CDC Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices votes to jab your kids with mRNA
In a unanimous vote of the CDC panel, they voted to add the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to the schedule of vaccines for children. This is undeniably a horrible decision, and what makes it worse is that they know the harm these vaccines produce in children, versus the vanishingly small risk to children from the virus itself. I previously covered the horrible idea of mandating these vaccines for children when politicians wanted to do it, but now they’ve got their hired, bought-and-paid-for, corrupt goons at the CDC doing their bidding for them. This way, the politicians can say: “Oh, the experts at the CDC did it.” Already in Florida, Governor DeSantis has said the CDC vote will have no effect in that state, and Kari Lake is promising to prohibit such a thing in Arizona if she’s elected. The worst part of the motive here is likely worse than you’re imagining. In point of fact, by adding these vaccines to the children’s schedule, what they’ve really done is to protect the manufacturers from any lawsuit. This effectively means it’s automatically applied to adults as well as children in terms of liability. If you’ve been injured, or lost a loved-one to these vaccines, you’ll have no recourse against the manufacturers. They acted on behalf of Big Pharma. They did it to profit the pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the health and lives of your children and grandchildren, by protecting them from legal liability.
It’s clear that these vaccines should be withdrawn from the market entirely, never mind finding approval for use in children:
Here, Bannon’s War Room covers the implications with Dr. McCullough:
Also, Dr. Malone, in the War Room:
Folks need to wake up before they’re tricked into poisoning their children. I should have realized when I posted about the recklessness of politicians mandating vaccines on children that they would seek another path. It’s clear that they don’t care if they harm your kids. They may even want to harm your children. Whether it’s intended purely to get Big Pharma off the hook, or also to pursue their depopulation agenda, the fact of the matter is that they know these mRNA vaccines are harmful to everybody, but particularly children. Here’s the response from Governor DeSantis. If your governor isn’t doing the same, you need to ask why:
These people need to be stripped of power. It’s time for you to volunteer to man the polls, to watch over our voting process, and to get out and engage your friends, neighbors, and relatives to get them to the polls. We’re running out of time to save this country. Protect your children. Tell your adult children so they will protect your grandchildren. Nobody deserves a monstrous government like this. Nobody.
The whole thing is a put-on. I don’t mean there isn’t a virus, but the whole over-hyped panic is just that. On Thursday, this past week, I saw that there were real signs that the fog was lifting. People were beginning to question the whole thing. It’s not that anybody thinks Coronavirus 2019 isn’t real, but that the statistics were being questioned, and the models were being questioned, and finally, Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx were being questioned. More, the reality of the unemployment numbers was coming to light, as an additional 6.6 million Americans added to the unemployment rolls that had already surged by 3.3 million the week before. That’s basically 10 million Americans, whose jobs are gone. More, businesses are now going belly-up, unable to sustain themselves in a shutdown or even skeleton-crew condition. Real people, with real businesses are losing their businesses, not because they did anything wrong, but because of some order by a government official. Those officials will all claim sovereign immunity to any lawsuits, but no matter what anybody claims, it is a real “taking” as the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Fifth Amendment defines it. They’re being wrecked, and their employees will have no jobs to which they can return. This must end. On Thursday, the American people finally realized it, and began to say so. Now, finally, two days later, it seems our President, already inclined to think along these lines, seemed to have gotten the message. In a lengthy briefing on Saturday, he said “We have to open…” He said it more than once.
After the debacle of the Fauci/Birx reliance on the statistical models, some of which were provided purportedly by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, people were beginning to question not only the obvious distance between projected death rates and reality, but also some of the underlying stories used to sell the panic. One YouTuber, channel name: AmazingPolly, who is an excellent researcher found some interesting problems with the video package prepared by the NYTimes about the catastrophe happening at the Elmhurst, Queens NY hospital. What’s interesting is that the video is now all in question. CBS famously aired footage that looked like a serious situation, allegedly in NYC, but actually from Italy. Other footage and stills showed lines of coffins that were actually from a movie. The media is a pure propaganda arm of the Democrat Party. At this point, it truly is the Democrat-Media Complex. The idea is to sell panic. The idea is to push the country as far down into the ditch as is humanly possible, because there’s really no other way for them to defeat President Trump. They’re willing to wreck America to get rid of him, and to cause the death of additional Americans if necessary. There’s really no bottom to their black hole of hatred for this country. They see Trump and his supporters as the last obstacle to vanquishing America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, forever. This is not hyperbole. They hate us that much.
I will tell you that the longer I observe the whole of our national polity, I am continually amazed at how absolutely disgusting is our so-called “Mainstream Media.” Sarah Palin had them pegged when she called them “Lamestream,” but lately, they seem to be more diabolical than that.
