This appears to be the first federal sales tax in the United States.
ObamaCare will be enforced by the Internal Revenue Service. The tax agency plans to hire 16,500 new auditors, agents and investigators, and to increase enforcement audits. The IRS can confiscate tax refunds, place liens on property and seek jail time if health-related penalties and taxes are not paid.
President Obama had said people could keep their coverage if they want, yet the Congressional Budget Office estimates that under ObamaCare 8 million to 9 million people will lose their employer-provided coverage.
The ObamaCare law passed over bipartisan opposition in Congress. Republicans say they will run on a “repeal and replace” platform this fall, and Washington has joined 12 other states in a lawsuit challenging the federal government’s power to force state residents to buy a product – insurance – from private companies. The long-term prospects of ObamaCare are unclear. In the meantime, Washingtonians should prepare for major changes in their tax burden.
(Paul Guppy is vice president for research at the Washington Policy Center, a research organization with offices in Spokane, Seattle, Olympia and the Tri-Cities ( www.washingtonpolicy.org).)
http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2010/mar/28/health-laws-heavy-impact/
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The Federal government has shown itself to be inept or at least politically corrupt and publicly insincere in addressing the chronic and dangerous problem of illegal immigration. The border states of Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas have been particularly hard hit with the noxious impact of widespread and overwhelming costs and spiraling out of control crime. Arizona, in fact, has the second highest kidnapping rate in the world which directly stems from the Mexican drug gangs and cartel.
Fed up (no pun intended) with years of inaction, unfulfilled promises and excuses, Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer and the Republican dominated state legislature have decided that it’s imperative that this issue be seriously addressed to protect the security, safety, financial resources and quality of life of its citizens. The state has recently passed several bills designed to better control illegal immigration but this new law, which has not yet been signed by the Governor, goes much further in aggressively addressing this problem. Arizona residents overwhelmingly support this law.
Arizona’s previous Governor, the incompetent Democrat Janet Napolitano, did little to address the issue and actively thwarted attempts by others to do so. Ironically and not suprisingly, because of her early vocal support for Obama, he selected her to be the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. We have since seen enough of her inaction (pun here)!
Arizona Immigration Law Sparks National Uproar
Paul Davenport Phoenix, Arizona April 22, 2010
Lawmakers approved a sweeping immigration bill Monday intended to ramp up law enforcement efforts even as critics complained it could lead to racial profiling and other abuse.
The state Senate voted 17-11 nearly along party lines to send the bill to Gov. Jan Brewer, who has not taken a position on the measure championed by fellow Republicans. The House approved the bill April 13.
"This bill goes a long way to bringing law and order to the state," said Sen. Al Melvin, R-Tucson, who cited costly services provided to illegal immigrants and the recent slaying of a southeastern Arizona rancher near the U.S.-Mexico border as reasons for the move.
The new measure would be the latest crackdown in Arizona, which has an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants and is the nation's busiest border crossing point.
Arizona enacted a law in 2005 making human smuggling a state crime and prohibited employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants with a law in 2007.
The latest bill would make it a state crime for illegal immigrants to not have an alien registration document. It also would require police to question people about their immigration status if there's reason to suspect they're in the country illegally.
Other provisions allow citizen lawsuits against government agencies that hinder enforcement of immigration laws, and make it illegal for people to hire illegal immigrants for day labor or knowingly transport them.
Republican Sen. Russell Pearce of Mesa, who sponsored the bill, said it will take handcuffs off police and put them on violent criminals. "Enough is enough," Pearce said.
U.S. Sen. John McCain on Monday called the bill a "tool that I think needs to be used." His office later said that wasn't an endorsement.
It's also a commentary on the frustration that our state Legislature has that the federal government has not fulfilled its constitutional responsibilities to secure our borders," the Arizona Republican said.
Sen. Leah Landrum Taylor, D-Phoenix, predicted the legislation would cause chaos by spawning suspicion among neighbors, friends and relatives about who might be in the country illegally.
"Our state will be going completely backward," she said.
The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund has all but promised a legal challenge if the legislation becomes law.
The organization claims the measure is unconstitutional because the federal government is responsible for immigration enforcement.
"The bill is so vague that it encourages investigation and arrest of people ... who essentially have done nothing wrong but because of their racial profile," said Gladys Limon, an attorney for the Los Angeles-based group.
Mexico's embassy also has voiced concerns about racial profiling.
Arizona law enforcement groups are split on the bill, with a union for Phoenix Police Department officers supporting it and a statewide association of police chiefs opposed.
Calls, e-mails and letters on the bill were running 3-1 in favor, Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman said.
Brewer's predecessor, Janet Napolitano, a Democrat who is now President Barack Obama's Homeland Security secretary, vetoed similar proposals.
Current law in Arizona and most states doesn't require police to ask about the immigration status of those they encounter, and some police officials say allowing such questions would deter immigrants from cooperating in other investigations.
The bill is regarded as carrying political high stakes for Brewer, who faces challenges from fellow conservatives in the Aug. 24 Republican primary.
If she vetoes it, "she would be crushed in the primary," said Mike Gardner, a business lobbyist and former legislator.
Vincent Picard, a federal Immigration and Customs enforcement spokesman in Phoenix, declined comment on the Arizona legislation and referred a reporter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Washington headquarters.
Agency officials gave only a written statement about Homeland Security immigration policy and refused to speak on the record about the Arizona legislation.
Arizona police use the human smuggling law from time to time to charge suspects.
In Maricopa County, however, more than 1,500 people were convicted under that law, with 85 percent immigrants, not smugglers.
To reduce the economic incentive for immigrants to sneak into the country, Arizona lawmakers also approved a civil law in 2007 that prohibits employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.
Authorities across Arizona have examined several dozen complaints of employer sanction violations. But in the more than two years since that law took effect, only two cases have been settled with employers admitting to violating the law.
Associated Press Writers Jacques Billeaud and Jonathan J. Cooper contributed to this report.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/arizona-immigration-law-s_n_544864.html
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Arizona Voters Support Controversial Immigration Bill, Poll Finds
- FOXNews.com April 21, 2010
An overwhelming majority of Arizona voters support a controversial bill that would give state officials broad new powers to arrest people suspected of being illegal immigrants, a new poll finds.
An overwhelming majority of Arizona voters support a controversial bill that would give state officials broad new powers to arrest people suspected of being illegal immigrants, a new poll finds.
The Rasmussen Reports poll found 70 percent of likely voters in Arizona back the bill, which cleared the state Legislature this week and awaits the governor's signature, despite concerns about potential civil rights violations.
The survey found 53 percent of voters are worried that immigrants' civil rights could be infringed in the effort to find and deport illegal immigrants. Forty-six percent were not concerned about that possibility.
But for immigrant-rights activists in Washington and elsewhere, the state bill has become a flashpoint in the national debate.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., who has led the charge against the bill on Capitol Hill, said Wednesday that he wants the Department of Justice to be prepared to "go immediately to court" to stop Arizona officials from enforcing the law if it is signed.
"There will be many, many people, American citizens, whose rights will be violated when the police come to them for no other reason than to check their immigration status," he told Fox News.
The Arizona bill would create a new misdemeanor crime for failing to have an alien registration document; allow officers to arrest anyone unable to show documents proving their legal residence in the country; and allow people to sue over claims that a government agency is hindering immigration enforcement.
The Rasmussen poll reflected bipartisan support for the bill in Arizona. Eighty-four percent of Republicans support it -- but so do 51 percent of Democrats. Forty-three percent of Democrats oppose it.
The poll of 500 likely voters was conducted last Wednesday. It had a margin of error of 4.5 percentage points.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/21/arizona-voters-support-controversial-immigration-poll-finds/?test=latestnews
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Obama and Congress are seriously considering imposing a value added tax or VAT on us and that should be a severe cause for alarm. The last thing we need is to be burdened with another tax. Or, more to the point, the government has taken enough of our money and it is time to say:
NO MORE!
VAT is an oppressive and to some extent hidden tax which makes it easier for the government to levy it and then relentlessly raise it. And when the government has more of our money they find that it’s never enough – so they spend even more than they collect. Ad infinitum.
This VAT has helped create the stagnation and miasma of indolence in Europe and we must make sure that it is never implemented here.
VAT Will Spell Anything But Relief
Investors Business Daily 04/08/2010
Taxes: Asked why he robbed banks, thief Willie Sutton famously replied: "That's where the money is." The same logic is now being used by the White House as it floats the idea of a broad new tax on all consumption.
White House adviser and former Fed chief Paul Volcker, one of the most respected men on Wall Street, broached the delicate topic of taxes Tuesday.
In his remarks, he said a value-added tax "was not as toxic an idea" as it had been in the past, and suggested it might be a way for the U.S. to escape its growing budget crisis.
"If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes," he said.
No doubt this is a trial balloon. Based on the $10 trillion in budget deficits expected over the next 10 years, this is one crisis the White House won't want to waste, as Rahm Emanuel would say.
Already, it's waged open war on the rich — vowing to take as much from those having $200,000 in income as it can. The 10-year budget plan submitted by President Obama in fact hits that group with $636 billion in new taxes.
But that's not even close to being enough to pay for the Democrats' reckless expansion of government.
As we've noted here before, Obama's new budget spends $45 trillion from 2011 to 2020. That's a 70% rise in spending from the previous decade. The only problem is, we're expected to collect only $35 trillion in taxes — and even that might be an overestimate, based on recent dismal economic growth.
So just going after the rich can't close that gap. The wealthy literally don't have the money. And even if we raised income taxes on everyone, which is highly unlikely, we would have to double current income tax rates to balance the budget, according to a recent Tax Foundation study.
So with deficits averaging $1 trillion a year through 2020 and spending soaring, where will the money come from?
Answer: A VAT. Only a VAT will give the government enough money to let it continue its out-of-control spending — which now seems to be the Democrats' main political goal.
Right now, the poor and the middle class pay virtually no taxes at all. In 2008, 49% of all households paid no taxes, new data show.
Those who had no tax liability at all receive about $70 billion in benefits and cash a year. In effect, for many, tax day has become an opportunity to collect a giant welfare check.
Yet, despite Obama's pledge that those with incomes below $200,000 wouldn't see their taxes raised "one dime," the fact is, they're the ultimate target of a VAT.
Yes, Obama is giving them lots of goodies. But he and the Democrats in charge of Congress know they'll have to tax the poor and the middle class to create the cradle-to-grave welfare state they so desperately want. It's the dream of all so-called progressives.
And it's already happening. In the health care takeover just signed into law, there are 13 new taxes — many of which will hit the poor and the middle class.
Still, that's penny-ante stuff. A VAT, as used in 150 countries around the world, would be a real money gusher — a Trojan horse for tax hikes on all Americans, especially the poor and middle class.
A VAT, remember, is really a tax on consumption. And since the poor and middle class spend a much greater ratio of their incomes on consumption than the wealthy, they'll bear the brunt.
A recent report from the liberal Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center said: "A major concern with a VAT is that it could be regressive, raising tax burdens proportionately more on lower income than on higher income taxpayers."
Even so, many Democrats point favorably to the European Union's welfare states, where VATs as high as 20% have long been a staple of public finance. The U.S., these critics suggest, would do well to imitate our EU friends.
Or not.
As the Cato Institute's Daniel Mitchell recently noted, "real-world evidence shows that VATs are strongly linked with both higher overall tax burdens and more government spending."
Indeed, in 1965, just before the EU adopted the VAT broadly, the average EU tax burden was about 28%, vs. 25% in the U.S.
By 2006, the EU tax burden was 40% — compared with 28% in the U.S.
The VAT tax grew and grew and grew. But Europe's economies didn't. Now, thanks to too much government and excessive taxation, the EU is almost hopelessly behind the U.S. in terms of both innovation and productivity. Is that the future we want?
