Oil leasing and Obama's real motive

Big announcement, Obama is becoming more anti-environmentally friendly. Hmm I believe that is an oxymoron and not a truthful statement.

Just because the MS press highlights the announcement that Obama is opening up the leasing of both the Atlantic banks and portions of the West Coast to oil and gas leasing plus parts of Alaska does not mean anything is going to happen.

Yes I for one believe we need to demonstrate more energy independence with the industries that have a proven track record. Gas and oil, plus updated nuclear energy while we continue to pursue more opportunities by the private sector to R&D things that show potential for lowering our overall costs and waste in energy consumption.

But I offer a word of caution!

Don't think just because Barry offers up the sacrificial lamb of environmental causes, our coastal views for high end property owners, that he has had an epiphany. Hell no !

Yesterday I published a great article about Sarah Palin,which is dated a bit which shows what she actually accomplished while Governor of Alaska. No small feat !
I direct you to accomplishment 5 (fourth article below this).

As you can see Governor Palin threatened to throw out Exxon when they were discovered to have been sitting on an offshore lease for 30 years ! Her actions caused Exxon to do something which helped Alaska because Exxon was convinced she meant what she said.

Somehow I don't see Obama pressuring anybody, especially an industry whom he hates at least publicly, into beginning to drill just because they have the winning bid on a lease, either currently or in the future.

The point is, we need to look at why! Obama has announced his intention to open up previously closed oil and gas tracts now. To me the reasoning is very clear.

Obama knows his "shit is in the wind" when it comes to Republican support in congress now and until November and possibly beyond.

I see his announcement as conveniently timed to continue on the current bump he has received from health care by the press, he is desperate. The polls show Obama continually slipping and his party even worse because of public fear his policies have instilled in the majority of American minds. He needs to turn public opinion more favorably towards him and his party for what he has recently done in order to get any new policies supported in congress.

The Republicans are basing their stead fast resistance to any future legislation he proposes because of public fears. Sentiment needs to be turned around if Obama is to retain any Democratic seats in November.

Obama now knows he must show something in the form of centrist politics or forget about stumping for his party now that election season is at hand.

Democrats face some pretty vicious constituents the public in general back home and Obama needs to have a positive distraction to turn these feelings around. A supposed leaning towards a more middle of the road if not more right way of thinking President is now in order. Not out of real reasoning that domestic energy from proven sources would be the right thing to do. But merely just another Obamaism, for the sole purpose of maintaining control while the bull-shit of leftist government continues.

LIke I have said, down deep the Obama administration is feeling the wrath of what they have just done. An orchestrated turn around is sorely needed. The President can't really talk more about jobs when none have been produced and more are being lost. So the next best thing is to show some supposed rational in the way of enery independence. Look for a push on "cap and trade soon" with state oil leasing as a trading chip to extrude Republican support.

My prediction ! It will fail.

Here's one from Bezerkly California . from a therapist no less

The Shock of Barack
By Robin of Berkeley
I've been feeling funky since Black Sunday, the day of the health care debacle. As a therapist, I'm usually able to identity my feelings. But this one had left me stumped.

I went through the usual laundry list of emotions: Am I depressed? (A little, but that's not it.) Worried, scared? (Yes, but who isn't?) Angry (Very, but that's still not what's bugging me.)

It took a conversation with a conservative friend, Nancy, for me to pinpoint the feeling. Nancy told me that a Jewish co-worker, a staunch Obama supporter, was feeling "shell shocked" by Obama's vilifying Israel.

Bingo. That's what it is: stunned, shell shocked, traumatized.

But it's not PTSD -- post traumatic stress disorder -- because then Obama would be ancient history. It's trauma happening right here, right now, at lightning speed.

Trauma means witnessing something that humans are not designed to see, a horror that is more than the self can absorb. The brutality of war, a gruesome crime scene, the sudden death of a loved one. Or the evil that unfolds through unchecked power yielded by megalomaniacs.

For me, trauma was that cloudless November day, years ago, when I exited an Oakland restaurant at noon and soon thereafter, lay prone on the concrete, bloody and broken.

Just moments before, I had looked into the eyes of a man who didn't know that I was human, or who knew but didn't care. I saw something sinister in him, but ignored my gut. I was still steeped in liberal political correctness and didn't want to appear racially insensitive.

When I see what Obama is doing to this country, how he is treating its citizens, I'm reminded of the man who mugged me. I think that both are constitutionally incapable of seeing our humanity. And each day that Obama is in office, he communicates this same deadly message to the masses -- that opponents are not human.

This would explain the burgeoning of hate and even violence towards those who deign to disagree. And why Tea Party members and conservatives are being targeted, as well as entire countries like Israel.

And this would illuminate why Obama is unfazed while the economy crashes. And why he cavalierly demonizes Israel, putting millions of Israelis at risk. And it explains why Obama mocks conservatives who are legitimately worried about this administration's violating fundamental rights.

But how could Obama see us? Did anyone in his childhood ever see him?

Did little Barry's needs factor into his mother's decision to shlep him to Indonesia to live with her and her alcoholic second husband? And how much maternal love was on display when she dragged him back home to Hawaii and then abandoned him for good?

Did Obama's humanity matter to Grandpa Stanley and Frank Marshall Davis when they sat around drinking, talking trash talk about women, and telling dirty jokes to the discomfited little Barry?

What was Stanley thinking giving Barry over to Davis, an alleged pedophile and Communist, for mentoring? And did Davis do the most unspeakable act of violation and dehumanization to Barry as the teenage Obama hints at in the poem, "Pop"?

Pop takes another shot, neat,

Points out the same amber

Stain on his shorts that I've got on mine, and

Makes me smell his smell, coming

From me; he switches channels, recites an old poem. . .

Asks for a hug, as I shrink. . .


For someone to survive a difficult childhood intact, he needs at least one person to see his humanity. It's best if the person is a close relative, but a child can endure with the help of someone else. An attentive coach, counselor, neighbor, or teacher can work wonders.

Who mirrored Obama's humanity back to him? Who looked into the young Barry's eyes and reflected back the man he was meant to be? Who honored and cherished the human being inside?

I'll tell you who -- no one. His family groomed him and sculpted him. They projected onto him who they wanted him to be. In later years, other egotistical father figures, like Rev. Wright and Bill Ayers, scripted his Messiah-like role.

But was there someone who loved and honored Obama for who he was? No.

And that's why Obama cannot see you or me. He cannot respond to the pain and suffering he is inflicting. He may, in fact, derive satisfaction by the act of revenge.

Years ago, I came face to face with a man who also didn't know that I existed. He had no qualms about injuring me and leaving me lying wounded in the middle of the street.

I wasn't a person to him. I was nothing. This is where all evil begins: the dehumanizing of another.

From what I have seen this last year, Obama shows no ability to walk in another person's shoes. This would require empathy and sensitivity, traits that are nowhere to be found.

Frankly, every time I see Obama, I catch a glimpse of the man who mugged me.

And that, to me, is the true danger and horror and shock of Barack.

A frequent AT contributor, Robin is a recovering liberal and a psychotherapist in Berkeley.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/the_shock_of_barack.html at March 31, 2010 - 08:49:27 AM CDT

Lenny Bruce:

I too as the author of this editorial was a fan of Lenny Bruce. I believe he was an intellectual way ahead of his time. An admitted heroin addict and abuser of various other illicit drugs, Bruce still maintained a certain aura of attraction until almost his untimely death. Like many in the entertainment business he used drugs to deal with the masses whom he found to say the least challenging.

Had Bruce lived to a ripe old age, who knows whether he would be a flaming liberal or moved into the conservative tent. Would he too see how the "Liberal" cause of civil rights and Constitutional freedoms of the 50's and 60's has come full swing, now that it is the conservatives who are pushing it more and attempting to live it in the most thermophilic society since Selma.

‘We agree to be offended by certain words.’


Lenny Bruce was my idol in those days. He performed at the Village Vanguard, a Greenwich Village jazz joint which also booked comics on occasion. I was an up-and-coming comic and worked the club from time to time myself. But when Lenny was on, I sat in the back of the room to learn from the master. The nineteen fifties was a time of tumultuous change. Integration had been made the law of the land. President Eisenhower had ordered the national guard to escort a small group of Black children into their school in Little Rock. They had to pass through a mob of adults screaming nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger. What a terrible word. Lenny Bruce decided to deal with the issue.

LENNYBRUCE

One night at the Vanguard I watched in shocked amazement as he pointed to a customer and said, “Oh look, we’ve got a nigger here tonight.” The crowd froze. “And another darky is with him and a third jigaboo.” The silence was deafening. But Lenny was an advocate of the old show business maxim: if you’ve gone too far… go farther. He’d only just begun “Look over here”, he said, “A kike. And a mocky is at the table with him. And we got two spicks in the back. Hey, there’s a fag at the bar.” Slowly, the laughter began. Lenny said nigger a hundred times. Finally the crowd was howling. The pure outrageousness of it all had gotten to them and they simply had no choice.