Back to the hospital in Elmhurst, Queens, why would they choose that hospital to target for their big scare story? On whom would this have the greatest effect? Amazing Polly figures that out for us, if we hadn’t guessed who might be from Queens, NY, who might be the target of a media disinformation campaign:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAnSkQojE_4
Every time I get the chance, I thank Polly for her work via Twitter. This video deserves a thorough watching. She admits up front that she can’t necessarily prove all of her conclusions, but she is always careful to provide documentation for the material she presents, in the information attached to her videos on YouTube. You can follow her on Twitter @99freemind. I don’t necessarily agree with her on everything, or subscribe to all the theories she presents, but I can tell you that she works very hard at her research, and she is very thorough, and also that she provides an alternative view of events and history that can offer a perspective that reveals new things the Lamestream Media will never, ever tell us. Give her a view if you haven’t already, and take the time to Like the videos of content creators like her and Dan Bongino.
Another person with whom you will cross paths if you research this overall CoronaVirus2019 shutdown is Candace Owens. Some of you will be familiar with her from FoxNews, or from other platforms, and on Twitter, she’s @RealCandaceO. She has real courage in many respects, and one of them is her willingness to take on the #FakeNews, particularly with respect to issues of race, and also with the pigeon-holing of black Americans as Democrats. She’s exposing those myths, and she has a new book coming out. Now, she’s exposing the governor of Connecticut who actually blamed the death of an infant on CoronaVirus when in fact, the death was due to being suffocated:
Since word is getting out— I can now confirm that the infant in CT was accidentally suffocated by its caretaker, who then called the police. @GovNedLamont KNEW this, & then lied to the world by linking it to the #coronavirus because he wants more Federal money.
He should RESIGN. https://t.co/q6L5V55DWh
This sort of displacement of blame onto CoronaVirus is rampant in states run by Democrats. It’s being done to grab more of the federal relief money from the $2Trillion package that Congress passed last week. It’s despicable, and it accounts for at least some of the mounting death toll being reported all over the news. It’s fraud. They’re mostly going to get away with it, since they compile the statistics, and they control the medical examiners, although these will mostly be considered “natural causes” and will never undergo autopsies. I’m not suggesting that there are no CoronaVirus deaths, as I’m sure there are, but as I covered in my previous article, this is all being blown way out of proportion. Now, we have even more evidence that this whole panic is contrived, and we also know the motive: This is all about elections, money, and power. What else? The idea here was to trap President Trump so that he would have to shut down the country. Instead, he left it to governors, as he should. He focused on the Federal response as is the job of the President. In short, he took the steps appropriate to the President under our constitution, but this is also why the Democrat-Media Complex kept pressing the President to take more steps, and force a state quarantine in New York.
Today, at the press briefing by the President’s CoronaVirus Response Team, he made it plain: “We have to get back to work.”
Remember, if it’s bad for America, Democrats approve. If it’s bad for Trump, Democrats insist. The media is now so utterly broken that the smarmy reporters in the room can’t help but become snotty in their questioning of the President. If I were the President, I’d throw at least half of them off the White House grounds and tell their networks or papers to try again with somebody else. There was never this kind of conduct toward President Obama. Not once. Not even during his most miserable and provocative failures, when actual reporters would be expected to be more insistent in their questioning. Here, the way these reporters talk to the President of the United States is an utter disgrace. Even were I given the opportunity to question Barack Obama in the White House in the aftermath of Benghazi, I’d never have been so basically rude and disrespectful. I certainly would have asked a couple seriously difficult questions. The problem here is that the media doesn’t really want any information. They’re not really asking questions designed to reveal any news, but merely questions aimed at catching the President in some inconsistency, or in some sort of disagreement with one or more members of his team. In some cases, they’re plainly argumentative. Just once, in the eight years of the incompetent and corrupt Obama administration, they should have gone after that President with such fervent zeal. Instead, they blithely pitched softballs that even the increasingly confused Joe Biden could hit out of the park.
Over the last few weeks, as the nation has attempted to deal with the WuFlu pandemic, one of the things that’s gotten short shrift is the economy. We had an economy in pretty good condition by the middle of February, and as you’ll remember, unlike during the Obama administration when the jobs numbers were “unexpectedly poor,” instead our Department of Labor found itself having to upgrade the numbers in weeks following original reports that understated the economy’s performance. Now, we’re losing jobs at a phenomenal rate, and President Trump has to do something to bring the economy back online soon, or the country will be wrecked. Most of the small businesses shutting down are highly leveraged, and with a halt in revenues, they’re facing serious, perhaps catastrophic, consequences. The typical situation looks like a Mom-and-Pop shop of some sort, opened up a business on tight margins, perhaps by re-mortgaging a recently paid-off home. Now, shut down by order of some public official, usually a governor, county judge, city manager or mayor. they find themselves without revenue. They have to lay off their employees, as a matter of pure financial survival, and then, within a month, they’re staring down the barrel of that debt service, and if they can’t service it, not only will they lose their business, but they might just lose everything. They’ll never be able to reopen. They’ll never be able to call up employees and offer them their old jobs back. Instead, the avalanche will gather momentum and mass, with a mounting depression at the bottom of the hill.