No. The VAT's a terrible idea. It would bring higher taxes, slower growth, fewer jobs and lower standards of living. But it would do one thing well: give bureaucrats a lot more of your money to spend.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=529800
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Fresh and ongoing from it initiating, feeding and perpetuating the housing debacle and collapse, the Federal government with its pernicious Obamacare is poised to destroy medicine and medical care as we know it here in the United States. If allowed to take root, gone will be the world’s best and most sophisticated healthcare system, home of most of the most important innovations and discoveries in medical care. In its place will be a near 3rd world level of “quality” of care encumbered by an oppressive and arcane government controlled system. At least in third world countries they don’t have swarms of attorneys pullulating like flies looking for their next jackpot.
It is commonly known that there will be a significant shortage of primary care physicians in the future which Obamacare will tremendously exacerbate for myriad reasons. Of course, neither Obama or Congressional Democrats considered this in their reckless haste to ram the healthcare reform legislation into effect. What a surprise – politicians didn’t anticipate something inherently important?
The end result? You will have the “right” of healthcare but you may not have a doctor to provide it to you. If you are ultimately able to schedule an appointment to see a doctor, you may have to wait an excessively long period of time to finally be seen, or be seen by a physician located far from where you live or work, or be herded through like cattle spending little time with the doctor who is massively overworked and overloaded with patients (and over-regulated).
Does the word “rationing” ring a bell? Or decreased quality of care? These were all important issues that were raised by those who opposed the Democrats’ plans but were ignored or denigrated by them and the press.
What is a “brilliant” solution for this problem that is being considered by the government? Have nurses act like doctors. Add a little more training, change some statutes and voila! Doctorlight. Easy! Just don’t be very sick or you might not make it to a real doctor.
And if the nurse gets a PhD, they can officially be addressed as Dr., adding to confusion but subtracting from quality. This proposal would place millions of Americans at unnecessary risk due to inferior training and as a consequence, inferior care.
Furthermore, given the government’s plan to reimburse these nurses the same or marginally less than real doctors, why would any sane person want to become a doctor? After all, for maybe $5 to $10 more per patient that a doctor would be reimbursed versus a nurse, that person would also have to go to medical school and residency for up to 11 or more years, assume debt to pay for school of $250,000 or more and then pay malpractice rates in practice that can exceed $100,000/ year.
This will surely dissuade many including the best and brightest from seeking a career in medicine and don’t we want our doctors to be smart and competent?
Sounds like another government plan causing unintended consequences.
Doctor shortage? 28 states may expand nurses' role
By Carla K. Johnson (AP) – 4/15/2010
CHICAGO — A nurse may soon be your doctor. With a looming shortage of primary care doctors, 28 states are considering expanding the authority of nurse practitioners. These nurses with advanced degrees want the right to practice without a doctor's watchful eye and to prescribe narcotics. And if they hold a doctorate, they want to be called "Doctor."
For years, nurse practitioners have been playing a bigger role in the nation's health care, especially in regions with few doctors. With 32 million more Americans gaining health insurance within a few years, the health care overhaul is putting more money into nurse-managed clinics.
Those newly insured patients will be looking for doctors and may find nurses instead.
The medical establishment is fighting to protect turf. In some statehouses, doctors have shown up in white coats to testify against nurse practitioner bills. The American Medical Association, which supported the national health care overhaul, says a doctor shortage is no reason to put nurses in charge and endanger patients.
Nurse practitioners argue there's no danger. They say they're highly trained and as skilled as doctors at diagnosing illness during office visits. They know when to refer the sickest patients to doctor specialists. Plus, they spend more time with patients and charge less.
"We're constantly having to prove ourselves," said Chicago nurse practitioner Amanda Cockrell, 32, who tells patients she's just like a doctor "except for the pay."
On top of four years in nursing school, Cockrell spent another three years in a nurse practitioner program, much of it working with patients. Doctors generally spend four years in undergraduate school, four years in medical school and an additional three in primary care residency training.
Medicare, which sets the pace for payments by private insurance, pays nurse practitioners 85 percent of what it pays doctors. An office visit for a Medicare patient in Chicago, for example, pays a doctor about $70 and a nurse practitioner about $60.
The health care overhaul law gave nurse midwives, a type of advanced practice nurse, a Medicare raise to 100 percent of what obstetrician-gynecologists make — and that may be just the beginning.
States regulate nurse practitioners and laws vary on what they are permitted to do:
_ In Florida and Alabama, for instance, nurse practitioners are barred from prescribing controlled substances.
_ In Washington, nurse practitioners can recommend medical marijuana to their patients when a new law takes effect in June.
_ In Montana, nurse practitioners don't need a doctor involved with their practice in any way.
_ Many other states put doctors in charge of nurse practitioners or require collaborative agreements signed by a doctor.
_ In some states, nurse practitioners with a doctorate in nursing practice can't use the title "Dr." Most states allow it.
The AMA argues the title "Dr." creates confusion. Nurse practitioners say patients aren't confused by veterinarians calling themselves "Dr." Or chiropractors. Or dentists. So why, they ask, would patients be confused by a nurse using the title?
The feud over "Dr." is no joke. By 2015, most new nurse practitioners will hold doctorates, or a DNP, in nursing practice, according to a goal set by nursing educators. By then, the doctorate will be the standard for all graduating nurse practitioners, said Polly Bednash, executive director of the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.
Many with the title use it with pride.
"I don't think patients are ever confused. People are not stupid," said Linda Roemer, a nurse practitioner in Sedona, Ariz., who uses "Dr. Roemer" as part of her e-mail address.
What's the evidence on the quality of care given by nurse practitioners?
The best U.S. study comparing nurse practitioners and doctors randomly assigned more than 1,300 patients to either a nurse practitioner or a doctor. After six months, overall health, diabetes tests, asthma tests and use of medical services like specialists were essentially the same in the two groups.
"The argument that patients' health is put in jeopardy by nurse practitioners? There's no evidence to support that," said Jack Needleman, a health policy expert at the University of California Los Angeles School of Public Health.
Other studies have shown that nurse practitioners are better at listening to patients, Needleman said. And they make good decisions about when to refer patients to doctors for more specialized care.
The nonpartisan Macy Foundation, a New York-based charity that focuses on the education of health professionals, recently called for nurse practitioners to be among the leaders of primary care teams. The foundation also urged the removal of state and federal barriers preventing nurse practitioners from providing primary care.
The American Medical Association is fighting proposals in about 28 states that are considering steps to expand what nurse practitioners can do.
"A shortage of one type of professional is not a reason to change the standards of medical care," said AMA president-elect Dr. Cecil Wilson. "We need to train more physicians."
In Florida, a bill to allow nurse practitioners to prescribe controlled substances is stalled in committee.
One patient, Karen Reid of Balrico, Fla., said she was left in pain over a holiday weekend because her nurse practitioner couldn't prescribe a powerful enough medication and the doctor couldn't be found. Dying hospice patients have been denied morphine in their final hours because a doctor couldn't be reached in the middle of the night, nurses told The Associated Press.
Massachusetts, the model for the federal health care overhaul, passed its law in 2006 expanding health insurance to nearly all residents and creating long waits for primary care. In 2008, the state passed a law requiring health plans to recognize and reimburse nurse practitioners as primary care providers.
That means insurers now list nurse practitioners along with doctors as primary care choices, said Mary Ann Hart, a nurse and public policy expert at Regis College in Weston, Mass. "That greatly opens up the supply of primary care providers," Hart said.
But it hasn't helped much so far. A study last year by the Massachusetts Medical Society found the percentage of primary care practices closed to new patients was higher than ever. And despite the swelling demand, the medical society still believes nurse practitioners should be under doctor supervision.
The group supports more training and incentives for primary care doctors and a team approach to medicine that includes nurse practitioners and physician assistants, whose training is comparable.
"We do not believe, however, that nurse practitioners have the qualifications to be independent primary care practitioners," said Dr. Mario Motta, president of the state medical society.
The new U.S. health care law expands the role of nurses with:
_ $50 million to nurse-managed health clinics that offer primary care to low-income patients.
_ $50 million annually from 2012-15 for hospitals to train nurses with advanced degrees to care for Medicare patients.
_ 10 percent bonuses from Medicare from 2011-16 to primary care providers, including nurse practitioners, who work in areas where doctors are scarce.
_ A boost in the Medicare reimbursement rate for certified nurse midwives to bring their pay to the same level as a doctor's.
The American Nurses Association hopes the 100 percent Medicare parity for nurse midwives will be extended to other nurses with advanced degrees.
"We know we need to get to 100 percent for everybody. This is a crack in the door," said Michelle Artz of ANA. "We're hopeful this sets the tone."
In Chicago, only a few patients balk at seeing a nurse practitioner instead of a doctor, Cockrell said. She gladly sends those patients to her doctor partners.
She believes patients get real advantages by letting her manage their care. Nurse practitioners' uphill battle for respect makes them precise, accurate and careful, she said. She schedules 40 minutes for a physical exam; the doctors in her office book 30 minutes for same appointment.
Joseline Nunez, 26, is a patient of Cockrell's and happy with her care.
"I feel that we get more time with the nurse practitioner," Nunez said. "The doctor always seems to be rushing off somewhere."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jCB6VTbMN12zQSwafnZfBJovMseAD9F2CK880
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Americans by the millions vehemently oppose what our Federal government is doing to America. Obama and Congressional Democrats are essentially perpetrating a bloodless coup including abrogating many of our rights and freedoms while legislating numerous ways to take more of our hard earned money. Adding insult to injury, they also denigrate us at any opportunity possible.
Such arrogant elitism along with fiscal recklessness and a host of other issues has precipitated the genesis of the Tea Parties, increasingly outraged and vocal opposition by even average Americans who previously had no interest in politics.
Obama, the Democrats and the news media arrogantly portray those Americans who use their democratic First Amendment right to peacefully oppose their radical policies as fringe elements, racists, terrorists and many other derogatory epithets.
We must continue and even elevate the decibel level of discourse and disagreement.
One individual who is garnering increased recognition both in Florida where he is running for Congress and across the country is Lieutenant Colonel Allen West. He is a successful self-made man who is outstanding public speaker - motivating, intelligent, well informed and sincere.
And the antithesis of Obama’s robotic, cold and monotone ones.
Below are two videos of Lt. Col. West in Action. A third video captures the typical media race baiting but with the individual responding with the quintessential answer.
Congressional Candidate Lieutenant Colonel Allen West speaking at the America Freedom Tour in Fort Lauderdale, Florida Oct. 21, 2009
Lieutenant Colonel Allen West West Palm Beach Tea Party Speech April 15, 2010
White NBC Reporter Confronts Black Man at Tea Party Rally
Such a question intending to degrade this individual and the Tea Parties is reprehensible and entirely typical of the far-left biased and corrupt news media.
They would never think to ask a white person a similar question if they largely surrounded by crowds of blacks - it would be considered to be racist. A clear double standard.
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The following hilarious, creative and hard edge and incisive video is a must see if you are disgusted with what Obama and Congressional Democrats have done to healthcare specifically and to our country in general. It is wholely therapeutic – and is performed to classic Stones.
Take It Back
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Unfortunately though not unexpected given Obama’s past, his Presidency has increased rather than decreased racial discord. He was anointed as the racial healer by the media and many politicians and even voted for by millions of credulous voters who were deceived by his rhetoric on the issue rather than scrutinizing his unalloyed history of racism.
His twenty year close association with the vitriolic, racist, anti-white Reverend Jeremiah Wright and membership in a church that preached black nationalism philosophy, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism (“Goddamn America”) as well as revered and formally honored Louis Farrakhan, should have served as more than fair warning of his sentiments.
Obama’s verbatim assessment of his church which was that “"I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial", should have further substantiated his racist philosophy. Of course, there are numerous other examples which came to light both before and after he was elected President.
After becoming President, he has continued to engender racial polarity such as by imprudently insinuating himself in the Henry Jones (Professor of Black Studies) and Cambridge, Mass. police incident in July of last year (About Obama’s Racially Inflammatory and Irresponsible Comments and More Unfortunate Consequences of Obama’s Racially Charged Statement). He also has appointed several radical and racist blacks to his Administration such as Eric Holder and Van Jones whose actions, history and rhetoric exude these sentiments.