When Lenny had them where he wanted them he turned serious. “It’s all arbitrary,” he told the crowd. “We agree to be offended by certain words. What if we decided that the word dentist was offensive. You dirty rotten dentist! Then that would become the insult du jour. But what if we simply decide not to be offended. What if we just take the sting out of these words and use them as terms of affection. ‘Hey niggah, how ya doin’? ‘Fine, honky, an’ you?’ What if we all just agreed that words can’t hurt? Then nobody could scream insults at a poor little Black girl in Little Rock.”

How poor Lenny’s wishes have not come true. Now we can’t even say nigger to condemn its use. We have to call it the “N-word.” How pathetic. And the “F-word” is next as the gay rebellion takes charge. At least you can still go outside to smoke. But certain words are taboo anywhere.

The left has decided to insult the tea party people by calling them tea baggers. First, they had to explain it was an insult by pointing out that it was an obscure sexual term. I’d never heard of it; not many Americans had. But the tea party folks, on cue, dutifully chose to be insulted. What if they hadn’t. Tea bagger is kind of cute, really. It’s a better nickname than tea party. And you could hold up little Tetley tea bags. Why not co-opt the name. Overnight, they couldn’t insult you anymore. It would annoy them and they’d stop trying and look for some other way to put you down.

While I’m on the subject of Lenny Bruce, he had a great routine on the subject of nature versus nurture. It went like this: the infant child of a pair of brilliant physicists is lost in the woods. Raised by a pack of wild dogs, he finds his way out again at the age of eighteen and goes on to graduate with honors from M.I.T. But a year after that he’s killed chasing a car.

Heritage Foundation Deplores Obama's "Misuse and Abuse" of its Health Research

*

Published on March 30, 2010

WASHINGTON, March 30, 2010--The Heritage Foundation reacted angrily today to President Obama's claim that a centerpiece of his health care legislation "originated" from the conservative think tank.

"We take great exception to this misuse of our work and abuse of our name," said Heritage President Edwin J. Feulner.

On NBC's "Today Show," the President characterized the so-called "insurance exchange" established under Obamacare as "just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market, [an idea] that originated from The Heritage Foundation."

But, Feulner charged, "the President knows full well" that the exchanges Heritage advocates "are very different from those in his package."

"True exchanges," Feulner explained, "are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obama's exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance.

Feulner decried the President's misrepresentation as "but the latest act in a campaign to sell this big-government program as a moderate law that incorporates conservative ideas" and called it "a sign of desperation."

Feulner stressed that Heritage research shows that President Obama's approach to health reform "is financially unsustainable and will ultimately lead to health care rationing, a lower quality of care and a greater degree of dependence on government."

"We remain fervently opposed to the President's partisan plan, and urge its immediate repeal, Feulner added. "What part of that does President Obama not understand?"

[Full text of Dr. Feulner's message follows.]

____________________________

A message from Edwin J. Feulner, President of The Heritage Foundation

President Obama this morning cited The Heritage Foundation's research in an attempt to sell his health care package as a "middle of the road, centrist approach." We take great exception to this misuse of our work and abuse of our name. This is but the latest act in a campaign to sell this big-government program as a moderate law that incorporates conservative ideas. Americans should not be fooled.

Let's be very clear: We oppose this new law because it is a radical new intrusion into the daily lives of all Americans and a massive takeover of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. We view the President's health care law as inimical to our national interests and offensive to the historic American dedication to the principle of self-government.

Our research has shown that President Obama's health approach is financially unsustainable and will ultimately lead to health care rationing, a lower quality of care and a greater degree of dependence on government. We deplore those outcomes and are committed to making the intellectual case for this law's repeal.

What part of that does President Obama not understand?

Specifically, President Obama told NBC's Today Show host Matt Lauer that a centerpiece of his health care package, "in terms of the exchange, just being able to pool and improve the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market—that originated from The Heritage Foundation."

But the President knows full well—or he ought to learn before he speaks—that the exchanges we and most others support are very different from those in his package. True exchanges are simply a market mechanism to enable families to choose their health insurance. President Obama's exchanges, by contrast, are a vehicle to introduce sweeping regulation and federal standardization on health insurance.

Moreover, we completely disagree that President Obama's law improves the purchasing power of individuals in the insurance market. On the contrary, it will create a staggeringly complex and costly insurance system that will drive up premiums for Americans.

The President's health care law is only eight days old, and already it has cost our economy billions of dollars. Late last week, AT&T alone took a $1 billion charge because of the impact of the bill, and the consulting firm Towers Watson told the Wall Street Journal that the total hit this year will reach nearly $14 billion. It is sad, given the present state of our economy, that the President's party in Congress has reacted not by trying to find ways to spare the jobs that will be lost because of this law. Instead, they are trying to intimidate companies that take such charges with threats that they will be hauled in before the Energy and Commerce Committee.

It is also revealing that President Obama is still struggling to sell the American people on a bill that he and his party rammed through passage by a narrow margin in the face of bipartisan opposition. It is a sign of desperation that he, his handlers and the media echo chamber are reverting to the campaign practice of selling the President and his policies as centrist, middle of the road and aisle-crossing. As the country has found out the hard way in the past 15 months, they are none of those things.

The President has made a habit of using conservative talking points when trying to sell a liberal ideology because he knows that this is a center-right country that rejects his agenda when articulated honestly. His supporters have even tried to pin the blame of the potentially unconstitutional individual mandate on us. This approach brushes over the details of our research and ignores our ability to evolve past further developed research.

Over 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired by the government to enforce the President's mandate on the American people. The President's health care plan also raises premiums, taxes, and costs while lowering quality and expanding Medicaid. These are not conservative ideas.

And let's be clear, these are not ideas Heritage has ever, or would ever, support.

We made every effort over the past year to share our ideas for better health care reform with the President and members of both parties in Congress, but were not invited behind the closed doors. Now, after the bill is signed, it seems the President wishes we were along for the ride. We were not. We remain fervently opposed to the President's partisan plan, and urge its immediate repeal. This is not common politics, it's common sense.

Had President Obama limited his bill to centrist elements, he would have won wide bipartisan support for effective reform both within Congress and among the American people. He would have won it, too, at a fraction of the cost of this intolerable, huge and intrusive legislation. He would not now be facing popular rejection by the American people. And he would not need to misrepresent Heritage policies and positions in an attempt to give his radical health plan the patina of respectability.

Ten reasons to challenge Health Care

1. New Spending Grows the Federal Deficit

2. Bending the Cost Curve in the Wrong Direction

3. New Taxes and Mandates Hinder Economic Growth

4. Regulations Grow Government Control over Health Care

5. Expanding Broken Entitlement Programs

6. Burdening State Budgets

7. Neglecting Medicare

8. Creates Discrimination Against Low Income Workers

9. Exchange Eligibility Creates Inequity

10. Questions of Constitutionality

An detailed explanation can be found here:Heritage

I just picked up on this related to Sarah Palin...

by Dewey? a real Alaskan Resident born and raised


Friday, September 18, 2009
SARAH PALIN'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS
I wrote the following piece in July and it's been read by thousands of people, many of whom wrote and called me to express their gratitude. I wanted to write a complimentary piece without taking cheap shots at any other individual. Anyway, it was suggested that I post it here as well. Here goes:

"The last 45 of my 66 years I've spent in a commercial fishing town in Alaska. I understand Alaska politics but never understood national politics well until this last year. Here's the breaking point: Neither side of the Palin controversy gets it.It's not about persona, style, rhetoric, it's about doing things. Even Palin supporters never mention the things that I'm about to mention here.

"1- Democrats forget when Palin was the Darling of the Democrats, because as soon as Palin took the Governor's office away from a fellow Republican and tough SOB, Frank Murkowski, she tore into the Republican's "Corrupt Bastards Club" (CBC) and sent them packing. Many of them are now residing in State housing and wearing orange jump suits. The Democrats reacted by skipping around the yard, throwing confetti and
singing "la la la la" (well, you know how they are). Name another governor in this country that has ever done anything similar. But while you're thinking, I'll continue.

"2- Now with the CBC gone, there were fewer Alaskan politicians to protect the huge, giant oil companies here. So, she constructed and enacted a new system of splitting the oil profits called "ACES". Exxon (the biggest corporation in the world) protested and Sarah told them "don't let the door hit you in the stern on your way out." They stayed, and Alaska residents went from being merely wealthy to being filthy rich. Of course the other huge international oil companies meekly fell in line. Again, give me the name of any other governor in the country that has
done anything similar.

"3- The other thing she did when she walked into the governor's office is she got the list of State requests for federal funding for projects, known as "pork". She went through the list, took 85% of them and placed them in the "when-hell-freezes-over" stack. She let locals know that if we need something built, we'll pay for it ourselves. Maybe she figured she could use the money she got from selling the previous governor's jet because it was extravagant. Maybe she could use the money she saved by dismissing the governor's cook (remarking that she could cook for her
own family), giving back the State vehicle issued to her, maintaining that she already had a car, and dismissing her State provided security force (never
mentioning-I imagine-that she's packing heat herself). I'm still waiting to hear the names of those other governors.

added after original posting
FFY07- Murkowski's federal requests total: 63 projects @ $349,497,000
FFY10- Governor Palin's federal requests total: 8 projects @ $69,100,000
It's 80% not 85% ... oops

"4- Now, even with her much-ridiculed "gosh and golly" mannerism, she also managed to put together a totally new approach to getting a natural gas pipeline built which will be the biggest private construction project in the history of North America. No one else could do it although they tried. If that doesn't impress you, then you're trying too hard to be unimpressed while watching her do things like this while
baking up a batch of brownies with her other hand.