I am reminded of a line by Bruce Willis in one of the many Die Hard sequels. The young guy he’s escorting to the FBI makes an off-hand remark about crashing the “system.” Willis’ character stops, and lets the kid have it a bit: “It’s not a system. It’s people!” Or something to that effect. His point was to say it is very easy to imagine shutting down a system like shutting down a computer or an assembly line. For some reason, when people eliminate the myriad complications implied by specific, concrete human beings, it become easy to be cavalier about their disposition. The point Detective McClane was making is that “the system” is really people, and what you’re really talking about wrecking is the lives and dreams and aspirations and plans of real live people, just like you.
Democrats suffer from the same childish misunderstanding and unfocused view of the world around them. It’s easier to imagine an amorphous system that just gets “shut down.” The same is true of the economy. They see it like turning off an engine. Instead, it’s like putting a country’s worth of people into suspended animation, only without the preservative aspect. The decay, the atrophy, the heart failures and the deaths begin to mount immediately. In short order, it’s much worse than any disease. Our country is much more complex than most people imagine, but the fundamentals of the situation are simple. We’re wrecking the economy, which means we’re wrecking businesses and that means we are wrecking people. Each minute this goes on, more businesses are lost, and with them, jobs die. Most of them won’t be back, and this is where people who don’t understand the entrepreneurial cycle fail to see the real danger: Small business creates a sizable majority of jobs in the United States. If you’ve just gone out and created a business, and had it wrecked by a government-ordered closure, and probably lost substantial money, or worse, had your entire life’s work demolished, assuming you find yourself in the position to launch another business some day, would you? Why? The next time a virus comes along, the government might just shut you down again.
It isn’t simply that this response to this virus was overblown and entirely unnecessary, but that the entire methodology is bankrupt, unfeasible, and wrong. We must never permit this kind of shutdown again. Ever. Under any circumstance. We have created a situation that will take years to repair, if it can be fully repaired at all. Your individual rights are not and must not be subjected to the vagaries of virologists’ models. Your liberties must never be placed in the hands of governors, mayors, county judges, and other elected numb-skulls whose motives and decisions will always be dominated by politics, their public declarations to the contrary notwithstanding.
Ladies and gentlemen, the worst aspect of the great WuFlu shutdown of 2020 is the precedent set by permitting government to behave this way in the first place. The very idea that the government can order the shutdown of the country is a preposterous notion. This is tyranny, whether you’ve recognized it or not. For the business owners whose concerns are now in serious jeopardy, if not already wrecked, this much is obvious. They’re carrying the largest burden in this entire fiasco, and those of us who do not bear their burdens should be thoughtful about the losses they face as a result. It is their lives and liberties, along with the properties of these entrepreneurs that have been cast onto the pyre of sacrifices created by this exercise of government authority.
I believe President Trump has been played, and the economy laid waste as a result of his desire to safeguard the lives of Americans. I believe the people upon whose guidance he relied are not all good people with innocent or virtuous motives. I also believe that certain elements opportunistically joined into this attack on our country. I know the President was trapped between doing what he believed at the time to be the best path for saving lives and what he knew would be catastrophic for the long-term economic and financial health of the country. I can forgive him for his motive of protecting and saving lives, but I’m less forgiving in another aspect: He should have recognized that the people around him were simply another brand of deep-state players, equally corrupt and equally apt to carry out a different form of a coup d’etat. If you don’t see that this has been the motive, I’d urge you to look more closely.
From: Cheryl MillsTo: Hillary Clinton Date: 2013-01-23 11:21Subject: TODAY’S PERFORMANCE
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05797268 Date: 12/31/2015 RELEASE IN FULL
From: Mills, Cheryl D <MillsCD@state.gov>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:21 PM
To:
Subject: FW: Today’s performance From your doctor admirer From: Fauci, Anthony (NIH/NIAID) [E] [mailto:AFAUCI@niaid.nih.gov]
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2013 6:10 PM
To: Mills, Cheryl D
Subject: Today’s performance
Cheryl: Anyone who had any doubts about the Secretary’s stamina and capability following her illness had those doubts washed away by today’s performance before the Senate and the House. She faced extremely difficult circumstances at the Hearings and still she hit it right out of the park. Please tell her that we all love her and are very proud to know her.
Warm regards,
Tony Anthony S. Fauci, MD
Director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
Building 31, Room 7A-03 31 Center Drive, MSC 2520
National Institutes of Health Bethesda, MD 20892-2520 Phone: (301) 496-2263 FAX: (301) 47-4409
E-mail: afauci
The information in this e-mail and any of its attachments is confidential and may contain sensitive information. It should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient. If you have received this e-mail in error please inform the sender and delete it from your mailbox or any other storage devices. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) shall not accept liability for any statements made that are the sender’s own and not expressly made on behalf of the NIAID by one of its representatives.