By “promoting” racism in his discourse and overtly inappropriate selections, Obama is feeding black racism against whites (and others) and even against other blacks – those that don’t toe the black victimization and dependency agenda. If an Afro-American speaks out for conservative issues or is against demagogue preached policies (such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc.) then they are labeled “Uncle Toms” or “traitors”. This is abhorrent. No ethnic or racial group is or should be considered to be monolithic in its beliefs, morals, likes, etc. By demanding this of all blacks, they are being intra-racially racist and intolerant.
Exacerbating the problem, Obama could rein in this destructive behavior from his bully pulpit as the President but he won’t (because he clearly agrees). This is recklessly irresponsible and contributes to the political racist slandering by Democrats, especially by the politicians, news media and black demagogues against "non-compliant" blacks, conservatives and the Tea Parties.
Black Tea Party Activists Called 'Traitors'
Black conservatives are really taking heat for their involvement in the mostly white tea party movement — and for having the audacity to oppose the policies of the nation's first black president.
Feb. 10: Angela McGlowan announces at the Tupelo, Miss., City Hall, that she is running for the 1st Congressional District as a Republican.
ALBANY, N.Y. – They've been called Oreos, traitors and Uncle Toms, and are used to having to defend their values. Now black conservatives are really taking heat for their involvement in the mostly white tea party movement — and for having the audacity to oppose the policies of the nation's first black president.
"I've been told I hate myself. I've been called an Uncle Tom. I've been told I'm a spook at the door," said Timothy F. Johnson, chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation, a group of black conservatives who support free market principles and limited government.
"Black Republicans find themselves always having to prove who they are. Because the assumption is the Republican Party is for whites and the Democratic Party is for blacks," he said.
Johnson and other black conservatives say they were drawn to the tea party movement because of what they consider its commonsense fiscal values of controlled spending, less taxes and smaller government. The fact that they're black — or that most tea partyers are white — should have nothing to do with it, they say.
"You have to be honest and true to yourself. What am I supposed to do, vote Democratic just to be popular? Just to fit in?" asked Clifton Bazar, a 45-year-old New Jersey freelance photographer and conservative blogger.
Opponents have branded the tea party as a group of racists hiding behind economic concerns — and reports that some tea partyers were lobbing racist slurs at black congressmen during last month's heated health care vote give them ammunition.
But these black conservatives don't consider racism representative of the movement as a whole — or race a reason to support it.
Angela McGlowan, a black congressional candidate from Mississippi, said her tea party involvement is "not about a black or white issue."
"It's not even about Republican or Democrat, from my standpoint," she told The Associated Press. "All of us are taxed too much."
Still, she's in the minority. As a nascent grassroots movement with no registration or formal structure, there are no racial demographics available for the tea party movement; it's believed to include only a small number of blacks and Hispanics.
Some black conservatives credit President Barack Obama's election — and their distaste for his policies — with inspiring them and motivating dozens of black Republicans to plan political runs in November.
For black candidates like McGlowan, tea party events are a way to reach out to voters of all races with her conservative message.
"I'm so proud to be a part of this movement! I want to tell you that a lot of people underestimate you guys," the former national political commentator for Fox News told the cheering crowd at a tea party rally in Nashville, Tenn., in February.
Tea party voters represent a new model for these black conservatives — away from the black, liberal Democratic base located primarily in cities, and toward a black and white conservative base that extends into the suburbs.
Black voters have overwhelmingly backed Democratic candidates, support that has only grown in recent years. In 2004, presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry won 88 percent of the black vote; four years later, 95 percent of black voters cast ballots for Obama.
Black conservatives don't want to have to apologize for their divergent views.
"I've gotten the statement, 'How can you not support the brother?'" said David Webb, an organizer of New York City's Tea Party 365, Inc. movement and a conservative radio personality.
Since Obama's election, Webb said some black conservatives have even resorted to hiding their political views.
"I know of people who would play the (liberal) role publicly, but have their private opinions," he said. "They don't agree with the policy but they have to work, live and exist in the community ... Why can't we speak openly and honestly if we disagree?"
Among the 37 black Republicans running for U.S. House and Senate seats in November is Charles Lollar of Maryland's 5th District.
A tea party supporter running against House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., Lollar says he's finding support in unexpected places.
The 38-year-old U.S. Marine Corps reservist recently walked into a bar in southern Maryland decorated with a Confederate flag. It gave his wife Rosha pause.
"I said, 'You know what, honey? Many, many of our Southern citizens came together under that flag for the purpose of keeping their family and their state together,'" Lollar recalled. "The flag is not what you're to fear. It's the stupidity behind the flag that is a problem. I don't think we'll find that in here. Let's go ahead in."
Once inside, they were treated to a pig roast, a motorcycle rally — and presented with $5,000 in contributions for his campaign.
McGlowan, one of three GOP candidates in north Mississippi's 1st District primary, seeks a seat held since 2008 by The National Republican Congressional Committee has supported Alan Nunnelee, chairman of the state Senate Appropriations Committee, who is also pursuing tea party voters.
McGlowan believes the tea party movement has been unfairly portrayed as monolithically white, male and middle-aged, though she acknowledged blacks and Hispanics are a minority at most events.
Racist protest signs at some tea party rallies and recent reports by U.S. Reps. John Lewis, D-Ga., and Barney Frank, D-Mass., that tea partyers shouted racial and anti-gay slurs at them have raised allegations of racism in the tea party movement.
Black members of the movement say it is not inherently racist, and some question the reported slurs. "You would think — something that offensive — you would think someone got video of it," Bazar, the conservative blogger, said.
"Just because you have one nut case, it doesn't automatically equate that you've got an organization that espouses (racism) as a sane belief," Johnson said.
Hilary Shelton, director of the Washington bureau of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, suggested a bit of caution.
"I'm sure the reason that (black conservatives) are involved is that from an ideological perspective, they agree," said Shelton. "But when those kinds of things happen, it is very important to be careful of the company that you keep."
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/04/06/black-tea-party-activists-called-traitors/?test=latestnews
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Politicians and most of the news media had no complaints when President Bush was the object of interminable vile hate and epithets that were publically spewed. Back then, they considered it to be people exercising their Constitutional rights of free speech and protest.
Now that the tables are turned, the Progressives are crying foul at anything that is less than reverential about Obama. It seems that such rights are only acceptible to them when they support their purposes and ideologies only.
Hypocrisy Watch: Left-Wing Hate and Violence
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Probably by now, many people are aware of the exclusion from Obamcare that Congress granted itself, staff members, the President and Vice President. As has been stated myriad times, if the legislation was so utterly fantastic for the American people, why is it not good enough for Congress and the President?
We all know that the political rhetoric which was employed for the bill’s passage was not merely disingenuous but overtly and despicably dishonest and criminal. As stated in a previous post, these politicians see themselves as elitists, members of a privileged class much as was extant in Russia in the 1970’s and early 1980’s – the nomeklatura.
As their employers (at least on paper), we must now revoke their privileges, limit their unrestrained actions, mandate that they abide by the same laws as the rest of us, and vote the offenders out of office.
No Obamacare for Obama
THE WASHINGTON TIMES March 23, 2010
President Obama declared that the new health care law "is going to be affecting every American family." Except his own, of course.
The new health care law exempts the president from having to participate in it. Leadership and committee staffers in the House and Senate who wrote the bill are exempted as well. A weasel-worded definition of "staff" includes only the members' personal staff in the new system; the committee staff that drafted the legislation opted themselves out. Because they were more familiar with the contents of the law than anyone in the country, it says a lot that they carved out their own special loophole. Anyway, the law is intended to affect "ordinary Americans," according to Vice President Joe Biden (who - being a heartbeat away from the presidency - also is not covered), not Washington insiders.
Mr. Obama frequently tossed around the talking point that the new law gave people the same type of coverage as Congress enjoyed. In his March 20 health care pep talk to wavering Democrats on Capitol Hill, the president said one of the advantages of the health care legislation was that "people will have choice and competition just like members of Congress have choice and competition." At yesterday's signing ceremony, Mr. Obama said Americans will be "part of a big pool, just like federal employees are part of a big pool. They'll have the same choice of private health insurance that members of Congress get for themselves." But the American people will have a public pool; the executive branch and congressional staffers kept their country-club pool private.
Last year, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican, spearheaded efforts to have all Americans included in the plan, but he ran into heavy opposition from unions representing federal workers - the same unions that were pro-Obamacare stalwarts. In September, the Senate approved a scaled-down amendment that covered members of Congress and their staff. When this provision later emerged from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, the leadership and committee staff loophole had appeared. A move in December by Mr. Grassley and Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, to close this loophole and to extend the law to senior members of the executive branch - including the president, vice president and Cabinet members - was blocked by Senate Democratic leaders.
Mr. Grassley has introduced an amendment to the Senate health care reconciliation bill that also will apply the law to the upper tier of the executive branch and all Capitol Hill staffers, but it remains to be seen whether Democrats will let this measure move forward.
The special exemptions slipped into the health care law are another example of how those statists who rule consider themselves a privileged class, imposing burdens on the country that they will not accept themselves. Candidates for office in 2010 should pledge to close these and other loopholes in the law that impose unequal burdens and create exclusive privileged classes in America. Meanwhile, we await Mr. Obama's explanation why if his "historic" health care law is so great for America, it's not good enough for him and his family.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/23/obamacare-for-everyone-but-obama/
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Many Democrats are revealing what countless opponents of Obamacare were claiming: the legislation had far more to do with wealth redistribution than it did with healthcare. This is not about quality of care or access or even reducing total medical care costs. If it were, malpractice reform would have been implemented and there would not have been an additional 159 new federal agencies created or the provision to hire almost 17,000 new IRS agents.
That is why the numbers never added up, the legislation was written in secrecy, negotiations were conducted behind locked doors by Democrats only with Republicans being totally excluded, opponents were gratuitously charged with racism, etc.
Obamacare was mainly aimed at redistributing wealth
By: Byron York Chief Political Correspondent
April 2, 2010
It hasn't attracted much notice, but recently some prominent advocates of Obamacare have spoken more frankly than ever before about why they supported a national health care makeover. It wasn't just about making insurance more affordable.
It wasn't just about bending the cost curve. It wasn't just about cutting the federal deficit. It was about redistributing wealth.
Health reform is "an income shift," Democratic Sen. Max Baucus said on March 25. "It is a shift, a leveling, to help lower income, middle income Americans."
In his halting, jumbled style, Baucus explained that in recent years "the maldistribution of income in America has gone up way too much, the wealthy are getting way, way too wealthy, and the middle income class is left behind." The new health care legislation, Baucus promised, "will have the effect of addressing that maldistribution of income in America."
At about the same time, Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate, said the health bill was needed to correct economic inequities. "The question is, in a democracy, what is the right balance between those at the top ... and those at the bottom?" Dean said during an appearance on CNBC. "When it gets out of whack, as it did in the 1920s, and it has now, you need to do some redistribution. This is a form of redistribution."
Summing things up in the New York Times, the liberal economics columnist David Leonhardt called Obamacare "the federal government's biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago."
Now they tell us. For many opponents of the new legislation, the statements confirmed a nagging suspicion that for Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress, the health fight was about more than just insurance -- that redistribution played a significant, if largely unspoken, part in the drive for national health care.
"I don't think most people, when they think of the health care bill, instantly think it's a vehicle to redistribute wealth," says pollster Scott Rasmussen. "But we do know that people overwhelmingly believe it will lead to an increase in middle class taxes, and we do know that people are concerned that it will hurt their own quality of care, so I think their gut instincts point in that direction."
By talking openly about redistribution, Baucus and others have gone seriously off-message. Democrats knew there was no way they could ever sell a national health care bill to a skeptical public by basing their case on income inequality.
That's one reason they went to such lengths to argue -- preposterously, in the view of most Americans -- that the bill could cover 32 million currently uninsured people and still save the taxpayers money.
After Baucus' statement, I asked a Democratic strategist (who asked to remain nameless) whether fighting income inequality was one of his goals in supporting the legislation. Never, he said. "That's what the tax code is for."