"5- For 30 years, Exxon held a lease to do exploratory drilling at a place called Point Thompson. They made excuses the entire time why they couldn't start drilling. In truth they were holding it like an investment. No governor for 30 years could make them get started. This summer, she told them she was revoking their lease and kicking them out. They protested and threatened court action. She shrugged and reminded them that she knew the way to the court house. Alaska won again.

added after orginal posting (from Tommy Report Petroleum News 8/09)
"...Cashman also notes that it's unlikely that Exxon/Mobil would have started drilling in Point Thomson had Governor Palin not taken a tough stand with producers... Even under ACES, Exxon/Mobil and its partners should be able to recoup more than 45% of their $1.3 billion cost of developing their phase 1 Point Thomson project , it is doubtful the Point Thomson partners would have made the decision to move forward with the high pressure gas cycling project under ACES if they weren't in danger of losing their leases tot he State of Alaska."

(Feb '10) Well, they started drilling (the first drilling there since 1983. February 9th They hit a pocket containing 8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That's a shit-load of gas ... now equaling 25% of all the gas in the North Slope. Palin sure has a knack for making the right decisions, huh?

"6- President Obama wants the nation to be on 25% renewable resources for electricity by 2025. Sarah went to the legislature and submitted her plan for Alaska to be at 50% renewables by 2025. We are already at 25%. I can give you more specifics about things done, as opposed to style and persona . Everybody wants to be cool, sound cool, look cool. But that's just a cover-up. I'm still waiting to hear from liberals the names of other governors who can match what mine has done in two and a half years. I won't be holding my breath.

"By the way, she was content to to return to AK after the national election and go to work, but the haters wouldn't let her. Now these adolescent screechers are obviously not scuba divers. And no one ever told them what happens when you continually jab and pester a barracuda. Without warning, it will spin around and tear your face off. Shoulda known better."

I forgot to mention in this original posting the a couple of years ago, Palin also posted the State's checkbook and ledger on line, displaying any check over a thousand bucks, who and what it was for.

Oops, I shouldn't have used the "CBC" (Corrupt Bastards Club) depiction, which was a different unrelated event, but instead used "GOB" (Good Ol' Boys). Sarah's narrative is accurate, mine is funny.

The real anti-Americans

Cross posted at Pat Buchanan's Web




As Democrats, after a Sunday rally on the Capitol grounds, marched to the House hand-in-hand to vote for health-care reform, tea partiers reportedly shouted the "N-word" at John Lewis and another black congressman. A third was allegedly spat upon. And Barney Frank was called a nasty name.

Tea partiers deny it all. And neither audio nor video of this alleged incident has been produced, though TV cameras and voice recorders were everywhere on the Hill.

Other Democrats say their offices were vandalized and they've been threatened. A few received, and eagerly played for cable TV, obscene phone calls they got.

If true, this is crude and inexcusable behavior. And any threat should be investigated. But Democrats are also exploiting these real, imaginary or hoked-up slurs to portray themselves as political martyrs and to smear opponents as racists and bigots.

This is the politics of desperation.

The best tea-party signs ever -- compiled in a striking book with foreword by Chuck Norris: "Don't Tread on US! Signs of a 21st Century Political Awakening"

Majority Whip James Clyburn accuses Republicans of "aiding and abetting ... terrorism." New York Times columnist Frank Rich compared the tea-party treatment of Democrats to Nazi treatment of the Jews during Kristallnacht:

"How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn't recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht."

Kristallnacht, "Crystal Night," the "Night of Broken Glass," was the worst pogrom in Germany since the Middle Ages. Synagogues were torched and hundreds of businesses smashed. Shattered glass covered the streets. Women were assaulted and men beaten and murdered. After that terrible night, half the Jews remaining in Germany fled.

To compare a brick tossed through the window of a congressional office and two shouted slurs to Kristallnacht suggests a growing paranoia on the left about the populist right.

Not since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made "some Americans run off the rails," said Rich, have we seen anything like this.

Was Rich awake in 1964? Because it wasn't the right that went off the rails. The really big riot in 1964 was in Harlem, lasting five days, with 500 injured and as many arrested. The Watts riot in 1965, Detroit and Newark in 1967, Washington, D.C., and 100 other cities in 1968, all bringing troops into American cities, were not the work of George Wallace populists or Barry Goldwater conservatives. They were the work of folks who went "all the way with LBJ."

Nor was it Young Americans for Freedom that burned ROTC buildings, vandalized professors' offices, toted the guns at Cornell or took over Columbia in 1968. And it was not the Birchers who set off that 1970 explosion in the Greenwich Village townhouse that killed three radicals and aborted the terrorist bombing of the NCO club at Fort Dix.

No, this was not the New Right. This was the New Left, and it was Obama not John Boehner who used to "pal around" with one of the boys who did the Pentagon and Capitol Hill bombings.

(Column continues below)




As for calling Barney Frank a naughty name, that is not nice. But one wonders what Rich thought of the students marching under Viet Cong flags chanting, about the man who signed that Civil Rights Act, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" and, "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win," when American boys were dying in the hundreds every week fighting the communist NLF?

The 1967 attack on the Pentagon, where thousands tried to break through military police to get into the building, was the work of left-wing radicals. Did the tea-party folks who chanted, "Kill the bill," outside the House behave worse than that?

Some of us recall the anarchy of May Day 1971, when 15,000 leftists tried to shut down Washington on a Monday morning by rolling logs onto Canal Road, smashing car windows, blocking traffic circles and wilding in Georgetown. Most wound up behind a chain-link fence at the Armory.

How many were arrested on Capitol Hill Sunday a week ago?

Not one tea partier, man or woman.

The "mass hysteria" of the tea-party right, writes Rich, is at root about race. "By 2012 ... non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The tea party is virtually all white. ... Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded."

Rich is implying that when America's white majority disappears, in 2042 according to 2008 Census Bureau projections, the day of the white conservative is over.

Given the rise in ethnic consciousness among all Americans, Rich may be right. But it is not just white folks who want illegal aliens deported and legal immigration curtailed, while 25 million of our own are out of work or underemployed.

A Zogby poll for the Center for Immigration Studies found that 56 percent of Hispanics, 57 percent of Asian-Americans and 68 percent of African-Americans think legal immigration is too high.

If the tea-party folks think it is leftist elites who detest and wish to be rid of the America they grew up in and love, they are right.

Intersting article from the San Franciso Comical

Conservative activists in the crosshairs

Debra J. Saunders

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

When activists break the law protesting Republican policies, it is because lefties care so much. But when conservatives act likewise, it's because they are loudmouths and louts.

So TV tells me. During an interview last week with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., NBC's Ann Curry observed that former GOP running mate Sarah Palin, who was about to stump for McCain over the weekend, had told supporters "don't retreat, instead - reload" and posted on her Facebook page "a map highlighting weak Democratic districts that conservatives should target with a crosshair symbol.

"Considering these threats, these concerns that we've been hearing about, regarding violence, do you think, do you now recommend that your party use less incendiary language and will you say that to her tomorrow?"

What could McCain do but laugh? The political lexicon long has used martial terms like "target" and "battleground."

Even if that is true - somehow she seemed unsure - Curry continued, "These are very dangerous times. Is this the language that we should be hearing today?"

The short answer: Yes.

CNN's Howard Kurtz got it right when he noted on Reliable Sources Sunday, "The conservative argument is that the media didn't seem quite so concerned with civility when protesters were calling George W. Bush a war criminal and a Nazi, and (using) that kind of overheated rhetoric as well."

Remember when an Iraqi threw his shoes at Bush - and it was Bush's fault?

Kurtz's three media guests disagreed. You see, they said, the right crossed the line. Poor babies; they can't even see that their line is the right.

Because Democrats see this story as a Victim Opportunity, there is more rage at vocal ObamaCare opponents than, say, students who have vandalized UC Berkeley property, including the chancellor's home, or toward violent anti-Bush protests.

Being a Victim is great for business too. As Pelosi said Monday, the GOP "really helps me with my fundraising."

As the recipient of copious slurs and the occasional threat, I have more cause than most to resent the angry froth that bubbles forth when ideologues believe the rules of civility do not apply to them.

While most of the vacuous insults hurled my way come from the left, I get them from the right, too. Incivility is not confined to one party. Both sides know how to shout.

On Saturday, authorities arrested a Philadelphia man for threatening House Minority Whip Eric Cantor, R-Va. Apparently, Norman Leboon videotaped his threat to kill Cantor and his "cupcake evil wife" and children and was so impressed with himself that he posted his threat on the Internet. A genius, that man. As Politico reported, Leboon also referred to the fact that Cantor is Jewish.

Does Leboon's behavior reflect on all liberals? Should the conservative media connect Leboon's threats to left-wing anti-Semitism? Will Curry ask Democrats to tone down their rhetoric lest they inflame more violence? Of course not.