China Originated Viral Infectious Disease #19(COVID-19 a.k.a. #WuFlu)
Ladies and gentlemen, I occasionally write from what must seem to be a purely contrarian point of view. I realize that my approach to some topics makes me the natural target for those who demand conformity in all matters. On so-called “Anthropogenic Climate Change,” I’ve long maintained that the evidence in-hand in no way supports the will conclusions and claims of so-called “Climate Activists,” and that instead, simple logic exposes the foolishness of their claims to an extent that their motive is not revealed to be the result of simple ignorance, but instead one of intentional disinformation for political purposes. You can agree or disagree with my arguments on that topic, but in the past, as I’ve made my arguments, I’ve not heard any retorts to the logic. In this case of the Wuhan Coronavirus known formally as COVID-19(COronaVIrus Disease2019[*],) but herein called #WuFlu for shorthand, I believe we are being intentionally mis-informed and driven into an entirely unnecessary, unwarranted panic while simultaneously surrendering liberties to governmental demands in answer to the non-existent emergency that has aroused this ridiculous panic. That’s quite an allegation on my part, but as ever, I stand prepared to defend my assertion.
Don’t misunderstand: There IS a COVID-19. What there ISN’T is any evidence that:
#WuFlu is actually killing anybody
#WuFlu is lethal in and of itself
#WuFlu is any more lethal than ordinary influenza
If you have irrefutable evidence of ANY of these, please provide it in the comments below. To date, no government authority or medical institution in the private sector has yet to provide any. Let’s start by playing a logic game. Let’s imagine you’re a healthcare provider. Let’s further stipulate that a patient coming to you for care presents with the following list of symptoms:
Persistent Fever
Cough
Body Aches
That sounds just like #WuFlu! So the healthcare provider uses a test to determine that yes, indeed, you have #COVID-19, and from that moment on, if you die, it’s going to be assumed that COVID-19 killed you. But did it? Did they test you for other infectious agents? No! They’re not going to test you to see if you also have influenza, or some other disease. Once you’re tagged with “COVID-19,” you will be counted as having expired due to COVID-19 even if it was actually your lung cancer that killed you.
In the 2017-18 influenza season, the CDC reports an estimated 61,000 people died from influenza. First, note that this is an “estimate,” and second, that the death rate was roughly 1 in 1000. Roughly one person of every one-thousand who was infected with influenza purportedly died of it. I remember this particular influenza season quite well, because my father very nearly succumbed to pneumonia thought to be secondary to the respiratory influenza that ultimately killed so many people in that season. I knew a number of elderly people, primarily men in their late 70s or 80s, who either died or nearly died in that season. Most of them had other health issues(my father a diabetic, for instance,) and others with various forms of COPD or smoking, or heart issues. This should sound quite familiar to you, because it’s the same exact class of people allegedly dying by COVID-19.
In fact, every flu season, it is almost always this same class of people who die in large numbers from this crud. I know it. You know it. The numbers bear it out each year.
That said, let me ask you a question I’d like you to consider: If you’re tested positive for #WuFlu, what information do you have that excludes the possibility that if you’re exhibiting some or all of the symptoms above, that it’s the result of COVID-19 and not something else? This is one of those basic syllogisms with which you’re going to need to wrestle.
Of course, I’m not a physician, or a medical professional of any sort, and my studies in my profession have nothing to do with epidemiology, or any related field. What my field does heavily rely upon is logic. In all respects.
Here is a German doctor explaining the matter. If you’re not a German-speaker, you’ll need to rely upon the subtitles, but after consulting with my wife(a German by birth,) the subtitles are faithful to the good doctor’s intent:
https://youtu.be/p_AyuhbnPOI
Mark Twain(Samuel Clemens) is purported to have said:
It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Whether he wrote these precise words may be in doubt, but he certainly wrote:
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and hard it is to undo that work again!
It seems to me they mean the same, so let’s credit him with the sentiment if not the precise words. As Dr. Wodarg alleges, this Emperor seems to be naked.
Still doubting? That’s understandable, since I’m just a guy on the Internet with a keyboard and an opinion, and virtually everybody has at least one of those. Some of you will be familiar with Candace Owens, and I commend to you her work. She’s trying very hard to demolish the stranglehold she alleges that the #DemocratMediaComplex has on the black community. She posted this on Twitter(@RealCandaceO):
It’s from the CDC. What it represents is the sharp drop-off in Influenza Positive tests since the emergence of COVID19. In other words, what’s really happening is that if you test positive for COVID19, they’re not testing for anything else in most cases. They’re blaming everything on COVID19! Influenza has become an invisible killer for which we’re not testing. More, when people self-quarantine because they have the symptoms above, it’s being assumed in many cases that they have/had COVID19. There’s no verification in many cases.
Are you starting to see a trend? This should be getting your eyebrows raised, at least a bit. If not, you may be succumbing to the impetus of the herd.
I’m not going to tell you that there’s no danger from #WuFlu. You must make your own judgments, but make sure they’re your own judgments, and that you’re not being driven to them. What I notice is that Americans are increasingly frustrated and even more often, furious, as it becomes clear that we’re laying waste to the best economy on Earth in order to pursue an alleged public health crisis that may be even more false and more hyped than so-called “Anthropogenic Climate Change.”