"It was not to take something away from rich people, it was to provide something to people without coverage," he continued, making a distinction between striving for universal coverage and seeking to redistribute income. But he quickly saw that Democrats talking about redistribution could be politically damaging, echoing the controversy that erupted when candidate Obama famously told Ohio plumber Joe Wurzelbacher that "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody."
" 'Redistribution' is an easy charge to make," the Democrat said. "I'm not surprised that it's an argument critics make; what I'm surprised at is that Democrats are making it."
This week the DNC group Organizing for America offered a commemorative certificate to supporters who helped pass the health care bill. The certificate said, "We achieved the dream of generations -- high-quality, affordable health care is no longer the privilege of a few, but the right of all."
The privilege of a few? It is widely accepted that about 85 percent of all Americans have health care coverage, and the overwhelming majority are happy with it. There's simply no way anyone could plausibly claim that health coverage is the privilege of a few.
And yet that is the bedrock belief of some who supported the health care makeover. So it's no wonder that we're hearing about health care as the redistribution of income. Of course, we're only hearing it after the bill has passed.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/Obamacare-was-mainly-aimed-at-redistributing-wealth-89725302.html
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The story below details an Orlando, Florida area urologist who posted a sign on his office door stating:
“If you voted for Obama … seek urological care elsewhere.”
This physician reaction has created a tempest in many parts, but what did Obama and the Congressional Democrats expect? They have legislated involuntary servitude of America’s physicians with their corruptly passed and ideologically radical healthcare “reform”. They are trying to pay for the Obamacare wealth transfer on the backs of productive citizens and physicians though all healthcare providers including medical device companies will be negatively impacted. They are destroying the physician-patient relationship, quality of care, etc. with the insinuation of federal officials in the mix, determining who can be treated and by what (less expensive) means.
And then there is the reimbursement part that we will put in perspective. Medicare reimbursement rates this year pay doctors below 1995 levels which were low at that time. To make matters worse, as of this April 1st, reimbursement is scheduled to drop another 21.3%. In other words, physicians will be paid almost 22% less than they were 15 years ago. Meanwhile, Congress which incredibly can vote for its own pay raise, will received nearly 95% more than they were 20 years ago!
Many physicians have been losing money for years taking care of Medicare patients at artificially low reimbursement rates that don’t even cover their expenses. Now lower that rate another 22% and add far more government bureaucracy and you have a disastrous situation.
Though it may not judged to be “politically correct” for a physician to react as this sign indicated, it is well within one’s Constitutional rights to do so and does not violate any medical laws nor should it. Despite the fine line that medical societies may need to toe in response to actions of physicians like the above, there is nothing illegal or immoral. Unfortunately, our government has facilitated such actions by their oppressive legislation.
The overwhelming sentiment in the medical community is vehemently against Obamacare for myriad reasons. Therefore, we expect to see additional significant actions in the future that would far surpass this one incident in scope and extent. Reactions to Obamacare are only just beginning...
Doctor tells Obama supporters: Go elsewhere for health care
A Mount Dora doctor posted a sign telling Obama health care supporters to go elsewhere.
By Stephen Hudak, Orlando Sentinel April 2, 2010
MOUNT DORA — A doctor who considers the national health-care overhaul to be bad medicine for the country posted a sign on his office door telling patients who voted for President Barack Obama to seek care "elsewhere."
"I'm not turning anybody away — that would be unethical," Dr. Jack Cassell, 56, a Mount Dora urologist and a registered Republican opposed to the health plan, told the Orlando Sentinel on Thursday. "But if they read the sign and turn the other way, so be it."
The sign reads: "If you voted for Obama … seek urologic care elsewhere. Changes to your healthcare begin right now, not in four years."
Estella Chatman, 67, of Eustis, whose daughter snapped a photo of the typewritten sign, sent the picture to U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, the Orlando Democrat who riled Republicans last year when he characterized the GOP's idea of health care as, "If you get sick, America … Die quickly."
Chatman said she heard about the sign from a friend referred to Cassell after his physician recently died. She said her friend did not want to speak to a reporter but was dismayed by Cassell's sign.
"He's going to find another doctor," she said.
Cassell may be walking a thin line between his right to free speech and his professional obligation, said William Allen, professor of bioethics, law and medical professionalism at the University of Florida's College of Medicine.
Allen said doctors cannot refuse patients on the basis of race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or disability, but political preference is not one of the legally protected categories specified in civil-rights law. By insisting he does not quiz his patients about their politics and has not turned away patients based on their vote, the doctor is "trying to hold onto the nub of his ethical obligation," Allen said.
"But this is pushing the limit," he said.
Cassell, who has practiced medicine in GOP-dominated Lake County since 1988, said he doesn't quiz his patients about their politics, but he also won't hide his disdain for the bill Obama signed and the lawmakers who passed it.
In his waiting room, Cassell also has provided his patients with photocopies of a health-care timeline produced by Republican leaders that outlines "major provisions" in the health-care package. The doctor put a sign above the stack of copies that reads: "This is what the morons in Washington have done to your health care. Take one, read it and vote out anyone who voted for it."
Cassell, whose lawyer wife, Leslie Campione, has declared herself a Republican candidate for Lake County commissioner, said three patients have complained, but most have been "overwhelmingly supportive" of his position.
"They know it's not good for them," he said.
Cassell, who previously served as chief of surgery at Florida Hospital Waterman in Tavares, said a patient's politics would not affect his care for them, although he said he would prefer not to treat people who support the president.
"I can at least make a point," he said.
The notice on Cassell's office door could cause some patients to question his judgment or fret about the care they might receive if they don't share his political views, Allen said. He said doctors are wise to avoid public expressions that can affect the physician-patient relationship.
Erin VanSickle, spokeswoman for the Florida Medical Association, would not comment specifically.
But she noted in an e-mail to the Sentinel that "physicians are extended the same rights to free speech as every other citizen in the United States."
The outspoken Grayson described Cassell's sign as "ridiculous."
"I'm disgusted," he said. "Maybe he thinks the Hippocratic Oath says, ‘Do no good.' If this is the face of the right wing in America, it's the face of cruelty. … Why don't they change the name of the Republican Party to the Sore Loser Party?"
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view.bg?&articleid=1244178&format=&page=1&listingType=politics#articleFull
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Obama is “changing” the Constitution by both by ignoring it and with insidious maneuvering. Activist judicial verdicts further pervert the original intent, reducing citizens’ rights and expanding government power and intrusion. What we need now are explicit Amendments to further delineate and proscribe federal government overreach.
Why should Congress regularly pass legislation that all Americans are mandated to follow but it is exempt from, most notably but not limited to Obamacare? What about the generous perks that they vote for themselves such as regular raises in salary and munificent retirement packages? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the average American could also say” I deserve a pay increase this year so I am going to give it to myself”- and they then do.
This corruption, greed and lack of accountability must be extinguished. Elections alone are not the answer.
Now may just may be the perfect storm for these monumentally important changes to be made.
Will Gov't Health Takeover Bring Constitutional 'Hope And Change'?
By Larry Elder 03/25/2010
We live in a fundamentally different country from that which existed only days ago. The government now requires every American to buy health insurance. The Constitution has been attacked, interpreted in a way beyond its original intent.
Therefore, we must change it.
Ignoring the will of the majority of Americans, the discouraging experiences of countries with socialized medicine, and the already staggering amount of entitlement debt, President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats "reformed" health care.
Once a nation under a Constitution that restricted government intrusion, we now want government to provide for our "needs" by calling them "rights."
We now ask government to prop up failing businesses, make student loans, guarantee mortgages, build and maintain public housing, financially support state education from preschool though graduate school, fund private research, provide disaster relief and aid, pay "volunteers" and on and on.
Many in our nation happily submit to this bargain. They consider the Big Three entitlements — Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — "rights," their absence unimaginable in a modern "caring" society. It is out of the question to expect people, families and communities to plan for retirement.
It's beyond reason to expect medical care, like any other commodity, to follow the laws of supply and demand — for prices and choices to allocate resources and competition to drive down prices and improve quality. It's too much to expect the compassion, morality and spirituality of humankind to aid those unable to care for themselves.
We ignore history's examples of how good intentions produce bad results. Almost 50 years ago, another "transformative" president launched a War on Poverty. But for many welfare recipients and their families, poverty became "structural."
People became dependent on government.
After the government finally placed some restrictions on welfare, dependency declined. Much to the surprise of those who denounced welfare reform as cruel, people changed their behavior.
We ignore the experience of price controls. Government can dictate prices, but cannot dictate costs. Price controls result in rationing, drive producers out of business and cause lower quality and less innovation. America, because its citizens enjoyed greater economic freedom, built a superior health care system — which ObamaCare now threatens to dismantle.
Communism collapsed under the romantic but bankrupt notion of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." Taking from the productive and giving to the unproductive does damage to the incentive of both parties.
European countries — "social justice" democracies — produce comparatively few private-sector jobs. Europe suffers from high taxes, choking union deals that make it virtually impossible to fire workers, and government policies that mandate paid vacations and other job-killing benefits.
Into this statist abyss we willingly jump.
Former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern left the Senate after 18 years and bought a small business. It went under. He wrote: "(I) wish I had known more firsthand about the concerns and problems of American businesspeople while I was a U.S. senator and later a presidential nominee. ... Legislators and government regulators must more carefully consider the economic and management burdens we have been imposing on U.S. businesses. ... Many businesses ... simply can't pass such costs on to their customers and remain competitive or profitable."
President Obama, like many in Congress, has little experience in or understanding of the private free-market economy.
Obama never started a business, ran one or struggled to meet a payroll. He shows little respect for the hard, long hours people put in to build successful businesses that hire people. He believes unequal outcomes are unjust and government exists to right this wrong by "spreading the wealth."
If this means telling doctors how to practice, so what? If this means people will be less likely to improve themselves through education and training to get "good" jobs with benefits, so what? If this means we make employers less likely to hire for fear of fines should they fail to offer health insurance, so what? And if the "wealthy" invest less and create fewer jobs because of higher taxes and expensive regulations, so what?
Now what? As many as 39 state legislatures have taken or will take action to block the mandate. Thirteen state attorneys general immediately filed suit, arguing, among other things, that ObamaCare's insurance mandate violates the Constitution's commerce clause. Expect more states to sue.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court broadly interprets the commerce clause — wildly beyond the intent of the Founders — to allow just about anything.
So, the Constitution must be changed. It must be amended to make what was once clear absolutely, positively, unavoidably clear.
Two-thirds of the states can call for a constitutional convention, where an amendment can be proposed to prohibit the forced purchase of health insurance. Three-fourths of the states could then ratify it.
Implausible? So was ObamaCare.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528448
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Where were these companies and why weren’t the potential costs widely and vehemently exposed while the legislation was still being “debated”? Inexcusable silence by thousands of companies and millions of citizens engendered the passage of Obamacare with less resistance than should have been the case? This is not to say that Americans were not outraged and didn’t translate this into positive and productive action – they unequivocally did with their letter writing, email and telephone calling campaigns and of course, with the Tea Party movement.
Some corporations might have stayed silent out of fear of government retribution, greed or diaphanous promises by politicians … but now we will all pay the price.
Now that many companies have “elected” to reveal the real devastating financial consequences of Obamacare (driven to a sizable extent by their legal obligations as public companies to release the information), several prominent Democrats are egregiously seeking retribution against them for exposing the gargantuan financial fraud that has been perpetrated with the healthcare legislation.
Our government has abrogated many of our rights and freedoms while aggrandizing their power … and continues to thirst for more. This is the evil addiction and corruption of power which must be vanquished and reversed.
This must not be the new America that we have to live in!
Dems Threaten Congressional Show Trials After US Companies Leak Real Economic Damage of Obamacare
Jim Hoft March 28, 2010
Late last week several US corporations leaked how the democrat’s health care bill will kill their businesses. The radicals in Congress were not pleased that these corporations would go public with this devastating information. In response, democrats threatened to call for Congressional show trials to publicly humiliate these corporations.
The Wall Street Journal reported:
It’s been a banner week for Democrats: ObamaCare passed Congress in its final form on Thursday night, and the returns are already rolling in. Yesterday AT&T announced that it will be forced to make a $1 billion writedown due solely to the health bill, in what has become a wave of such corporate losses.