Yet somehow threats made against Democrats are supposed to reflect on the right. Folks like Curry have a story line, and they'll make the facts fit it. When the facts don't fit, there is no story.

E-mail Debra J. Saunders dsaunders@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/03/30/EDKV1CMSLU.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 16 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Is this truth or is it a falsity ? You be the judge. For me the jury is still out.

I will say one thing though. The part about applying for foreign scholarship aid may be a reason that Barry, even is he is really a citizen wouldn't want his college records publicized. The fact that he may have lied about his true origins to gain scholarship funding if he is really a U.S. citizen wouldn't reflect to well on his character. I mean after all wouldn't that mean he may have a penchant for lying? Whoda thought?

Posted on Sunday, March 28, 2010 3:11:41 AM by TexasPatriot8

Ok, basically, unable to sleep and this has been rolling around my head for days, and I'm increasingly annoyed by conservatives, and as pissed at liberals as I can ever recall being. If this below is true, then what? If it's bogus, I can't find it on Snopes or Truth or Fiction. If this is on those sites as bogus for God's sake someone please post where, cause the b*****d is still President, so if it's true, hmph. Maybe someone else can find it. But first things first, IF this below is true, then...???

Lolo Soetoro, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, baby Maya Soetoro, and 9 year old Barry Soetoro. This registration document, made available on Jan. 24, 2007, by the Fransiskus Assisi school in Jakarta, Indonesia, shows the registration of Barack Obama under the name Barry Soetoro made by his step-father, Lolo Soetoro.

Name: Barry Soetoro Religion: Islam Nationality: Indonesian

How did this little INDONESIAN Muslim child - Barry Soetoro, (A.K.A. Barack Obama) get around the issue of nationality to become President of the United States of America?

PART 2: In a move certain to fuel the debate over Obama's qualifications for the presidency, the group "Americans for Freedom of Information" has released copies of President Obama's college transcripts from Occidental College. The transcript indicates that Obama, under the name Barry Soetoro, received financial aid as a foreign student from Indonesia while an undergraduate at the school. The transcript was released by Occidental College in compliance with a court order in a suit brought by the group in the Superior Court of California. The transcript shows that Obama (Soetoro) applied for financial aid and was awarded a fellowship for foreign students from the Fulbright Foundation Scholarship program. To qualify for this scholarship, a student must claim foreign citizenship. This document provides the smoking gun that many of Obama's detractors have been seeking - that he is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States - necessary to be President of these United States. Along with the evidence that he was first born in Kenya, here we see that there is no record of him ever applying for US citizenship. Gary Kreep of the United States Justice Foundation has released the results of their investigation of Obama's campaign spending. This study estimates that Obama has spent upwards of $950,000 in campaign funds in the past year with eleven law firms in 12 states for legal resources to block disclosure of any of his personal records. Mr. Kreep indicated that the investigation is still on-going but that the final report will be provided to the U.S. attorney general, Eric Holder. Mr. Holder has refused comment on this matter.

BAKST: The courts can stop Obamacare

Cross posted in the Washington Times
Daren Bakst

Even if Republicans take over Congress in November, they'll probably lack the numbers required to repeal Obamacare over the veto of its namesake. In the short run, then, the only way to fight this massive expansion of federal government is through the courts.

If the Supreme Court dares to rule the legislation unconstitutional, there will be cries from the liberals of judicial activism and political bias. Nothing, however, would be further from the truth.

It's the members of Congress who, knowing and ignoring the constitutional problems with the health care bill, have put the courts in this unfortunate bind. They played politics and ignored their oaths to the U.S. Constitution.

The most legally problematic provision of the bill is the mandate imposed on individuals to purchase health insurance. The underlying question is whether Congress has the authority under the Constitution to impose these individual mandates. The strongest argument to justify such a mandate would be under the Commerce Clause.

Under the Commerce Clause, Congress does have extensive power to regulate almost any economic activity. Congress even can regulate intrastate commerce if the activities have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.

In 1942, the Supreme Court issued one of its most expansive Commerce Clause opinions. The case, Wickard v. Filburn, involved the federal regulation of the production and consumption of wheat.

The court held that Congress could prohibit a farmer from growing wheat for his own personal consumption. Even though the farmer wasn't placing his wheat in the stream of commerce, he was substantially affecting the market by growing his own wheat because he wouldn't buy wheat on the open market.

In 2005, the court heard a similar case called Rich v. Gonzales. The court, instead of reversing Wickard, held that Congress had the power under the Commerce Clause to prohibit individuals from growing medicinal marijuana for their own use. It didn't matter that the so-called market was an illegal one.

These cases are important because they are the most extreme examples of court deference to legislative power under the Commerce Clause. However, they also are clearly distinct from an individual mandate.

In both cases, Congress is attempting to regulate activities, growing wheat and medicinal marijuana, which has a substantial effect on interstate commerce. There's no activity being regulated under the individual mandate. In fact, Congress is trying to regulate inactivity.

Wickard and Raich represent the extremes of Commerce Clause jurisprudence. Neither compels the court to hold that an individual mandate falls under the same line of cases. In fact, the court would be pushing its interpretation of the Commerce Clause to a whole new level if it found the individual mandate to be constitutional.

If the mandate is deemed constitutional, Congress could mandate that people buy cars, video games or any other good or service because those purchases would help the interstate market for those goods or services. It would create an absurd result with no logical limit.

For the liberals who might like this result, it probably won't be as appealing to them if Congress mandated that individuals purchase, for example, handguns, sport utility vehicles, large houses and private kindergarten-through-12th-grade education.

There should be some cautious optimism that the court would strike down the individual mandate. On pure legal grounds, there's reason to think that at least five justices won't want to take the Commerce Clause to unprecedented levels.

The bigger concern, though, may have nothing to do with the law. The federal courts may be so deferential to Congress that they won't want to strike down this excessive abuse of legislative power. Even worse, the Supreme Court may simply want to avoid any political headache by striking down this extremely controversial bill.

The legitimacy of the government has been weakened drastically through the recent actions of President Obama and Congress. The judicial branch will have a chance to restore the people's faith in our system of government or weaken it even further.

Daren Bakst, a lawyer, is the director of legal and regulatory studies at the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina.

I hope you find this as encouraging as I did, I needed a little encouragement

A Word to the Weary
posted at 8:40 am on March 27, 2010 by Doctor Zero

I get a lot of email from people who ask if the final degeneration from capitalism to collectivism is now inevitable. Entitlements are never repealed, after all, and we just got saddled with a back-breaking entitlement, piled atop a national debt that was already crushing us. It seems like it would take a miracle just to undo the damage Barack Obama has done in a single year… and that would just get us back to where George Bush left us. Dependency, unemployment, economic contraction, and socialist politics are a perpetual-motion engine of national decline.

I also hear from people who wonder just how bad things really are. If they’re so awful, we should be thinking about unthinkable alternatives. If not, maybe we should follow David Frum’s advice, and work out reasonable terms of surrender with our new socialist overlords. After all, Obama’s not the first guy to wipe his feet with the tattered “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Perhaps none of the wounds from 2009 and 2010 are all that deep, and we’re just a few elections away from Bush-era prosperity again.

Thoughts about the future shape our actions in the present. If you believe the events of the past week have permanently and irrevocably deformed the American economy and culture, your feelings are likely to consist of anger, or despair.

I can understand why some are tired of fighting the good fight. Robin Koerner at The Moderate Voice reacts to the Obama Administration’s plan to offer incentives if mortgage holders will forgive part of the principle on overvalued homes:

A few months ago, the principal on my mortgage was comfortably more than the place was worth, and my low income was in decline. So I did the responsible thing, cut my expenses back to the bone, and raised and moved whatever money I could to cover it, and to try to pay it down. I wanted to deal with the fact that I was upside down on the mortgage and dangerously exposed to future rate increases; most of all, I wanted simply to reduce my monthly payments.

Why did I bother?

If I had not been so responsible, Obama’s plan (I still cannot quite believe it) would have given me (via my bank) YOUR money, humble tax-payer, as a gift to reduce my mortgage, and I would have gained to the tune of many thousands of dollars.

Those who play by the rules find themselves dealing with a lot of these sucker punches lately. It’s the nature of a politicized economy. Health care will work the same way. If you’re not part of a favored constituency, the government will milk you for the money it needs to buy the votes it requires.

When you object that such behavior is wildly inconsistent with the Constitution, you’re quickly assured that, on the contrary, these outrages are legally unassailable. Decades of court precedents, often laid down by activist judges, have become a weird quantum formula that somehow proves the Constitution was actually designed to guarantee a titanic redistributionist State with virtually unlimited powers. The ruling class can even spend weeks openly discussing the idea of passing laws without voting on them, when it’s not sure it has the votes to do what it wants.

My own vision of the future includes peril, but not doom. We’re in a bad place right now, but we can turn things around. We can do better than pacing slowly backward through the wreckage of Obama’s term, until our feet begin crunching on the empty pill bottles of George Bush’s unsustainable prescription-drug entitlement.