While I’m on that topic, I’d like to bring a related matter to your consideration, also on the matter of COVID19, but also the possibility that local/regional environmental concerns might be contributing to the death toll being seen in various hot-spots around the globe. Tony Heller is a first-rate guy, and his website realclimatescience.com is first-rate. I’ve been reading his site for a long time, and I follow him on Twitter (@Tony_Heller). This video, also featuring a German doctor, is definitely worth the watch, albeit for somewhat different but related reasons:
Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to look out for your health, and I want you to look out especially for the health of those who are what might be termed “medically fragile,” inasmuch as they may be elderly, or have significant pre-existing conditions that would make them a target for any communicable respiratory pathogen. Wash your hands, mind your social distance, and begin to demand of the media and your political leaders: Where is the evidence?
We’re killing our economy, which will in turn surely kill MANY MORE PEOPLE than this disease will have done, and we have no evidence that COVID19 has actually killed ANYBODY. None. Nada.
Think about that.
We can go into motives another day. For the moment, ignore the question of motives, and focus instead on the situation. I don’t know exactly why, as of now, but it seems fairly clear to me that we’re being played. The panic is a scam. We need to demand our leaders explain why. Now.
Editor’s note[*] When this article originally published, it was stated that COVID-19 stands for “ChinaOriginatedViralInfectiousDisease#19” That was false, and while it had come from what seemed a reputable site, that site has also changed their annotation, so I have corrected mine. The fact remains that the virus originated, with the best information at hand, in the Wuhan Province of China in 2019.
With the slim details that are thus far available of the Senate’s Obamacare replacement legislation, I must say that I am both saddened and disgusted with the state of the Republican party in Congress, and highly annoyed with Donald Trump’s insistence on Wednesday night that more tax-payer money equals heart. That’s what he said, and it makes me ill. If Mr. Trump wishes to have more “heart” in healthcare, let him donate his billions. Most of us don’t have billions to give, or even hundreds, and the government doesn’t exactly “solicit donations.” It aims a gun at our heads, making demands for payment. What may disappoint me most about this is that from his base of support, a loud groan did not erupt when he made that statement before the audience in Iowa. Conservatism is dying because to a large extent, so many Americans, so fatigued by Obama’s war against them, would accept two smiling lashes per day from another President if it meant escaping Obama’s ten, delivered across their backs with full leftist fury. So happy are they to be removed from Obama’s ever more weighty iron jack-boot, that they’re willing to have Donald Trump’s wingtip on their neck. The stark truth of this whole situation is very simple, and it comes down to this: You cannot repeal a despicable law like Obamacare and then replace it with something very nearly as egregious, while hoping Americans won’t notice.
Apparently, most of a handful of Senators today noticed too: Senators Cruz(R-TX,) Johnson(R-WI,) Lee(R-UT,) and Paul(R-KY) signed a joint statement to the effect that they cannot support the Senate bill. I want to know where the other 48 Republican Senators are hiding. This bill is a scandal, promising to saddle our children and grandchildren with a mountain of debt that reaches out to infinity. President Trump should be ashamed. Vice President Pence should join him in guilt for this bill. Over in the House, Paul Ryan should be breathing at least a momentary sigh of relief as the worst Republican bill to come out of Congress in memory is no longer his pet, now reduced instead to a close second in the standings.
I realize President Trump is not a conservative, but leans somewhat conservative on a few issues. At present, however, he’s flirting with losing conservatives’ support because of this bill. The Republicans in both houses of Congress have failed to provide a true repeal of Obamacare, and I cannot possibly express how thoroughly disappointing this development has been. Rather than scrap the whole damnable thing, they are nearly all of the spending, and merely trimming some of the tax burdens Obamacare imposes. That’s not “repeal.” It’s scarcely “replace.”
The sad truth is that our country is headed into the toilet of world history, and this bill will do nothing to arrest its fall. We cannot have a system in which half the citizens are the beneficiaries of the lashes across the other half’s backs. I had hoped Trump would fight the left, rather than encouraging them, but this sort of thing provides fresh evidence that he’s just another big-government Republican, little different in this respect from the parade of so-called “moderates” who have repeatedly disappointed us.
President Trump’s supporters had better get in touch with Mr. “Big heart” and let him know that money doesn’t equal compassion when it is extracted at gunpoint, or affixed like a ball and chain to generations yet unborn. I could vomit.
It’s been nearly two decades since it was established, but the U.K.’s Independence Party(UKIP) isn’t going away, and indeed, it has begun to make inroads, particularly at the local level. The larger reason for this opportunity may be that the establishment Tory party, long considered the UK’s “conservatives,” have abandoned conservative policies in favor of progressive ideas. If that sounds familiar to you, it should, because in many respects, our own Republican party, long-portrayed in media as virtually synonymous with “conservative” has been behaving like liberals. Of course, the Tories in the UK have always been more slanted to the left than had been our Republicans, but lately, they’ve all but abandoned any pretense to conservative thought. As this has happened, it has had a curious effect on the Independence Party, swelling its ranks lately and giving it a real foothold in local elections. UKIP seems to understand this is a fight over the long run, and not a battle to be won in an election cycle or two. Their leader, Nigel Farage, made clear in an interview with Foxnews what is the UKIP’s aim:
“We want to take back our country, we want to take back our government, and we want to take back our birthright,”
If this sounds familiar to Tea Party activists, it should. Just like the Republicans here, the Tories have begun to fully embrace National Healthcare, and all sorts of left-wing ideals, including liberal immigration policies, and the whole slate of liberal policy preferences advocated and advanced by their Labor Party. the U.K.’s equivalent to our own Democrats. The largest strategic difference between the Tea Party and the UKIP is that rather than seeking to influence the Tories, the Independence Party is in direct competition with them. They are not trying to work on the party from within, but instead making a full frontal assault on the establishment “Conservatives.” While not precisely like the Tea Party in all respects, in terms of a movement, it is quite similar in its grass-roots orientation.