This wholesale destruction of wealth and capital came with more than ample warning. Turning over every couch cushion to make their new entitlement look affordable under Beltway accounting rules, Democrats decided to raise taxes on companies that do the public service of offering prescription drug benefits to their retirees instead of dumping them into Medicare. We and others warned this would lead to AT&T-like results, but like so many other ObamaCare objections Democrats waved them off as self-serving or “political.”
…Henry Waxman and House Democrats announced yesterday that they will haul these companies in for an April 21 hearing because their judgment “appears to conflict with independent analyses, which show that the new law will expand coverage and bring down costs.”
In other words, shoot the messenger. Black-letter financial accounting rules require that corporations immediately restate their earnings to reflect the present value of their long-term health liabilities, including a higher tax burden.
Should these companies have played chicken with the Securities and Exchange Commission to avoid this politically inconvenient reality? Democrats don’t like what their bill is doing in the real world, so they now want to intimidate CEOs into keeping quiet.
On top of AT&T’s $1 billion, the writedown wave so far includes Deere & Co., $150 million; Caterpillar, $100 million; AK Steel, $31 million; 3M, $90 million; and Valero Energy, up to $20 million. Verizon has also warned its employees about its new higher health-care costs, and there will be many more in the coming days and weeks.
The last paragraph says it all about the democrat’s trickery:
The Democratic political calculation with ObamaCare is the proverbial boiling frog: Gradually introduce a health-care entitlement by hiding the true costs, hook the middle class on new subsidies until they become unrepealable, but try to delay the adverse consequences and major new tax hikes so voters don’t make the connection between their policy and the economic wreckage. But their bill was such a shoddy, jerry-rigged piece of work that the damage is coming sooner than even some critics expected.
Byron York at The Washington Examiner has more on the show trials.
Waxman is also demanding that the executives give lawmakers internal company documents related to health care finances — a move one committee Republicans describes as “an attempt to intimidate and silence opponents of the Democrats’ flawed health care reform legislation.”
…Waxman has ordered the executives to explain themselves at an April 21 hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigative subcommittee. That subcommittee just happens to be chaired by Rep. Bart Stupak, the Michigan Democrat who held out his vote on health care reform until a few hours before final passage on March 21, giving the bill’s opponents the unfounded hope that he might vote against it.
Waxman’s demands came Friday in letters to several executives. “After the president signed the health care reform bill into law, your company announced that provisions in the law could adversely affect your ability to provide health insurance,” Waxman wrote to Randall Stephenson, chairman and CEO of AT&T. A few hours before Waxman sent his letter, AT&T announced it will take a $1 billion charge against earnings because of the tax provision in the new health bill. AT&T also said it will be “evaluating prospective changes” to its health care benefits for all workers…
Waxman’s request could prove particularly troubling for the companies. The executives will undoubtedly view such documents as confidential, but if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman. And all as punishment for making a business decision in light of a new tax situation.
These democrats in Washington are nothing but thugs. They’ll try anything to keep the truth from coming out about their disastrous legislation.
http://gatewaypundit.firstthings.com/2010/03/dems-threaten-congressional-show-trials-after-us-companies-leak-real-economic-damage-of-obamacare/
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Rightful Anger
Investors Business Daily 03/25/2010
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., warned that politicians should “be very careful ... that our rhetoric doesn’t incite to violent...
Health Reform: Should Americans feel ashamed for being angry that those who rule Washington thwarted the popular will? No more than colonial Americans at the trampling of their freedoms.
If the president and the leaders of his party in Congress think the American people are going to roll over and play dead after the biggest government power grab in history, they don't know this country.
And if they think those on the side of economic freedom will be intimidated by their attempts to caricature them as a bloodthirsty mob of Timothy McVeighs, they underestimate the powers of a free people.
A new CBS News poll finds that 62% of Americans want Republicans to keep fighting the Democrats' health legislation even now that it has passed.
Only 16% believe the new law will "mostly help" them.
Democrats are portraying that majority as a violent minority, being inflamed by the speeches of GOP congressmen and Sarah Palin. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., in an appearance on the CBS "Early Show" on Thursday, warned that politicians should "be very careful ... that our rhetoric doesn't incite to violent acts."
Does that include the rhetoric of former House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell, D-Mich., who this week told a Detroit radio show that "it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people"?
Control the people?
This is a country that went to war over onerous taxation by the mother country. We took up arms and sacrificed our sons "to dissolve the political bands" that attached us to King George, and "to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God" entitled our Colonial forebears.
Dingell has again earned his longtime nickname, the Truck. But it will take more than a couple of hundred congressional eighteen-wheelers to turn the Spirit of '76 into roadkill.
Where were Hoyer and his colleagues, now so concerned about inflammatory rhetoric sparking violence, a couple of years ago?
As Victor Davis Hanson points out, "write a book in which you muse about killing George Bush, and its Knopf imprint proves it is merely sophisticated literary speculation; do a docudrama about killing George Bush, and it will win a Toronto film prize for its artistic value rather than shock from the liberal community about over-the-top discourse."
Knopf's defense was that it was "not the first time a novelist has chosen fiction to express their point of view about American society or politics." Newmarket Films' defense of its computer-rejiggered news footage depicting Bush being assassinated was to call it "quite a compelling political thriller. In many ways it is sympathetic to George Bush."
Nor do you even have to go back years ago.
Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy on Monday said of the Tea Party protesters: "I want to spit on them, take one of their 'Obama Plan White Slavery' signs and knock every racist and homophobic tooth out of their Cro-Magnon heads."
Politically motivated violence is to be condemned as long as America can peacefully be kept free.
Our bet is that as Americans increasingly feel the impoverishing effects of last Sunday's big step toward socialized medicine, they will indeed repeal it — without firing a single shot.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=528481
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The following outrageous comment by Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) just confirms the mind set of many of the far-left Democrats (Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et. al.) and not just regarding healthcare and why we need to be ever vigilant in protecting and fighting for our rights and freedoms. This is an ideology that will relentlessly seek to abrogate our rights, creating an omnipotent, intrusive, and authoritarian Central Government not unlike the Soviet Union or China.
What can and should we do? Fight back. Resist. Remove these Democrats from office in November. Provide support for organizations, agencies, individuals and even states that are trying to rein in and reduce the ever increasing power of the Federal government.
Rep. Dingell: It's Taken a Long Time to 'Control the People'
From American Thinker: Rep. John Dingell (D-MI), the Dean of the House of Representatives for being the longest serving member of the body (he was first elected in 1955, succeeding his father, Rep. John Dingell, Sr.), made an amazing admission during a live telephone interview with Detroit WJR News/Talk 760 radio talk show host Paul W. Smith on Smith's show Monday morning, March 22, 2010. The night before, Dingell had been a featured speaker at the Democrat Congressional leadership victory press conference after Obamacare passed the House. In response to a question posed by Smith, Dingell said:
Let me remind you this [Americans allegedly dying because of lack of universal health care] has been going on for years. We are bringing it to a halt. The harsh fact of the matter is when you're going to pass legislation that will cover 300 [million] American people in different ways it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.
http://www.thefoxnation.com/rep-john-dingell/2010/03/24/rep-dingell-its-taken-long-time-control-people?page=7
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Obama and the Congressional Democrats have corruptly and despicably passed a wealth transferring, fiscally bankrupting socialized medicine bill that legalizes seizure and control of our healthcare and privacy by the Federal Government – all in opposition to the will of the people. Though it is imperative that we continue to fight this abomination through Congress and elections, the best immediate chances that we have of overturning it are through legal challenges.
Kill It In Court
Investors Business Daily 03/22/2010
Constitution: Republicans vow to repeal health care reform. But no social entitlement, once signed into law, has ever been overturned. The way to stop this federal overreach is through the courts.
Fox pundit Bill Kristol predicts that Republicans will repeal the law in 2013. Rep. Jim DeMint and other GOP leaders have already pledged to do so.
But that assumes a lot. Republicans must first regain control of both houses of Congress, which will require sustaining the current level of public outrage for six months after the fact.
That won't be easy. While additional negative details about the 2,074-page bill will come out over the coming months, the worst parts won't go into effect for years. And the White House is already reselling the few positives, such as covering pre-existing conditions, which go into effect right away.
Yes, Republicans won Congress for the first time in 50 years after Clinton tried to socialize medicine. And yes, this bill is arguably worse, with 732 more pages, 109 more bureaucracies and just as many new taxes.
But HillaryCare failed, and was cast as a major Democrat defeat. ObamaCare, on the other hand, will be hailed as a big Democrat win. Even in the off chance that they do take back Congress, Republicans seeking repeal will have to fend off all the lobbyists who will cement around new health care rules, programs and benefits.
Then they'll have to override President Obama's veto.
The nation's best chance to kill this monstrosity before it can ruin the best health care system in the world is to get the courts to declare it unconstitutional.
The "individual mandate" is a violation of the 9th and 14th amendments. The Commerce Clause gives Congress the power to regulate the health care industry on issues of interstate trade. It does not give it the authority to force individuals to buy a service from private industry. This is unheard of. Even in World War II, the feds did not make citizens buy war bonds, for instance.
Already Virginia, Florida and South Carolina are preparing constitutional challenges.
The high court — which thankfully (for now) is led by strict constructionists — will not let stand this violence against the Constitution, which the framers designed to limit federal powers.
If the bench were to uphold mandated universal participation in a federal health system, it would give Congress license to do anything it wants under the Commerce Clause. Nothing would be out of bounds.
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As many people are beginning to realize and what we have been warning about for a long time, Obamacare is not truly about healthcare or healthcare reform. That is the liberal pretense used for its passage. This legislation is all about the transfer of wealth, expropriation of 17% of our economy by the Federal government, and unfettered control and intrusion by the government into our private lives including access to our medical records.
There are no cost savings nor will there be a reduction in our national debt. We don’t think that adding in excess of 170 new federal agencies enumerated within this bill will accomplish this trick. Nor will the planned hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents (we don’t think that they have your interest at heart) to monitor compliance save us money. These actions tell you all you need to know about Obama’s and the Congressional Democrats’ true agenda under the guise of healthcare reform.
We all must vigorously thwart implementation of Obamacare by also providing verbal and financial support to our Senators, Representatives, Tea Party Groups, organizations and States who will be fighting this despicable legislation.
Enacting A Lie
Investors Business Daily 03/22/2010
Health Overhaul: Sunday's vote exposed the ugly truth that ObamaCare is not really about health care at all. It's all about who pays for it and who controls it — in effect a massive wealth-redistribution scheme.
Those who believe this will lead to some medical nirvana will likely be disappointed. Fact is, this poorly designed monstrosity will lead to lower-quality care, higher costs, fewer practicing physicians, higher taxes and fewer jobs.
We've done more than 150 editorials in the past year or so documenting these problems. Democrats surely understand them.
Yet, despite a recent CNN poll showing that 59% of Americans oppose ObamaCare, Congress approved it anyway.
Why? Because it's not really about health care. It's the largest wealth grab in American history, masquerading as health care "reform," another step in the socialization of Americans' income in the name of "fairness" and "spread(ing) the wealth around," as Obama himself has put it.
That's why we call the program a lie.
The idea behind all this, simply put, is control. This is a vast expansion of government that will require as much as $3 trillion in added spending over a decade. All claims of deficit neutrality are a joke.
This is socialization through the tax code. That $3 trillion has to be paid for. As we showed last week, the health care bill levies $569.2 billion in new taxes over the next 10 years alone.
At the same time, as noted by Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former head of the Congressional Budget Office, it will increase U.S. budget deficits by $562 billion.
Who'll pay all these taxes? Those deemed "rich" by Democrats, and businesses. Specifically, the bulk of the money comes from a special 3.8% Medicare tax on 5 million people earning more than $200,000 a year. That tax is imposed on capital gains, dividends, rents, royalties and interest — that is, investment income.
Obama already has proposed boosting these taxes in his budget. So the top tax take on dividends and cap gains will rise to 23.8% from 15%, an increase of nearly 59%, while top rates on interest and rents will soar from 15% to nearly 44%, a 193% jump.