When I look to the past, I see a central government that has never been able to keep the promises of its welfare programs, or respect the limits of its budget projections. Even among those who accept the premise that health care is some kind of “human right,” I find it astonishing that anyone could ignore history to the degree necessary to believe politicians can provide it. It’s even more amazing that anyone could watch those politicians blindly stumble across various legislative land mines – less than a week after passing the bill – and convince themselves these people have any idea what they just signed. Only someone with religious faith in the State could look upon the rotting heap of fraudulent budgeting, deception, and last-minute deals that spawned this monstrosity, and believe it will have a happy ending in which its promises are kept.

The future holds the final, systemic crash of the New Deal and Great Society. How far away is it? It’s hard to recalibrate the doomsday clocks fast enough to keep up with our current tidal wave of deficit spending. I think we have about fifteen years, after factoring in the poisonous effects of desperate measures taken to hold off disaster, like the Value Added Tax. I can imagine many world events that would accelerate that timetable considerably.

Social Security is running deficits now. Its collapse is a matter of actuarial fact, not opinion. The Congressional Budget Office just released a report that says the national debt will reach 90% of our gross domestic product by 2020… and the CBO usually under-estimates the effects of economic slowdown on federal tax revenue. Two years ago, the CBO thought Social Security would not be in the red until 2019. Five years ago, Barack Obama’s party confidently assured us the program would remain solvent for decades. These people have always been wrong. They just compounded their errors with trillions of deficit spending from a bill none of them read.

So, yes, the situation is serious. You can’t wait fourteen years to deal with a meltdown that’s fifteen years away. Even if the system was not due to implode into a black hole of unfunded liability, the offenses against freedom required to create and sustain it would still be wrong. Those offenses did not begin with the current President. They began long before I was born. That doesn’t make them any more excusable. We should not accept decades of error as an insurmountable obstacle to doing better.

The task awaiting us at the ballot box is difficult, but not impossible. Laws have no magical, talismanic power – if they did, we wouldn’t need law enforcement. We can change laws. We can dissolve any body that tells us otherwise. No one can hold us down in our national deathbed. We are instructed to worship the political traditions of the 1940s, 60s, and 70s, when vast and eternal departments of limitless appetite and wretched inefficiency were constructed. Our birthright as Americans includes a far older, stronger tradition from 1776, which teaches us that only our liberty is eternal.

There’s no reason a country with vast natural resources, tended by a bold and innovative people, should suffer double-digit unemployment and capital flight. A compassionate nation, whose daily industry has done more for the downtrodden than every utopian scheme combined, has no reason to lower its head in shame, and tolerate the extraction of “charity” at gunpoint. The veterans of bloody wars against lawless tyranny should not accept a system that makes fools of the industrious. A great people, who live in reverence of equality, require no lists of class and racial enemies from opportunistic politicians.

This is the hour for passion and reason, not anger and disgust. The strength to restore our prosperity lies in the muscle and imagination of citizens who have been programmed to think of themselves as sheep, by those who seek power as their shepherds. The time for averting a painful disaster is short… but the most amazing chapters of American history were written in the last seconds before midnight.

It’s time for us to be amazing again. I hope you find that as invigorating as I do.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

As Predictable As the Sun Rising

cross posted at both Pajama's Media and VDH's own web Page

Giddy About Remaking America

If we assume that Obama & Co. wish to radically remake the United States — along the lines of a European socialist society, or perhaps to the left even of a Belgium or Denmark — then the past 14 months were as predictable as the sun rising.

To transmogrify a center-right country into a liberal utopia, certain things follow: higher taxes on the better-off to pay for redistribution and to bring “fairness” to society (e.g., called “redistributive change,”“spread the wealth,” “patriotic,” “paying your fair share”); increased government coercion to force the reluctant to conform (e.g., new IRS agents, more regulations and government intrusion, mandatory new fees); a growing constituency to administer and receive entitlements (e.g., I never really heard much about ACORN or SEIU until the Obama ascendancy); a public relations campaign to demonize the skeptical as enemies of civil society, starting with “selfish” and “greedy,” escalating to “racists,” and finally reaching the dangerous level of “terrorists” who “threaten officials” (those who used to court Michael Moore, or snooze about books and movies suggesting scenarios of killing George Bush are suddenly worried about uncivil discourse); a new neutralist foreign policy to match defense cuts on the horizon and to adjust our stature abroad with our new more revolutionary profile at home (cf. the treatment of an Israel or Britain to the new efforts at winning over Iran and Syria; or our shrinking Navy and Air Force); a highly educated, urban technocracy not subject to its own new protocols and dependent on an ever growing bureau (e.g., Geithnerism, or the strange career of Van Jones); and a new euphemism in language (there is no “terrorism” any more, liberals disappeared and were replaced by “progressives,” we have no more enemies from the radical Islamic world, etc.)

Taxes and Spending

As these nearly two trillion dollar annual deficits mount, as the combined local, state, federal, and payroll taxes approach 60-70% on the top brackets and yet do little to meet the shortfalls, we will have to either cut programs or tax the middle class or both — or implode.

We are floating huge amounts of debt at historically cheap interest. One can borrow $ 11 trillion at the price of what would be borrowing $20 trillion in the old days of interest, as rates hover around 2-4% rather than the old 6-10%. But this is a fool’s delusion; any spike in inflation will almost immediately turn this mortgaging into an unsustainable disaster, sort of like those old 1980s adjustable mortgages at 3% that drew buyers in to purchase enormous homes only to climb within a few years to 15% and insolvency, or like those introductory credit card offers that offer 6 months at 3% only to climb to 19% when you are maxed out. (As a rule, all interest rates climb as borrowing increases [ask a petulant Greece]).

If we cut some spending, as in the Clinton years, it will eventually fall mostly on defense — fewer planes, armor, divisions, personnel. Etc. If we continue to increase taxes, we will see some sort of federal sales, VAT, or special user taxes on the tens of millions who are now tax exempt. The untaxed will be taxed and told they are not taxed (sort of like poor George Stephanopoulos in his interview with Obama, being bewildered by the president’s postmodern linguistic gymnastics, and thus reduced to looking up “tax” in the dictionary, only to be ridiculed by Obama that Stephanopoulos had to rely on a dictionary in the first place.)

There are simply too many new entitlements and too few left now to pay for them. Note — it is not as if we were extending novel universal health care to a 1920s self-reliant and much poorer populace, but rather to the most affluent, most leisured and most taken care of generation in the history of civilization. It is not as if those without health insurance plans either get turned away from the emergency room or are bereft of cell phones and flat-screened TVs.

No, entitlements subsidize the good consumer life of both the poorer and the middle class. Go to the poorest section of a poor county in a bankrupt state (e.g., 2 miles from my residence), and the electronic and warehouse discount stores are crammed with the shopping “poor” — poor maybe in comparison with the contemporary wealthy, but in a way rich compared to most in the world today or to Americans a generation ago. Cheap interest, the welfare state, 1 billion Indians and Chinese working night and day, high-tech, and instant communications and entertainment have made life not as it was. Today’s Selma resident not far from this farm has access to “things” that an earl or duke could only dream of 50 years ago.

The gradual slow-down

If Obamism is carried to its logical conclusions, we will start to see Californization or Hellenization. An increasingly furious public work force refuses to take cuts or furloughs, and so continues to demonize the supposedly greedy “them,” who in turn nod and leave or begin to marginalize themselves. (Our radio ads out here now blare with teachers unions demanding higher taxes on the most taxed “wealthy” and “corporations” in the nation.)

In America’s case, the flight will be psychological rather than material (where else could one wish to go?), as professionals and the self-employed begin to slow down, drop out, or detach — not dramatically so to stop the economy, but enough to keep unemployment high and growth disappointing. As income is curtailed (the herdsman is now skinning rather than trimming the sheep), the unions, as in Greece, as in California, will turn on each other, and on us the taxpayers who never quite give enough (I expect something like the 6th century Nika riots next in Greece).

Government is not an abstraction, but a work force; its prime directive is for self-survival and perpetuation. Public workers will find the rationalization to lash out, when the money dries up and the checks begin to bounce. Again, here in California, professors are on furloughs each month, prisoners are being released, teachers pink-slipped, and 3,500 leaving the state each week. Our schools are rated 47-49th in the nation, but we employ America’s highest paid teachers, and level the highest state, gas and income taxes in the United States — and yet we have not a shred of introspection over how we managed to have the highest taxes, the highest paid teachers and the worst schools. To suggest that this is logical rather than aberrant earns one all sorts of calumny.

Make it up as we go along

As Obamans realize that the current fiscal course is unsustainable, and as they sense the country is still center-right and their political futures uncertain, we will experience a sort of hysteria.

“Will” is the wrong auxiliary verb tense; we’ve already seen it. Congressmen walk the national mall, intent on proving to America it is now again 1965 in the Deep South and they courageously are replaying the civil rights marches among Neanderthal tea party racists — the sort of psychodramas comparable to Skip Gates donating his handcuffs to the Smithsonian.

The melodrama is ubiquitous. Pundits scream that the system is broken and we need to radically change our institutions — until the 217th vote is obtained and suddenly within a few hours America is wonderful again and Pelosi a genius at the helm of a smooth sailing ship of state. If we need justifications for suspect procedures, our more candid representatives confess rules are made up as we go, undiscovered new articles in the Constitution now appear, and the control of the people is lamentably said to take time.