Naturally, they are dismissed as “racists” and “kooks” and all sorts of demeaning labels by both the traditional parties, but that isn’t stopping them from moving ahead. Dishonest labels only work so long, as does the attempt to define the whole of the party by the bombastic or outrageous statements of a few individuals within it. More, the UKIP has focused on an issue that seems to a majority of voters across party lines: Membership in the EU. UKIP opposes it while both Labor and the Tories favor it, despite the fact that a clear majority of the populace stands in favor of withdrawing from the EU. With this on the table in 2014, UKIP stands to make further inroads as the only party pushing in the same direction as the populace.
This is in many respects like the arguments on two issues we face domestically. The first is Obama-care, and the second is immigration. In both cases, the US population is opposed by strong majorities to any sort of amnesty and continuance of the health-care law. While there are still some Republicans who are opposed to amnesty, and a few more in favor of repeal of Obama-care, the fact remains that a large number of Republicans in both houses of Congress are in favor of an amnesty deal, and distinguishing by their votes, have been only too willing to fund and thereby continue Obama-care.
If UKIP manages to pull off some electoral victories, it may offer a hint to Tea Party activists in the US: It may be time to put up its own slate of candidates, completely independent of the Republicans, and it may be time to formally register as a political party. The sorts of clear issues in which the American people are at odds with both major political parties may be reaching a climax, at which one party or the other must disappear. This is what happened to the Whigs one and one-half centuries ago, and it may be the end in store for the Republicans if Tea Party activists can get their act together. Like more and more voters in Britain, Americans may discover that they have no need of both a conservative party and a fake conservative party. If this comes to be the case in the U.K., it may evince hope for a resurgence of the Tea Party, perhaps under a new banner independent in all respects of the Republican Party.
It may be time for the Tea Party to take that leap.
Let’s be blunt about this: Obama-care is a failure, if you’re measuring it by how it is affecting the health-care market, or how it is impacting the lives of millions of Americans who are losing their insurance, their jobs, and the hours they work. It’s going to throttle the economy, and signs already exist that this is happening now, as on average, rather than seeing the promised $2500 saving on premiums per family, many people are seeing doubling, trebling, or far more on their insurance premiums bill. It’s killing off the individual market, and one year from now, as the exemptions for large employers expire, it’s going to decimate that segment too. Estimates are as high as one-hundred million Americans will ultimately lose their insurance due to Obama-care. Of course, if you’re Barack Obama, this is all going according to plan, because this law was never about providing health-care to the uninsured, but instead a scheme by which to punish prosperous Americans and tax them into poverty. They knew that would be the result, and yet they went forward anyway. This law is going to kill millions of Americans prematurely. It’s going to drive tens of millions into poverty. It’s going to do far worse things than Americans might have imagined, and among them, we now find that Democrats are already advocating the literal enslavement of doctors. It was inevitable.
Have you ever visited a Veterans hospital? Have you ever seen the sort of doctors they have? Certainly, there are some good doctors, but on average, I wouldn’t put them on par with privately-owned hospitals. Care is sub-par, doctors are over-booked, and there is generally little to recommend. As Obama-care sinks its teeth into America, this will be the fate of all Americans except the very rich who will use some form of concierge care, almost certainly off-shore, if Democrats have their way. Medicare and Medicaid patients have been noticing that fewer and fewer doctors accept Medicaid or Medicare, because reimbursements are insufficient to pay for the services provided. These programs expect physicians to operate at a loss, apparently in perpetuity. Democrats, ever ready to pass a new bit of tyranny into law, are now suggesting that the way around this shortage of doctors is to force them.