About 50% of this higher-taxed group reports small business or partnership income. So don't be fooled: These aren't taxes on the "rich," but on small businesses and jobs.
In ObamaCare, the taxes will be ruinous. Unlike real insurance, where individuals pay to cover their risks, this program covers everyone — including 32 million uninsured — and pays for it by a "mandate" ( read: "tax" ) and by taking money from other people to subsidize those who can't pay. And this just scratches the surface of the new taxes — we literally don't have room to list them here.
Hmm. Taking money from one group, and giving it to another. That's called welfare — or, perhaps, health-fare. It's not insurance.
Once the new program is finished wrecking what remains of the private health insurance industry — as it ultimately will — we'll be stuck with the government declaring that "the market doesn't work" and forcing all of us into a single-payer government plan.
That's what those Democrats who back "Medicare for all" want — to kill what's left of the private market for health care, which has created the best medical system on earth, and use "reform" to expand an already-bankrupt Medicare system.
The math behind this is ugly. Medicare's long-term liabilities now total $89 trillion, according to the Government Accountability Office. Based on projected deficits, the just-passed health reform will take that to $136 trillion.
It will take a lot more than the "rich," as defined today, to make up such unfathomable tax shortfalls. That's when they'll come for the rest of us — poor, middle-class and rich alike — and we all will be paying vastly higher taxes for vastly inferior medical care.
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The preliminary estimates publicized by the Congressional Budget Office have no basis in reality. Though we don't know exactly how they arrived at their artificially low number, it was unquestionably affected by the incomplete and deceptive information that they were provided with. Of course, this does not account for bald faced fraud perpetrated by the Democrats in attempting to reduce the ostensible costs with maneuvers such as removing the Medicare fix costs from the legislation.
Five Reasons The CBO Figures Are Phony
Ed Carson 3/18/2010
The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary “score” says the health care overhaul will cost $940 billion over the first 10 years, saving $138 billion over that time. But the CBO must assess legislation as written, rather than whether it will actually be carried out. Or, as the Economist put it, “The CBO is required to pretend to believe many impossible things before breakfast.”
1. Medicare cuts
The Senate health care bill relied heavily on unprecedented cuts in Medicare spending increases. If implemented, this would have a huge impact on seniors’ care. But Congress has always balked at Medicare cuts. (See No. 3).
2. Delayed start
To make the budget math work, Democrats plan on delaying the start of subsidies and other costly provisions for several years. (The bill spends just $17 billion through 2013). The true 10-year cost is far higher.
3. The “doc fix” is excluded
The Sustainable Growth Rate imposes automatic cuts in Medicare payment rates to doctors.
For several years, fearing a revolt by doctors — and seniors — Congress has suspended those cuts. The original draft of the House health care bill included a permanent “doc fix.” But that ballooned deficits, so Democrats dropped it, even though everyone knows Congress isn’t going to slash doctors’ rates. The CBO has estimated a “doc fix” would cost $247 billion over 10 years.
4. Student loans are included
Doctors’ payments are excluded from the health bill, but major student loan program changes are included? Yep. The reconciliation bill will end student loan subsidies to lenders. The CBO says this will save $19.4 billion over the first decade, accounting for virtually all of the $19.8 billion in deficit reduction from the health care reconciliation bill. Reconciliation bills must cut the deficit by at least $1 billion. So, without the non-health care items, the health care reconciliation bill would not pass muster.
5. It’s a CLASS act
In the Senate health bill, a new, voluntary long-term care insurance program called CLASS accounted for some $72 billion of the deficit reduction. The Community Living Assistance Services and Supports program is supposed to be deficit-neutral long-term. But Democrats are counting the upfront premium surplus in the short term and ignoring the significant operating deficits after 2029. Update: Democrats also are counting on projected additional Social Security revenues from payroll taxes on higher wages in lieu of lower health benefits. Again, those benefits have to be paid out.
But wait, there’s more! Let’s assume that the cost savings materialize as planned. It still makes the long-term fiscal outlook worse. Why? Democrats are using up a lot of tax hikes, spending cuts and upfront payment just to get barely better than deficit-neutral. That leaves future lawmakers less scope to bring the nation’s finances into order.
On a related note, Democrats continue to maintain the health bill would extend Medicare’s solvency by several years. But they plan to use those as-yet-unrealized Medicare cost savings for a huge new entitlement and to reduce the overall deficit.
http://blogs.investors.com/capitalhill/index.php/home/35-politicsinvesting/1524-five-reasons-the-cbo-figures-are-phony
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It is difficult if not impossible to find a period of time in our history where our government is as corrupt and hell-bent on abrogating the freedoms and rights of its citizens. This is the anathema of a one party rule without countervailing opposition. What we are witnessing is a revolution by corrupt and unconstitutional legislation perpetrated by “our” government which must be stopped.
The next few days are the most critical for all of us. We urge you to call, e-mail and fax Senators and Representatives across the country and give them a piece of your mind. Then in November, these corruptocrats need to be ousted wholesale.
Not Even A Vote?!
Investors Business Daily 03/16/2010
Health Reform: Using a parliamentary trick ironically known as the "self-executing rule," Democrats plan on passing their massive health bill without voting. In November, they'll learn just how "self-executing" it was.
Just when you thought Washington couldn't get more corrupt, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week seems intent on trampling representative government itself. Unable to get the votes to pass their U.S. health care revolution, she and her fellow Democratic leaders have figured out a way to pass it without a vote.
The "self-executing rule" has been "used to adopt concurrent resolutions correcting the enrollment of measures or to make other technical changes to legislation," according to the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress.
It's "a two-for-one procedure," as the CRS describes it, because the House of Representatives always must pass a rule, written by the House Rules Committee (where Democrats hold a 9-to-4 majority), setting the terms of debate on a particular piece of legislation. In this case, it's been rigged so that if the rule passes, the legislation passes too.
The trick has been used before, as cited by the CRS, on obscure measures like the prohibition of smoking on airline flights in 1989, an employee verification program regarding illegal aliens in 1996, the blocking of the use of statistical sampling for the 2000 census until federal courts could determine its constitutionality, and an IRS overhaul in 1997.
But never on anything approaching such landmark legislation.
Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, is among a number of legal scholars who believe this Slaughter Solution, named after House Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter, D-N.Y., "would stand a very good chance of being tossed out by the U.S. Supreme Court."
In the 1998 Clinton v. City of New York ruling on the line-item veto, liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for a 6-to-3 majority, "laid a likely road map for how the court might rule on a challenge to the constitutionality of the Slaughter Solution," according to Ridenour.
Stevens made note of "three procedural steps" that must be taken before a bill becomes law: The "exact text" must be "approved by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives"; the Senate must approve "precisely the same text"; and the same text must be "signed into law by the president. The Constitution explicitly requires that each of those three steps be taken before a bill may become a law."
Indeed, Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution couldn't be clearer: "The votes of both Houses shall be determined by yeas and nays, and the names of the persons voting for and against the bill shall be entered on the Journal of each House respectively."
Michael McConnell, a former federal judge and director of Stanford University's Constitutional Law Center, writing in the Wall Street Journal this week, declared the trick unconstitutional because "this means that no single bill will have passed both houses in the same form." Talk radio host and Landmark Legal Foundation President Mark Levin warned of its use sparking "the greatest constitutional crisis since the Civil War."
The president, the speaker and the rest of those involved in one-party rule in Washington may think they know what's good for the American people better than the people do.
Do they also think they know better than the framers of the Constitution and their naive ideas of one man, one vote?
If anything could swell the ranks of the populist Tea Party movement and make it friendlier to Republican candidates this November, it's executing the "self-executing rule."
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=527493
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We are now seeing some more sensible politicians speaking out against the Federal government's illegal tactics of attempting to impose legislation on Americans and against their will. This is essentially a clarion call to action in order to prevent the government from abrogating our rights and freedoms.
We all must act. Call, write and e-mail your Representatives and Senators again, again and again...
Steve King Calls For Revolution In The Streets Of Washington To Stop Health Care Bill
Eric Kleefeld March 16, 2010
Rep. Steve King (R-IA)
Rep. Steve King (R-IA) is calling for a new procedural solution to stop the health care bill: Have an angry mob of citizens storm Washington and prevent Congress from acting, in imitation of the Velvet Revolution that overthrew communist rule in Czechoslovakia!
The Huffington Post interviewed King after his speech at today's "Code Red" anti-health care bill rally, a speech in which he called upon the crowd to "Storm this city, fill up Washington D.C., jam this capital so they can't move."
Speaking to the Huffington Post shortly after his speech, King declared that a peaceful uprising, a la the successful overthrowing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia on the streets of Prague in 1989 "would be fine with me."
"Fill this city up, fill this city, jam this place full so that they can't get in, they can't get out and they will have to capitulate to the will of the American people," he said.
"So this is just like Prague under communist rule?" the Huffington Post asked.
"Oh yeah, it is very, very close," King replied. "It is the nationalization of our liberty and the federal government taking our liberty over. So there are a lot of similarities there."
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/steve-king-calls-for-revolution-in-the-streets-of-washington-to-stop-health-care-bill.php
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The ideology of Republicans and Conservatives regarding taxes is that this is money that the Government has taken from the private sector, from the labor of private citizens and businesses, and uses for its purposes which should be to the benefit of Americans. Tax cuts are returning money directly back to those who worked hard to earn it.
Democrats and liberals see tax cuts as the Government taking ITS money and unnecessarily and unwisely paying individuals who should not be entitled to it.
These are diametrically opposite assessments of taxes based on fundamental ideological differences and why Republicans are strong proponents of tax cuts and why Democrats almost always oppose them. Interestingly, when you look at the data, tax cuts ultimately benefit everyone including those who did not receive their money back directly.
The Dems' Deafening Silence On Tax Cuts
Cesar Conda and J.T. Young 03/09/2010
Who killed the economy? Those on the left want to frame the previous administration, with George Bush fronting every lineup and most scenarios implicating the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003.
This gives us the chance to play detective and prove not just the innocence of the tax cuts, but also their efficacy.
Liberal leaders want us to believe Bush's tax cuts weakened the economy and created a climate of avarice. This fostered the speculative bubble that eventually burst, bringing down the financial sector and triggering the latest recession.
But just the opposite is true. The 2001 tax cuts quickly ended the downturn that took hold at the end of 2000. The economy began the first quarter of 2001 in decline. Yet during those three months, it was plain that tax relief was on the way, and by the second quarter bipartisan tax relief had arrived.
Negative growth did not return until Sept. 11, 2001. But despite the lack of momentum coming out of 2000, and the terrorist attacks that ushered in the third quarter of 2001, the economy still never registered two straight quarters of negative growth.
The failure to match that recessionary rule of thumb, and the short and shallow downturn that ensued, made that dip unique among post-World War II slowdowns.
Data from the end of 2001 to the latest recession bear this out. The economy started expanding again in the fourth quarter of 2001 and grew for 25 consecutive quarters. After enactment of the 2003 tax cut, which lowered the marginal effective tax rate on new investment, gross domestic product surged 7.5% in the third quarter, the fastest pace since 1984. And for 26 straight months unemployment stayed below 5%.
The Bush tax cuts also led to increases in tax revenues, and after 2004 the revenues grew faster than the economy. The ratio of tax receipts to GDP rose to 18.8% in 2007, above the 40-year average, and the deficit was just 1.2% of GDP.
From 2004 to 2008, capital gains realizations grew by 60%; from 2004 to 2007, corporate tax receipts nearly doubled, adding a full point to the revenues-to-GDP ratio.
As for the first charge in liberals' "frame-up" — that the economy would have been better off with a higher tax burden after 2000 — it's hard to accept such a premise.
The economy crested in 2000's fourth quarter under the highest federal tax burden (20.6% of GDP) since WWII. It's hard to see how sustaining such a burden would have aided economic recovery prior to 9/11, let alone after it.
The charge that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts triggered the latest recession is even more outlandish.
As noted, the economy was weak in the first three months of 2001. If the tax cuts were as poisonous as the liberals believe, wouldn't the economy have gone into a full, unmistakable and far deeper recession at that point — instead of seven years later?