Then there is supposedly a spate of hate speech against the president and Congress. My god, one would think Alfred Knopf had published a novel about killing the president or the Toronto film festival had honored a docudrama of the same theme! Or Michael Moore had lamented that terrorists killed the wrong blue-state 3,000 Americans.

A vote is purchased in the House for about a million dollars in federal largess, in the Senate for a hundred and more times that figure. I can’t remember all the presidential prevarications, because it no longer matters. Obama has become the face on the screen that everyone sees for his morning three minutes and no one believes — five days on the Oval Office desk before a passed bill is to be signed, C-span airing of the entire health care negotiations, a 51% majority is not morally sufficient for major health care legislation in a new age of bipartisanship, no more Bush executive orders trumping elements of congressional legislation. And so on.

So this is Groundhog Day, as cap and trade and blanket amnesty loom on the horizon and will follow the same script. We will print more money to pay off supposedly “principled” holdout congresspeople and senators, angling for air time and earmarks. Instead of the millions of children killed by the lack of federal health care, assume millions more will be roasted or drowned by boiling or rising seas, followed by the millions of children who are in mortal danger because their parents are asked to have proof of legal residence. The hysterical style is now enshrined.

We search for one honest man behind all this, just one. How wonderful if a Reid, Obama, or Pelosi for a moment would just come clean, if even in defiant fashion. Imagine:

“Some people screw up or are unlucky. We’re here to ensure they end up the same as you who don’t screw up or are luckier. We can’t say they are in any way culpable, so we blame either the system or you who are better off. The best way to level the playing field is to tax all we can, take our percentage, and redistribute the rest. Lots get hired to administer to even more. The rules don’t apply to ourselves, who are wealthy but not the targeted culpable. We know privately all this is not sustainable, but assume the better off will find a way to save themselves and thus us, before we bankrupt ourselves — after we are gone. And we don’t care really whether this is always legal, or fair, or workable, because we know it is moral and we are far more moral people than you.”

Here is a reprint of what happened last weekend in Washington regarding Amnesty

Here Are OUR 'Voter' Numbers Countering the Pro-Amnesty 'March For America'



By Roy Beck, Wednesday, March 24, 2010, 10:42 AM EDT - posted on NumbersUSA

Our grassroots mobilization numbers are in for last weekend, and I have no doubt that there were far more of you standing up for 25 million Americans who can't find a full-time job than there were marchers on the National Mall demanding that the jobs stay with 8 million illegal aliens.

And when we just count voters among them and us, well . . . . . .

As has been well-documented, the big pro-amnesty march/rally on Sunday and the last two months of PR build-up across the country was backed by tens of millions of dollars from George Soros, Carnegie Foundation, Ford Foundation and the giant SEIU unions.

All that was available to back unemployed Americans was the volunteer personpower of compassionate, community-minded U.S. voters who answered our call to make their voices heard.

And, boy, did you!

* More than 7,000 of you signed up to visit the home offices of more than 400 Members of Congress last Friday.
* More than 8,000 of you responded to our request for you to make phone calls into the DC offices of all 535 Members of Congress on Monday.
* More than 90,000 came onto our website on Sunday while we were webcasting our interviews and coverage of the pro-amnesty march.
* Our computerized telecommunication system processed 149,216 faxes into Congress during the Friday through Monday period.

Although some march enthusiasts have bandied about figures like 200,000 for the size of the march, most observers have put the number between 60,000 and 100,000. Our personal visits with officials who deal with these marches all the time and privately estimate based on how many big screens are put up, the parts of the Mall grid that are packed and the parts that are loosely filled, etc., it sounds like 60,000 is the more likely figure.

Whatever the actual number, which nobody knows, it was a big and impressive turnout.

And, as some of the pro-amnesty blogs have said in ridiculing NumbersUSA's efforts, riding a bus across America and spending a day or two in DC is a whole lot larger commitment than somebody sending a fax or phone call from home.

Nonetheless, candidates for office next fall ultimately have to care about only one thing about each person -- the vote.

It doesn't matter whether the person behind the vote came to DC or made a phone call, it all boils down to one vote per voter.

And that is where the scales tip decidely in our favor.

I can just about guarantee you that 98% or more of the people behind the numbers up there in those NumbersUSA bullet points are U.S. citizens who can vote.

On the Mall Sunday?

Well, in order to vote, you have to be a U.S. citizen. To be a citizen, you have to pass an English test. We had a dozen people in multiple teams scattered throughout the rally and found that a high majority of those present could not communicate in English at all. Even if a lot of the marchers were legal residents, it is doubtful that many of them are citizens and voters.

The SEIU unions bused in a lot of mute human props (and I'm not talking about their mimes) for their theatre on the Mall. But will anybody in Congress really be more concerned about those non-voters than all the voters who visited, phoned and faxed their offices over our S.T.O.P. Amnesty in 4 Days campaign?

The pro-amnesty side may have the big bucks to generate a lot of op-eds from the elites and a lot of noise from non-voters, but most Members of Congress still know that most of their voters back home have views more in keeping with all the people who participated In NumbersUSA's four days of mobilized suppport for our 25 million Americans without a full-time job.

ROY BECK is Founder & CEO of NumbersUSA



NumbersUSA's blogs are copyrighted and may be republished or reposted only if they are copied in their entirety, including this paragraph, and provide proper credit to NumbersUSA. NumbersUSA bears no responsibility for where our blogs may be republished or reposted.
Views and opinions expressed in blogs on this website are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect official policies of NumbersUSA.

Obamacare prescription: While half the country slept!

Cross posted in World Net Daily
'Emergency health army'
Force subject to 'involuntary calls
to active duty' during 'public crises'


By Chelsea Schilling

President Obama's recently passed health-care reform legislation includes a surprise for many Americans – a beefing up of a U.S. Public Health Service reserve force and expectations that it respond on short notice to "routine public health and emergency response missions," even involuntarily.

According to Section 5210 of HR 3590, titled "Establishing a Ready Reserve Corps," the force must be ready for "involuntary calls to active duty during national emergencies and public health crises."

The health-care legislation adds millions of dollars for recruitment and amends Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 204), passed July 1, 1944, during Franklin D. Roosevelt's presidency. The U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps is one of the seven uniformed services in the U.S. However, Obama's changes more than double the wording of the Section 203 and dub individuals who are currently classified as officers in the Reserve Corps commissioned officers of the Regular Corps.

'You've been served!" Send the Constitution to Obama, Pelosi, Reid and put them on notice. What better way to tell them why they're losing their jobs?

The following is the previous wording of the act as of 2004, before Democrats passed the health-care legislation:


Wording of Section 203 of Public Health Service Act before Obamacare amendment

The U.S. Public Health Service website describes its commissioned corps as "an elite team of more than 6,000 full-time, well-trained, highly qualified public health professionals dedicated to delivering the nation's public health promotion and disease prevention programs and advancing public health science."

According to its mission page, officers of the commissioned corps may:

* Provide essential public health and health care services to underserved and disadvantaged populations

* Prevent and control injury and the spread of disease

* Ensure that the nation's food supply, drinking water, drugs, medical devices and environment are safe

* Conduct and support cutting-edge research for the prevention, treatment and elimination of disease, health disparities and injury

* Work with other nations and international agencies to address global health challenges

* Provide urgently needed public health and clinical expertise in response to large-scale local, regional and national public health emergencies and disasters

Members are trained to respond to public health situations and national emergency events, such as natural disasters, disease outbreaks and terrorist attacks.

As stated in the health-care legislation, "The purpose of the Ready Reserve Corps is to fulfill the need to have additional Commissioned Corps personnel available on short notice (similar to the uniformed service's reserve program) to assist regular Commissioned Corps personnel to meet both routine public health and emergency response missions."

(Story continues below)

The Democrats' legislation recently added the following text to Section 203 of the Public Health Service Act:

'(b) Assimilating Reserve Corp Officers Into the Regular Corps- Effective on the date of enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, all individuals classified as officers in the Reserve Corps under this section (as such section existed on the day before the date of enactment of such Act) and serving on active duty shall be deemed to be commissioned officers of the Regular Corps.

'(c) Purpose and Use of Ready Research-

'(2) USES- The Ready Reserve Corps shall--

'(A) participate in routine training to meet the general and specific needs of the Commissioned Corps;

'(B) be available and ready for involuntary calls to active duty during national emergencies and public health crises, similar to the uniformed service reserve personnel;

'(C) be available for backfilling critical positions left vacant during deployment of active duty Commissioned Corps members, as well as for deployment to respond to public health emergencies, both foreign and domestic; and

'(D) be available for service assignment in isolated, hardship, and medically underserved communities (as defined in section 799B) to improve access to health services.

'(d) Funding- For the purpose of carrying out the duties and responsibilities of the Commissioned Corps under this section, there are authorized to be appropriated $5,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2010 through 2014 for recruitment and training and $12,500,000 for each of fiscal years 2010 through 2014 for the Ready Reserve Corps.'

Commissioned officers of the ready reserve corps are appointed by the president, and commissioned officers of the regular corps are appointed by the president with the advice and consent of the Senate.