Have you ever worked with a gun to your head? This is the Democrat proposal for meeting the growing crisis. You will hear it expressed ultimately as a civil right. Having enslaved one portion of the populace to redistribute an increasing portion of its wealth to government, prepare to see what happens when government demands that doctors must treat Medicaid and Medicare patients as a matter of anti-discrimination. Soon, our physicians will be told that they must take all comers, irrespective of the reimbursement schedule’s pitfalls. If Democrats have their way, this will be the future of American medicine: Practitioners held at gunpoint to treat anybody who demands it, with the glaring oversight of bureaucrats making sure they treat all their patients just the same,
If I were a doctor forced to work under those circumstances, I would relinquish my medical license. All decent, competent doctors will do just that. In such an environment, only the incompetent and the malevolent will flourish. Yet this is the proposal of Democrats, and it has secretly been part of their agenda from the outset. If you think Democrats are anything but communists, you have not been paying attention. Their egalitarian impulse is coming to its lethal conclusion: They will compel people at the point of a gun to serve others. This is the ultimate end of the road in any system of tyranny. We are becoming a police state every bit as oppressive as the Soviet Union had been, and slowly but surely, any ability of any person to make any choice of any description is being removed. When doctors lose the ability to decide under which circumstances they will accept clientele, there will be a corresponding loss of ability for you to choose your doctor. “If you like your doctors, you can enslave them” will be the new meaning of the President’s broken promise, so long as Democrats are permitted to exercise power.
Did it ever bother you that the President complained that we spend too much of our Gross Domestic Product on health-care? I objected simply because that notion collectivizes our our choices, and our expenditures in a grotesquely communistic manner. Why is it any of the President’s business how much the American people spend on health-care? If a person wished to spend every penny of his or her disposable income on health-care, what would be the harm? For all his protestations, you will now pay much, much more, and he will stand as the middle man between you and your doctors, nurses, radiologists, and other professionals in the medical field. He will skim a mighty share of it, forwarding only a pittance to the providers, using the remainder to fund the health-care of those whose votes he has purchased.
If we were a sane and proud people, we would revolt. We would rally in Washington DC and remain there until the tyrants fled our capital in fear. Sadly, neither are we a rational people sufficient in numbers to raise such objections, nor are we proud enough to stand on the principles that had built the prosperity we had until recently enjoyed. The truth is that the union could be salvaged yet by a resolute people, but there is no evidence that such people now exist in sufficient numbers to accomplish such a thing. We would need a crowd of five millions or more, descended upon DC with rage in their eyes at what has been done to their country, all demanding in unison that this abomination be repealed. We would need tens of thousands more at every congressional district office demanding a repeal unrelentingly. Instead, the sound of surrender prevails as Americans consider how they will now live under the new slavery they have accepted, preparing to meet the fate their cowardice has all but guaranteed.
I have never really observed Ronald Reagan’s “eleventh commandment” whereby he disclaimed the idea of speaking ill of his fellow Republicans, but it’s true to say that I avoid being unnecessarily harsh where I expect some bridges might be built. On this day, I come to you to explain why I am going to speak ill of certain Republicans in the most heartfelt, sincere manner. Watching the senior Senator from Arizona deliver his critique of Senator Cruz after his magnificent twenty-one hour speech, I couldn’t help but think how far John McCain(R-AZ) has fallen. Just five years ago, he had been the nominee of his party, a party that ultimately accepted and supported him despite the fact that he’s been a thorn in the side of conservatives for decades(and in no small measure because he chose a running mate who was dynamic and powerful.) Now John McCain appears to be nothing more than an angry old man, who once championed the idea of “maverick senator” right up until he was swallowed by the DC establishment. Now firmly entrenched in the good ol’ boys club of Washington, and accustomed to being the center of attention, McCain looked the fool on Wednesday as he belittled the efforts of Ted Cruz and other conservative Senators who decided to oppose Obama-care.
John McCain has built quite a record of opposing conservatism over the years since his presidential loss. He’s been subsumed into the general ideological quagmire of moderates like his chief adviser, Steve Schmidt, who never met an actual conservative he liked. Just a few months ago, he referred to Cruz(or those like him) as “Wackobirds.” Before that, he made a long speech mocking the “hobbits” of the Tea Party. McCain wishes to share in the control of Middle Earth these days, and he’s more than satisfied to lie down with the dogs of Obama’s encampment. He wants to bomb Syria so badly, he was willing to hang out with terrorist thugs, and he now holds conservatives in such thorough contempt that he’s willing to consider gun control measures. Now, he rushes to the defense of the DC status quo establishment in order to preserve Obamacare on the basis of the shoddy but oft-repeated argument that “Obama won.” If this is the length and breadth of the Senator’s vigor for the fight, perhaps he should simply retire. This country has no room any longer for the vigorously inept or the supinely resistant.
There are those Republicans, though not so many conservatives, who insist that one must make allowances for Senator McCain’s previous service as a pilot and a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, but given his performance on the floor of the Senate Wednesday, I believe it’s fair to suggest that he’s used up the last of his tokens for past honorable conduct. What Senator McCain did was a crass spectacle in opposition to both the mood and the temperament of the nation, possible only because he will serve at least three-and-one-half years longer without an election. I can virtually promise you that his intemperance with respect to the grass-roots would never have made it past a primary in 2010 had he displayed such contempt for Tea Party-inclined conservatives, and the Senator knows it. In short, he faked-out the world and Arizonans in 2010 by pretending he was a conservative, when indeed, there are few conservative reflexes in Senator McCain’s body.