In searching for suspects to blame for the recession, critics would do better to investigate those that had a bearing on the financial sector — money supply, failure to properly price risk and zeal by all parties — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — to extend credit to those who could not afford their loans.
Yet the clearest clue to the tax cuts' innocence comes from the greatest of detectives — Sherlock Holmes. It was in tracking down the missing racehorse Silver Blaze in Conan Doyle's story of the same name that the super sleuth found it "curious" that "the dog in the nighttime did nothing." This led him to conclude the person who took the horse was no stranger.
In the current mystery, the dog that isn't barking — at least for repeal of the Bush tax cuts — is the liberal elite.
If the cuts were as bad as they think, wouldn't they have tried to roll them back by now? Such a course would have increased taxes and paid for the redistributive policies they so love.
How curious they remain so silent.
A year from now, the Bush tax cuts will expire — unless Washington acts to keep them. All but the most liberal among us agree the lower rates need to be retained. President Obama's new budget proposes extending them, except for upper-income taxpayers.
It's hard to see into a crystal ball, but it's relatively easy to look in the rearview mirror. Bush's tax cuts have proved themselves to the satisfaction of all but the ultraliberal, preventing a much worse recession post-9/11 and helping ease the impact of the l
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The Democratic leadership has not ruled any tactics off limits in its quest to obtain enough votes necessary to pass their healthcare reform legislation. They have resorted to ad hominem attacks even on fellow Democrats, slander, threats, bribes, illegal or questionable parliamentary maneuvers and other corrupt deals.
All of this is being perpetrated despite a furious and rejecting American public who oppose Obamacare by nearly a 3:1 margin. The contemptuousness, elitism and arrogance of Obama, Pelosi, Reid and others is essentially unparalleled in American History.
These individuals must be stopped and Obamacare should never see the light of day. What these politicians are doing is facilitating a legislative theft of our rights, freedoms and wealth that may be permanent. It is a heinous scheme that is leading us closer to an ideological totalitarian regime under the guise of a “representative” government.
House Democrat Takes On Party Leaders
Lee Ross March 13, 2010
In a surprising and fascinating look at the behind-the-scenes negotiations of proposed health care legislation on Capitol Hill, a prominent Democrat says the actions of his party's leaders in recent days represents a "pretty sad commentary on the state of the Democratic party."
If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is holding out hope that Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) will replicate his "yes" vote on health care reform she can probably forget it. In a wide-ranging swipe at his party's leaders, Stupak told an interviewer that he is a definite "no" vote on a health care bill that is expected to reach the House floor next week.
A single vote could make the difference in the fate of the legislation but Stupak says other pro-life Democrats who had been part of his coalition fighting for specific language on abortion funding have given up the fight. "It's almost like some right-to-life members don't want to be bothered. They just want this over," Stupak told National Review's Robert Costa in an article [1]published on-line Friday. If that's the case, Democratic leaders may be able to prevail without Stupak's support.
The Michigan Democrat's vitriol for House leaders shines a bright light on the normally secret negotiations. "They're ignoring me," Stupak asserts while concluding that the final bill will not have the stronger abortion-related language that he's long supported and was able to force in the first bill the House passed late last year.
"[E]ven if they don't have the votes, it's been made clear to us that they won't insert our language on the abortion issue," Stupak says. "I really believe that the Democratic leadership is simply unwilling to change its stance. Their position says that women, especially those without means available, should have their abortions covered."
Stupak offers an interesting take on why party leaders don't want his effort to succeed. "If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That's one of the arguments I've been hearing," Stupak says. "Money is their hang-up. Is this how we now value life in America? If money is the issue - come on, we can find room in the budget. This is life we're talking about."
Stupak believes that if a final health care bill passes without strong language on abortion funding, it will effectively freeze out pro-life Democrats in the future. He says he will remain a Democrat but predicts that any effort to change the abortion language would have to wait "until the Republicans take back the majority to fix this." You read that right, a Democrat looking forward to a Republican take-over of Congress!
Stupak's prominence and apparent resolve on this issue has increased the political heat on the nine-term Democrat. "This has really reached an unhealthy stage," Stupak says. "People are threatening ethics complaints on me. On the left, they're really stepping it up. Every day, from Rachel Maddow to the Daily Kos, it keeps coming. Does it bother me? Sure. Does it change my position? No."
A Friday posting on Daily Kos has this headline: "Women ROAR BACK against Stupak/Pitts!" It targets Stupak and Congressman Joe Pitts (R-PA) and is a fundraising appeal for Stupak's primary challenger. "If you were pissed when Joe Wilson shouted YOU LIE at President Obama I want you to channel that same sort of anger and aim it in support of Connie Saltonstall..."
Earlier this week, MSNBC's Maddow took direct aim at Stupak saying his efforts were designed to do nothing more than get him on television. "Abortion rights only for rich ladies. That's Bart Stupak's principled crusade," Maddow said.
Stupak does not name names in his attack on party leaders but in a radio interview Thursday, Stupak recounted a conversation he had with House Energy & Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA), a central figure in the health care debate. Stupak said Waxman told him that Democratic leaders "want to pay for abortions." In a statement to Fox News, Waxman said “My position has been clear and consistent. I do not believe health reform should be used to change current law, which prohibits federal funds from paying for abortion.”
http://congress.blogs.foxnews.com/2010/03/13/house-democrat-takes-on-party-leaders/
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Over the last year, we have expressed our resolute opposition to Government controlled healthcare reform independent of the various iterations that have been promulgated. The present behemoth legislation, in excess of 2700 pages, will destroy the best healthcare system in the world and ultimately bankrupt this country with uncontrollable and unsustainable costs.
There are countless reasons to oppose this legislation, many of which have received little exposure in the press or by analysts (privacy issues). Regardless, this bill must be vehemently fought and opposed by all Americans if we want to preserve the world’s best healthcare as well as our rights and freedoms.
Below, is an abbreviated list assembled by Investors Business Daily of some of the reasons why Obamacare should not be implemented.
Why Health Bill Makes No Sense
Investors Business Daily 03/12/2010
Health Reform: So it's come down to this — desperate Democratic leaders strong-arming members on the worst bill ever before they go home to explain to constituents why they decided to commit political suicide.
We've said just about all we've had to say on this issue — actually dating back to 1993-94, when we wrote nearly 100 editorials in opposition to HillaryCare. Since January of last year, we've weighed in 150 more times against the latest version of socialized medicine.
But to review, here are just 15 reasons why a government takeover of the finest medical system in the world makes no sense at all:
1. The people don't want it! This, we would think, should have some bearing on decision-making. Yet the Democrats forge ahead without consent of the governed. In the latest Rasmussen poll, 53% opposed the Democrats' reform while 42% were in favor. More than four in 10 "strongly" opposed; just two in 10 "strongly" favored. This jibes with other surveys, including our own IBD/TIPP Poll, taken since last year.
2. Doctors don't want it! A survey we took last summer of 1,376 practicing physicians found that 45% would consider leaving their practices or taking early retirements if the Democrats' reform became law. In December, the results were validated by a Medicus poll in which 25% of doctors said they'd retire early if a public option is implemented and another 21% would stop practicing even though they were far from their retirement years. Even if the bill doesn't have a "public option," nearly 30% said they'd quit the profession under the plans being considered.
3. Half the Congress doesn't want it! Not a single Republican backed the health care bill that cleared the Senate on Christmas Eve 60-39. House passage was by a slim 220 to 215, and the lone Republican "aye" has since switched to "no."
Columnist Michael Barone says other changes would put the House vote today at 216-215 in favor, and he has doubts Democrats can even muster 216.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made her job of securing yes votes even more difficult last week when she told a meeting of county officials that "we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it." Members of Congress aren't waiting: They've already exempted themselves from whatever they inflict on us.
4. People are happy with the health care they've got! Polls show that 84% of Americans have health insurance and that few are displeased with what they've got. Last month, the St. Petersburg Times looked at eight polls and reported that satisfaction rates averaged 87%.
5. It doesn't even cover the people they set out to cover! Supporters of government-run health care say there are as many as 47 million Americans — 9 million to 10 million of them illegal aliens — without medical insurance. The Democrats' plans, however, will put only 31 million of the uninsured under coverage.
6. Costs will go up, not down! Democrats say their plans will cost less than $1 trillion over the first decade. But analyst Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute puts the cost at $2.5 trillion over the first 10 years. Even if we go with the government's lower estimates, the cost is already on the rise. A new estimate by the Congressional Budget Office puts the cost of the Senate bill at $875 billion over 10 years, $4 billion more than its original projection. Imagine how fast costs would soar if one of the bills became public policy.
7. Real cost controls are nowhere to be found! The Democrats are offering no meaningful tort reform that will help push down the high malpractice insurance premiums that are a burden to doctors and their patients. Nor are they considering any other cost-saving provisions, such as allowing the sale of individual health plans across state lines or easing health insurance mandates.
8. Insurance premiums will rise, not fall! One goal of nationalizing health care is to lower costs, to bend the spending curve downward. Yet, as Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin acknowledged Wednesday, that won't be the case.
"Anyone who would stand before you and say, 'Well, if you pass health care reform, next year's health care premiums are going down,' I don't think is telling the truth," he said from the Senate floor. "I think it is likely they would go up."
An analysis completed by the CBO at the request of Sen. Evan Bayh confirms Durbin's suspicions. Insurance coverage in the individual market will "be about 10% to 13% higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law," it concluded.
9. Medicare is already bankrupting us! The Medicare trust fund, which has unfunded obligations of $37.8 trillion, will be insolvent in 2017. How can lawmakers justify another entitlement that will cost trillions when they can't pay for existing liabilities?
10. There aren't enough doctors now! Last month, 26% of physicians responding to a Web poll on Sermo.com, which calls itself "the largest online physician community," said they had been forced to close, or were considering closing, their solo practices. Providing coverage for an additional 31 million Americans when the number of doctors is shrinking won't improve our health care.
11. The doctor-patient relationship will be wrecked! The latest IBD/TIPP Poll, taken just last week, found that Americans, by a wide 48%-26% margin, believe the doctor-patient relationship will decline if the Democrats' plan is passed.
12. Medical care will also deteriorate! IBD/TIPP has also found that 51% of Americans believe care would get worse under government control. Only 10.5% said they felt it would improve. In our doctor poll, 72% disagreed with administration claims that the government could cover 47 million more people with better-quality care at lower cost.
13. Rationing of care is inevitable! Health care is not an unlimited resource and must be rationed, either by the individual, providers or government. In Britain and Canada, where the government does the rationing, medical treatment waiting lists are sometimes deadly and quite often excessively long.
For instance, late cancer diagnoses in an overcrowded public health care system cause up to 10,000 needless deaths a year in Britain. The reasons cited for the late diagnoses include doctor delay, delay in primary care, system delay and delay in secondary care.
14. Private health insurers will be destroyed! Added mandates and price controls will force many insurers to simply get out of the health plan business because it will no longer be profitable.
15. It's probably unconstitutional! One way to help bring down the number of uninsured is to demand that those without coverage buy health plans. But the government has never passed a law requiring Americans to buy any good or service.
Constitutional scholars say any such mandate would likely draw a legal challenge.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=527217
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In direct response to the irresponsible and profligate spending by both Republicans and Democrats, three Republican politicians have proposed a Spending Limit Amendment. This would serve to rein in and constrain such runaway spending whether it is by the President or Congress.
Given our financially dire present situation and an angry America as evidenced by the ascendancy of the Tea Party, it may just stand a chance.
Tea Party Amendment
Investors Business Daily 03/03/2010
Fiscal Crisis: Tea Partyers have made it clear they don't trust politicians — Democrat or Republican. Their historic uprising may now have a surefire way to stop politicians from spending us into the abyss.
In what promises to be a consequential election year, Republican leaders are eager to get the masses who make up the Tea Party movement on their side. But Tea Partyers remember that the GOP Congress and GOP president themselves spent way too much — even expanding the fiscally doomed Medicare entitlement program. Some Tea Party leaders even accuse Republican spendthrifts of practicing socialism.