Robert Book, a senior research fellow in health economics at the Heritage Foundation, said the service has been around some time but is not well known.

In the past, its responsibilities have included work related to the National Institutes of Health, the Indian health service and providing physicians for Coast Guard operations, he said.

As first reported by WND during his campaign, Obama called for a "civilian national security force" July 2, 2008, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set," he said. "We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."

WND also reported in January when a Rand Corporation report proposed the federal government create a rapid deployment "Stabilization Police Force" that would be tasked with "shaping an environment before a conflict" and restoring order in times of war, natural disaster or national emergency.

The blogosphere is buzzing with speculation about the amendment. Some comments include:

* This cannot be publicized enough!

* Remember before the election when Obama said we need to have a civil defense corps as well funded and as well armed as the armed services?

* Is it Hitler and the Brown Shirts all over again? It is time for all who love our freedom to stand up and be counted.

* Perhaps ACORN with a different name?

* What about FEMA. Does this mean FEMA is to be disbanded?

* Healthstapo!

* I guess this is how they'll keep all the doctors from quitting the profession and becoming window washers.

* Amazing isn't it, they can't afford to secure our borders, but we can afford this nonsense – dangerous nonsense.

* Let's all sign up. It will be much easier to take the country back if we do it from within.

Kuhner: Will America Break Up?... My prediction ....Yes

By Jeffrey T. Kuhner

President Obama is splintering America. The passage of Obamacare was a historic victory for liberal governance. Yet, its true cost may be that it triggers the eventual breakup of the country.

Mr. Obama has achieved what his liberal predecessors - Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Bill Clinton - could only dream of: nationalized health care. Obamacare signifies the government take-over of one-sixth of the U.S. economy. It has dealt a mortal blow to traditional America. We are now a European-style socialist welfare state. The inevitable permanent tax hikes, massive public bureaucracy and liberal ruling elites will stifle competition and initiative.

Republicans vow to repeal Obamacare. Their past record, however, leaves many conservatives rightly skeptical. Since FDR's New Deal, Big-Government liberalism has been on the march - Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Education. The Republican Party has been unable to roll back the tide of statism. In fact, under Richard Nixon and both George Bushes, Great Society Republicans have been complicit in erecting a nanny state.

Socialism is the road to economic ruin and fiscal bankruptcy. It subverts democracy, threatening the very future of our constitutional republic. Socialist states degenerate into some form of autocracy or technocratic neo-feudalism, whereby the productive class is taxed and exploited to sustain a growing dependent class. Factions are pitted against each other; groups vie for handouts at the expense of their fellow citizens. The bonds of economic union and national solidarity slowly dissolve.

"Thedemocracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not," warned Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson was right: Redistributionist welfare policies are undermining our democracy. The resentments in America are growing. Tea Partiers believe that their government no longer represents their interests or values. The heartland is becoming dangerously alienated from the political class, whom it feels has betrayed them.

Obamacare may be the last straw. It strips away fundamental economic liberties, empowering the federal government to de facto nationalize everyone's body by controlling our health. Americans are compelled - upon pain of penalty and eventual imprisonment - to purchase insurance.

Moreover, the law codifies the federal funding of abortion. Taxpayer dollars will be used to subsidize the murder of innocent life. Hence, Mr. Obama has violated the social compact: He has abrogated the conscience of pro-lifers, making them tacitly complicit in the slaughter of the unborn. Obamacare is a radical assault upon fundamental religious freedoms.

The Obama revolution threatens to tear America apart. This has happened before. Slavery eventually triggered the Civil War between the industrial North and the agrarian South. Abortion is the slavery of our time - the denying of basic human rights to an entire category of people.

The bitter debate over Obamacare has exposed the country's profound divisions. We are no longer one nation or one people. Rather, there are now two Americas: one conservative, the other liberal. Increasingly, we no longer just disagree but we despise each other.

Our disagreements encompass everything - politics, morality, culture and history. We no longer share a unifying essence or common values. One half of America believes abortion is an abomination; the other half considers any attempt to repeal it as oppressive and sexist. One half opposes homosexual unions because it elevates immoral and unnatural behavior to the sacred status of marriage; the other half supports it as an extension of civil rights. One half reviles Mr. Obama's socialist agenda, viewing it as the destruction of capitalism and our constitutional government; the other half embraces it as the culmination of social justice and economic equality. One half reveres America's heroes - Christopher Columbus, George Washington, James Madison, Davy Crockett - and its glorious history; the other half is ashamed of its past, seeing it as characterized by racism, imperialism and chauvinism.

Ultimately, a country is not simply its geographical borders with the people inside of it. It is something more - and deeper. A nation must share a common heritage, language, culture, faith and myths. Once upon a time, Americans celebrated the same heroes, sang the same patriotic songs, read the same history and literature, and gloried in its exceptional nature: a city upon a hill, with liberty and freedom for all. It was understood that, for all of our different ethnic and religious backgrounds, America is a product of English and Christian civilization. Those days are long gone.

Instead, we are going the way our Founding Fathers warned us against: increasing balkanization and sectionalism. A constitutional republic - unlike an empire - is only as strong as its national cohesion. It is based not on imperial coercion but civic consent. Mr. Obama is recklessly pulling at the strings of unity, further polarizing us.

In confronting Obamacare, state sovereignty, states' rights and state nullification of federal laws are being asserted. This is what happened in the 1830s and 1840s. They are the signs of growing political anarchy and social frustration - people can only be pushed so far. Mr. Obama's drive for a socialist super-state threatens America's very existence. As Jefferson warned about slavery, it is time we start ringing the "fire bell in the night."

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold," wrote William Butler Yeats. "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world."

Conservatives will not be passive in this onslaught on all our core values. Mr. Obama's true legacy may be that he divides us deeper than ever before - unless he abandons his revolutionary project.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is a columnist at The Washington Times and president of the Edmund Burke Institute, a Washington think tank. He is the daily host of the "Kuhner Show" on WTNT 570-AM (www.talk570.com) from noon until 3 p.m.

Obama's constitutional malpractice

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Americans have grown used to Congress claiming the right to regulate and control everything they do. But by what right can

Congress force Americans to purchase health insurance?

This question is at the root of lawsuits filed by 14 states challenging Obamacare's requirement that those without health insurance must obtain it or face fines of $2,085 per household or 2.5 percent of income - whichever is greater.

Defenders of the new law point to the constitutional provision empowering Congress to regulate interstate commerce. The Supreme Court has long interpreted the Commerce Clause to extend well beyond what a common-sense reading would support. In the 1942 case Wickard v. Filburn, the high court ruled that farmer Roscoe Filburn could not grow wheat in excess of limits set by the 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act. It did not matter that the wheat was grown on his own land for his own use - in this case feeding his chickens. According to the court, "control of total supply ... depends upon the control of individual supply." If enough farmers like Filburn grew their own chicken feed, they would not buy it, and this would have an impact on commerce nationwide. The Congress that can regulate Roscoe Filburn's chicken feed can regulate anything.

Still, Congress never claimed it could force people to take up farming or any other vocation. This is the radical interpretation of the Commerce Clause embedded in the health care bill. It is not a power to regulate commercial activity, but to compel it.

The change is unprecedented. All previous Commerce Clause cases have dealt with regulating pre-existing activity, but if someone is not buying health insurance, there is no commerce to regulate. The clause has never been used to compel private citizens not engaged in commerce to spend money on a government-mandated program. This is a new, extreme and potentially dangerous interpretation.

Professor Erwin Chemerinsky of the University of California, Irvine, School of Law defends the individual mandate on the grounds that the Commerce Clause "includes authority to regulate activities that have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. In the area of economic activities, 'substantial effect' can be found based on the cumulative impact of the activity across the country."

This is a significantly flawed view as applied to the individual mandate because almost everything people do or choose not to do has a "substantial effect" on commerce. It would by extension give Congress the power to regulate all human activity or inactivity. Professor Chemerinsky's interpretation of the Commerce Clause represents a significant threat to human freedom because it gives Congress essentially unlimited power. The Constitution is an instrument created to limit the power of government, not a vehicle to justify its infinite reach. Thus, any line of argument that grants limitless powers under the Constitution is inherently wrong. Any laws justified by such claims are, by the same reasoning, abhorrent to the Constitution and must be overturned.

The states fighting Obamacare in court are concerned with more than just health care. At stake are two fundamental views of the nature of the Constitution. In one, government power is limited. It enables and supports human liberty, serves as a referee to keep the game fair and punishes criminals who break the law. In the other view, government is a coercive mechanism that aims at perfecting a social vision in which personal freedom takes a back seat to the utopian plan where the ends justify the means.

The lawsuits arising from the government health care takeover will help to clarify these issues. They will force the government to justify its actions in terms that will be acceptable not only to the courts, but also by the people. Whether or not the states prevail, it is doubtful that the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress will be able to satisfy the public that their rights and liberties, not to mention health and pocketbooks, have to be sacrificed in pursuit of this particular vision of paradise.

No Obamacare for Obama: Did anyone really think that he would be part of the mess?

By THE WASHINGTON TIMES

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.

BIG FOOT LIVES !