GOP Reps. Jeb Hensarling of Texas, Mike Pence of Indiana and John Campbell of California may have just hit on a way of focusing the energy of a movement that's been accused by Democrats such as former Senate aide and Forbes columnist Dan Gerstein of being "incoherent, indiscriminate" and "all over the place" in its complaints.
The three have proposed a Spending Limit Amendment to the Constitution that would restrain the federal government to the average expenditures of the post-World War II era — 20% of the U.S. economy. It would take a declaration of war or a two-thirds vote by Congress to waive the spending constraints.
Tea Partyers will no doubt be impressed by the fact that the idea comes from no less than Thomas Jefferson. In 1798, the Declaration's author wrote: "I wish it were possible to obtain a single amendment to our Constitution. I would be willing to depend on that alone for the reduction of the administration of our government."
There really is no credible argument against the idea. In common-sense fashion, the constraint would be suspended during a declared war, and any other real emergency would surely be recognized as such by two-thirds of lawmakers.
Other attempts to save Americans from the drunken sailors they send to Washington have failed. The automatic cuts of the Gramm-Rudman "sequester" of the 1980s worked, but the Supreme Court judged much of the law to be an unconstitutional restriction on presidential powers, and Congress defanged it. Gramm-Rudman's successor, Paygo, didn't use fixed targets, and expired in 2002. The line-item veto was famously ruled unconstitutional by the high court.
The Hensarling-Pence-Campbell Spending Limit Amendment is actually preferable to the line-item veto because it doesn't discriminate between big-spending Congresses and profligate presidents. It snaps the public purse closed on every Washington politician's fingers.
The SLA couldn't come at a more opportune time. The president and Congress want to add to our current $12 trillion in national debt a $2-trillion-plus big government health overhaul. Medicare, in the meantime, is less than a decade from bankruptcy, Social Security less than three decades away. As the plan points out, "if the SLA is not adopted, all of these programs are doomed on their current auto-pilot glide path as these three entitlement programs alone — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — are set to consume the entirety of the federal budget by 2036."
Investor's Business Daily on Wednesday asked Hensarling and Pence about the difficulties of getting three-quarters of the states to approve an amendment when so many amendment attempts by both sides of the aisle — from equal rights for women to abortion to flag desecration — have failed in recent decades.
"We're not naive," Hensarling said, noting that of about 5,000 proposed amendments only 27 have been ratified. But both men said that based on attending town halls and other venues, they have never seen the American people so incensed about runaway spending. The SLA "might be one of those simple ideas," Pence said, whose time has finally come.
If the Tea Party movement embraces this simple idea, with Thomas Jefferson as the SLA's avatar, there's no telling how big the political tsunami to strike Washington could end up becoming.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522845
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As predictable as the sun rising in the east, Obama will pursue reconciliation in order to facilitate passage of his radical bill which will steal our freedom and rights, fiscally bankrupt our country and destroy the best healthcare system in the world.
We must stop Obama and his radical, elitist minions from this government take over of our healthcare system that a large majority of Americans oppose ... and which Obama and Congress will never have to be subject to.
We urge you to call and email your Senators and Representatives, voicing your vehement opposition to this legislation.
Unreconciled
Investors Business Daily 03/03/2010
Health Reform: As promised, the White House has unveiled the latest tweaks in its plan to take over the U.S. medical care system. Both parties in Congress should beware: You vote for it, you own it.
Survey after survey, including our own IBD/TIPP Poll, shows that Americans firmly oppose more government control over health care. Yet President Obama's new reform plan does just that.
He and other Democratic leaders seem willing to ignore both the voters and the well-founded doubts of opponents to ram a plan down our collective throats — making the grand bet that Republicans, even if they retake Congress in November, will have neither the political clout nor the guts to undo the damage.
Worse, they cynically manipulated us into this situation. Last week, at the much-ballyhooed health care "summit," the president pretended to take ideas from Republican foes to "improve" his wildly unpopular plan. But it was just window dressing.
On Wednesday, the president made clear he'll use the budget reconciliation process to get his radical plan through with as few votes as possible. In short, he'll pass a bill that takes control of 17% of the economy without any GOP support.
So much for bipartisanship.
Worse still, this requires the House to vote up or down on an already-passed Senate bill, with only a vow from the Senate and Obama that they'll go back later and "fix" all that's egregiously wrong with the measure.
So, neither House members nor the citizens they represent will really know what's in the bill until after it's passed. Is this what the White House and Democratic leaders meant last year when they repeatedly promised "transparency" in health reform deliberations?
Still more troubling, no one seems to know the plan's true cost. Obama puts it at $1 trillion over 10 years. But just this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi vowed a "much smaller" bill, while Majority Leader Steny Hoyer insists there is no "scaled-back" version.
Who's right? We'll just say this: Because of accounting tricks that front-load costs but delay benefits, the real price of ObamaCare is more like $2.5 trillion over a decade. This will require massive tax hikes on the middle class, rationing of care by government bureaucrats and deep cuts in Medicare.
The president also said on Wednesday: "The proposal I've put forward gives Americans more control over their health care by holding insurance companies more accountable." Not true.
Americans will be forced to buy health insurance — something we believe is unconstitutional. By adding 31 million new buyers to the health care market and requiring coverage of pre-existing conditions, private insurance prices will inevitably soar. That will force businesses to drop coverage for millions of workers.
"I don't know how this plays politically, but I know it's right," Obama also said. But he knows darn well his scheme is highly unpopular, and that resorting to reconciliation is the only way he'll get the main item on his presidential agenda passed — even if it ends Democrats' control of Congress.
Surely moderate Democrats and Republicans won't be swayed by talk of joining in a "historic opportunity." Their constituents clearly see the flaws in this government takeover of the best health care system in the world, and a vote in favor of it will likely bring their political careers to a sudden end.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522847
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Cavuto Blasts Obama Transparency Claims: ‘People Have Had It With Phonies’
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Obama and many Congressional Democrats aim to pass government run healthcare no matter what the cost, financially or politically. They are arrogantly and relentlessly pursuing this despite the vehement opposition of a large majority of Americans. In fact, both they and the fifth column news media have added the contemptuous tactics of calling Americans who oppose it dumb, ignorant, and too stupid to understand the complexities of the bill. Of course, they have made many other derogatory claims.
As we have mentioned numerous times, THIS IS NOT TRULY ABOUT HEALTHCARE. Obamacare is a crucial piece in the puzzle that will further co-opt the individual’s rights and transfer it to an all powerful and controlling central government. It is a confiscation by legislation of an additional 16% of our economy which would mean that nearly 50% of it is directly owned and controlled by the government.
Have you noticed how many czars and other officials selected by Obama ardently support communism? This is not by accident. It is part of the overall plan.
The rhetoric of Obama and select Democrats regarding healthcare reform are complete lies. There is no cost savings with this plan. In fact, their claimed costs probably underestimate the total 10 year costs by well in excess of three to four trillion dollars. Look at estimates of other federal programs and check out how they turned out. Most were off by a factor of three to ten times.
Unbelievable!
The following expose by Thomas Sowell eloquently and cogently examines the relevant issues and information regarding government controlled healthcare, truths, facts and political motivations.
Other Nations' Health Systems Are Overlooked
By Thomas Sowell 03/03/2010
What is most like Alice in Wonderland in medical care reform is the fact that it is being discussed in the abstract, as if there are not already government-run medical care systems in this country and elsewhere.
Yet there seems to be remarkably little interest in examining how government-run medical care actually turns out — medically and financially — whether in Medicare, Medicaid, Veterans Administration hospitals in this country, or in government-run medical systems in other countries.
We are repeatedly being told that we need to have a government-controlled medical care system because other countries have it — as if our policies on something as serious as medical care should be based on the principle of monkey see, monkey do.
By all means look at other countries, but not just to see what to imitate. See how it actually turns out. Yet there seems to be an amazing lack of interest in examining what government-controlled medical care produces.
While our so-called health care "summit" last week was going on, British newspapers were carrying exposes of terrible, and often deadly, conditions in British hospitals under that country's National Health Service. But this has not become part of our debate on what to expect from government-controlled medical care.
Such scandals are an old story under the National Health Service in Britain, one repeatedly producing fresh scandals that their newspapers carry but ours ignore.
In addition to a whole series of National Health Service scandals in Britain over the years, the government-run medical system in Britain has far less high-tech medical equipment than there is in the United States. Neither in Britain and Canada nor in other countries with government-run medical care systems can people get to see doctors, especially surgeons, in as short a time as in the United States.
It is not uncommon for patients in those countries to have to wait for months before getting operations that Americans get within weeks, or even days, after being diagnosed with a condition that requires surgery. You can always "bring down the cost of medical care" by having a lower level of quality or availability.
But again, you may never learn any of this by following most of the American mainstream media. It is not that they don't make comparisons between medical care in different countries. But they tend to feature news that will promote government-controlled care.
One of the statistics they spin endlessly is that life expectancy in some countries with government-controlled medical care is higher than in the United States. What they don't tell you is that, in some of these countries, all the infants that die are not included in infant mortality statistics, as they are in the United States.
More important, both political and media supporters of government-controlled medical care consistently confuse medical care with health care.
Much, if not most, of health care depends on what individuals do in the way they live their own lives — including eating habits, alcohol intake, exercise, narcotics and homicide. A study some years ago found that Mormons live a decade longer than other Americans. But nobody believes that Mormons' doctors are that much better than other doctors. When you don't do a lot of things that shorten your life, you live longer. That is not rocket science.
Americans tend to have higher rates of obesity, narcotics use and homicide than people in some other countries. And there is not much that doctors can do about that.
If those who make international comparisons were serious, instead of clever, they would compare the things that medical science can have a great effect on — cancer survival rates, for example. Americans have some of the highest cancer survival rates in the world, and for some particular cancers, the very highest.
When you can get to see a doctor faster, and get treatments under way without waiting for months while the cancer grows and spreads, you have a better chance of surviving. That, too, is not rocket science.
But it is also something that you are not likely to see featured in most of the media, where people are promoting their own pet notions and agendas, instead of giving you the facts on which you can make up your own mind.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522833
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The same Democratic leaders who were vehemently opposing the possible usage of reconciliation by Senate Republicans in 2005 are singing an antithetical tune now. Back then, they averred that such a maneuver amounted to a destruction of the institution of the Senate, loss of rights and freedoms and, in essence, an apocalyptic event. You would never know it now given their unrelenting support to this arcane rule now that they have power and are trying to pass healthcare reform legislation involving a government take over and abridgement of our freedom and rights stealing,.
Dems in ‘05 51 Vote ‘Nuclear Option’ Is ‘Arrogant’ Power Grab Against the Founders’ Intent
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We can better appreciate the attitudes, bellicosity and tactics of the Democratic Party and more specifically, both Chambers of Congress, by understanding the predominant occupation of the Senators and Representatives.
Lawyers.
Their legal training, mind set and approaches foster more government, control, regulations and lawsuits and do much to restrain our freedoms and rights. The following was written almost 2 years ago and is still quite relevant.
The Lawyers' Party
By Bruce Walker
The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are lawyers. Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama are lawyers. John Edwards, the other former Democrat candidate for president, is a lawyer and so is his wife Elizabeth. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate.) Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at the Democrat Party in Congress: the Majority Leader in each house is a lawyer.
The Republican Party is different. President Bush and Vice President Cheney were not lawyers, but businessmen. The leaders of the Republican Revolution were not lawyers. Newt Gingrich was a history professor; Tom Delay was an exterminator; and Dick Armey was an economist. House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer, not a lawyer. The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is a heart surgeon.
Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office thirty-one years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work. The Democratic Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick like Frist, or who immerse themselves in history like Gingrich.
The Lawyers' Party sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And so we have seen the procession of official enemies in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers and anyone producing anything of value in our nation.
This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side.
Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the legal system in our life becomes all consuming. Some Americans become "adverse parties" of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class action suit. We are citizens of a republic which promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers.
Today, we are drowning in laws, we are contorted by judicial decisions, we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to use, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing.
We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform or real hope in America. Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy.
Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/03/the_lawyers_party.html
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