Printed in the Financial Times of London as well

Gene research reveals fourth human species

By Clive Cookson in London

Published: March 24 2010

A fourth type of hominid, besides Neanderthals, modern humans and the tiny “hobbit”, was living as recently as 40,000 years ago, according to research published in the journal Nature.

The discovery by Svante Pääbo and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, is based on DNA sequences from a finger bone fragment discovered in a Siberian cave.

It further enriches the scientific picture of human life in the recent geological past. “Forty thousand years ago the planet was more crowded than we thought,” said Terry Brown, an expert in ancient DNA at Manchester University.

Until recently scientists believed there were just two members of the genus Homo alive at the time: Neanderthals whose ancestors left Africa 400,000 years ago, and modern humans, who left about 50,000 years ago. The picture changed in 2003 when archaeologists found remains of a third species, the tiny “hobbit”, which had survived on the Indonesian island of Flores until 14,000 years ago.

The identification of a fourth species is potentially more significant because it was not an isolated population but lived in the centre of the Eurasian continent, where Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens were also present.

The Leipzig team extracted DNA from a child’s finger bone, which Russian archaeologists discovered with other hominid bone fragments in Denisova Cave, a well known Neanderthal site in Russia’s Altai Mountains.

The site’s exceptional cold helped preserve enough DNA to be read with the latest gene sequencing technology.

The scientists first decoded the “mitochondrial” DNA. It was human but, to their astonishment, very different from Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals.

The differences imply that the ancestors of the still unnamed Siberian hominid diverged from the human family tree about 1m years ago, well before the split between Neanderthals and modern hominids about 500,000 years ago. The results also suggest a previously unsuspected migration out of Africa about 1m years ago, said Prof Pääbo.

He expects within months to decode the hominid’s “nuclear” DNA. That will be compared with the modern human and Neanderthal genomes.

Until more of the new hominid’s DNA has been analysed – or larger pieces of bone discovered – it will not be possible to say much about its physical or cultural characteristics, or how it interacted with other human species.

But one thing is clear: it must have clothed itself in thick furs to withstand the Siberian winter, said Prof Pääbo: “It would have been a bit colder 40,000 years ago than today, and it was -40°C when we went there this January.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2010. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.

Come on George, Bill may be an a-hole but he ain't a dish towel

Ha ! It appears George Bush did literally wipe his hand on Bill Clinton's shoulder after shaking hands with someone in the welcoming crowd. But there doesn't seem to be any type of a wet mark or stain left on Bill's shirt as a result. Here's hoping that the person who shook Georges hand hadn't just sneezed or worse, like picked their nose.

More noticeable to me was the poor condition that Bill Clinton appears to be in. He really doesn't look so good. Maybe it's just the heat I dunno. But seeing as I have had two of the same heart surgery's that he has had (multiple by-pass)I am quite conscious of psyical signs of the heart not working too well. If I were Bill I would be making an extra visit to my cardiologist for a check up like right now.

The ObamaCare 'Acceptance' Strategy

Share, Share, Share Tea Party Link



Also published at American Thinker
By Richard J. Little
There is a huge new public relations offensive being unleashed by the Democrats and their allies in the progressive left, one designed to limit their short term election losses and defeat any significant ObamaCare repeal efforts. It is imperative that all conservatives and opponents of government-run health care understand the Democrats' and progressive left's short-term political strategy so that we do not inadvertently aid them or fall victim to the new health care myths that they will be propagating.

The new plan is designed to accelerate the public through a mass analogue of the "seven stages of grief" (shock, denial, anger, etc.) and quickly get to "acceptance" of their federal government health care takeover and looming European-style, cradle-to-grave social welfare state.

The Democrat/progressive spin machine is going to mount a massive disinformation campaign with assistance from their surrogates in the MSM, unions, and "community groups" designed to change the subject. They are counting on getting you cooled down about the unconstitutional takeover of the health care system and usurpation of your personal freedom and individual liberty. And they will constantly hammer that this takeover is "the law of the land" that will "never be repealed" and must be accepted as a fait accompli. Anyone who disagrees with them will be portrayed as "dangerously angry" and a potential threat for "violence" in order to paint dissenters as "extremists".

Obama is going to hit the road this week. Yes, he will be selling the supposed "benefits" of taxpayer-funded and government-run health care. But mainly he and his surrogates will also be trying to "dispel fear and myths" in order to get you to "calm down" and accept your new transition from citizen to subject.

Here are the DNC main talking points (all false, of course):

* It is not government-run health care because it's not a single-payer system, nor is there a government option insurance; it's "private" insurance of your choice.
* This bill is "no big deal," and it's "very moderate and watered-down."
* This is a "giveaway to insurance companies" because of the $2.5 trillion in government medical welfare subsides to purchase "private" insurance.


While all of these statements may have a small grain of truth or are technically correct in a very narrow sense, they are in no way accurate descriptions of how this government health care takeover works.

ObamaCare is essentially the same compulsory insurance scheme that has been foisted on the public in the states of Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts. When you peel back the veneer of supposedly "private" insurance coverage, you discover that for all practical purposes, compulsory insurance is every bit a government-run health care system and functionally amounts to being a cleverly disguised version of a single-payer system.

This is the second part of the progressives' "acceptance" strategy: Simply confuse and misdirect the public about how their new governmental control structure works. There are hundreds of confusing structures, programs, and financing mechanism included. All are designed to divert people into discussion about ancillary components or into wonkish analysis of the monetary aspects. All of this is designed to obstruct people from a real-world understanding of how the system works in practice.

ObamaCare amounts to a de facto federal takeover of the entire medical and health insurance system through regulation, forced participation, and financial control over individual citizens and the major health care interests. At best, the ObamaCare structure will function as a shadow single-payer system. In the worst case, the massive amount of government control can be unleashed at any time to destroy the entire health care system in this country in a few short years.

Functionally, ObamaCare gives the federal government three major powers that are characteristic of all government-run health care plans (single-payer or fully socialized medicine).

First, there will be forced participation in the new health care system for all individuals and employers. The individual and employer mandates force participation in what in practice amounts to a nationalized, "one-size-fits all" health insurance plan, with little hope of "opting out" for the average citizen. This is the universal coverage aspect of government-run health care.

Second, there will be massive government subsidies to individual citizens (available to people who have incomes up to 400% of the poverty level) to fund their insurance coverage. This is medical welfare for the middle class. This is designed to create massive dependency in a huge voting bloc in order to buy future complicity for further "progressive" reforms in health care and other areas.

Third, there will be over 150 new agencies established to implement federal regulatory control over every aspect of the health care system. There will be boards to ration care in the overtly government-controlled programs (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, TRICOR, and SCHIP). Rationing will occur for private insurance through powers delegated to the new "czar" (Health Choices Commissioner) for the government-controlled insurance market euphemistically dubbed the "exchange." Doctors will be "guided" into providing only the government-approved treatments by "Comparative Outcome Boards." Finally, the HHS Secretary is given power to regulate health insurance companies out of existence at any time. And this power is huge.

Simply put, the federal government will be controlling the health insurance industry just as it controls the banks and auto companies who received bailout money. While it will still technically be true that health insurance companies will be "private" in the sense that there is private management and for-profit operation, they will be so constrained and controlled by government that they are quasi-public. Politicians and technocrats will really be calling the shots. There are few practical distinctions between a true single-payer system and a compulsory insurance scheme funded through a very small number (only the very largest of the insurance firms will be able to survive under the massive regulatory structure; in Maine, a similar plan reduced the number of insurance firms in the state from twenty-one down to two in less than ten years!) of pseudo-private insurance companies.

The bottom line for the individual citizen is that control over your own health care choices is gone. All significant medical, insurance, or cost questions will now be matters of politics. Groups that have significant political influence and can deliver votes or money will hold sway (think unions like the NEA and SEIU, big interests like Big Pharma, and pressure groups) over unorganized individuals .

The weakest citizens who cannot easily speak out come out the worst: the unborn, the elderly, veterans, and the disabled.

The stealth nature of the control of the health care system benefits the progressive politician in many ways. The Democrats can keep up the fiction that "this is not government-run health care" as a campaign selling point while at the same time creating a huge new shakedown source for campaign cash in the captive insurance industry. And if things get ugly with costs or medical care, they can still blame "greedy and evil" insurance firms and "the free market" when nothing of the sort was allowed to exist.

The level of control provided by all the regulations, mandates, and other features of ObamaCare will allow them to either continue the fiction or change a few regulations and push us into single-payer by default at any moment.

The cleverly crafted timing of implementation significantly reinforces this message. The public will see exactly nothing of tangible meaning happen for the near future. The supposed "benefits" of mandated insurance and the accompanying skyrocketing premiums (in Maine and Massachusetts, they are currently twice as high as the national average and are increasing at twice the rate of national medical inflation), higher taxes, longer waiting lines, and rationed care will not be happening until 2013 through 2018. This is the final trump card for the Democrats and the progressives. Since nothing overtly onerous will happen to the vast majority of Americans, they are counting on everyone settling back into their individual "comfort zones" of working, watching TV, and acclimating to the regime of health care.

Richard J. Little is a resident of Lawton, Oklahoma.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/03/the_obamacare_acceptance_strat.html at March 24, 2010 - 07:01:31 AM CDT