McCain said he took umbrage at Senator Cruz’s comparison of some to the appeasement of Hitler by Neville Chamberlain, but I must ask why Senator McCain would take offense at this at all. McCain has basically said that he is surrendering on Obama-care on the basis of an election almost eleven months ago, and that he will do nothing to oppose it. That sounds a good deal like Neville Chamberlain to me. If McCain would merely embrace Barack Obama and claim to have gained “comity in our time,” the picture would be complete. Not satisfied with that, McCain tried to drag his father and grandfather into the argument, an absurd juxtaposition that allowed him to pout and spout, but to make no sense whatever. The truth is that in his statement, McCain looked afraid, and barely cogent. His words were incoherent. He said “I resoundingly reject…”[Cruz’s remarks] but I think it is clear from the aftermath of Cruz’s speech that what is being rejected resoundingly is John McCain and his ethos of capitulation. A writer less-concerned with honoring Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment might observe that he’s apparently accustomed to living in political captivity at the behest of communists.
I honestly cannot tell you that I’ve ever thought much of John McCain. I supported him in 2008 only after he picked a running-mate I thought might well salvage the ticket – and almost did – until John McCain’s brilliant adviser convinced the Senator to suspend the campaign to return to Washington to “confront the financial crisis” in which he was factually almost entirely powerless to act. McCain may well enjoy deriding and defaming actual conservatives, but what I find more egregious is his contention that since Barack Obama won, conservatives in and out of Washington DC ought to surrender to his agenda. Last I checked, Ted Cruz also won in 2012, and as I remember from the 2012 campaign, nobody talked about Obama-care except conservatives, in part because the GOP nominee had inflicted a similar program on Massachusetts, and also because Obama himself didn’t want to talk about it. Besides, nearly a year having elapsed, the facts or at least the opinion the American people hold about them have changed, and as more facts come to light about the consequences, Senator McCain should be taking heed to the catastrophic effects of the law.
I don’t know why Senator John McCain is so intent on destroying conservatives and conservatism, but he is. It could be that he feels most fulfilled when being treated by the establishment media as their favorite pet Republican. Even the speech he made in the Senate on Wednesday was arranged by Democrats. I wonder if he’s simply just another Arlen Specter-like liberal who has been posing as a Republican. Whatever the motive, his speech of Wednesday dishonors whatever good he had done in his service to the country, while openly disavowing any claim he has made to conservatism. With respect to John McCain as well as Barack Obama, 2016 cannot possibly come soon enough. It’s time to retire this oaf.
The conventional wisdom in Washington DC is that if the Republicans in the House take the fight over funding of Obama-care to the limit, they will pay a price at the polls in 2014 should government shut down. The fact of the matter, however, is that the House of Representatives has as one of its constitutional powers the primacy over federal taxation and expenditures. There should be no doubt that if the government shuts down, it will not be because House Republicans hadn’t passed a bill to fund government, but that Senate Democrats conspiring with the President insisted on funding a program to which nearly sixty percent of Americans remain opposed. Why wouldn’t Americans oppose Obama-care? It’s driving up costs, killing jobs, reducing wages, and stealing the foundation of middle-class America. There is only one party committed to the notion of shutting down government in the name of such a program, and it is that party, driven by a highly ideological president that will insist on the shutdown. Everybody acknowledges that Obama-care isn’t even close to being fully ready for roll-out, including the President, who has delayed various portions of the law, including the employer mandate, but none of this will stop him if he can help it. Who’s willing to shut down government? President Barack Obama and his henchmen in the Senate will do and say anything to take over your health-care.
The Republicans should stand ready to shut down the government to prevent this atrocity in economic and human terms. Obama-care is worse than a disaster. It is a sole-source national wrecking ball that will kill. It will lead to the death of businesses, small and large, the death of the middle-class, and ultimately, to the premature deaths of countless Americans who will be denied care or given substandard, delayed medical attention that almost certainly could have saved or extended their lives. Perhaps worse, the government’s estimates suggest that it won’t really reduce the number of uninsured Americans, but it will drive our nation’s debt to an insanely, unsustainable new high from which we will never escape. Republicans ought to be willing to stand forth and take credit for shutting down government if that’s what it takes to stop such a program, but one can understand the fear tactics in play, so that politicians don’t wish to be associated with it if it’s possible to avoid.
With that in mind, however, the President is willing to shut down all the other departments of government in order to preserve this one new unsustainable program. What sort of arrogance must consume him? This president is willing to delay Social Security payments, medicare reimbursements, military pay, and all the other pre-existing obligations of government in order to preserve a program that has come to bear his name. This is vanity written on a presidential scale. For all the blathering of Democrats about compassion, they are willing to sink an entire nation for the sake of a program that was mortally flawed from the moment of its conception. In order to preserve a program that they consider important to their political futures, they are willing to submarine a nation, its freedoms, its economic opportunities, and its people. Who is willing to shut down government? The President and his party are willing to sacrifice the entire nation to this extension of their miserable misunderstanding of the laws of nature and economics.
The fact of the matter is that Democrats are scared to death. They ought to be, because if this program goes into effect as it is currently written, the results will be tragic for most Americans. “Death panels” are a feature, and not a bug, as we in the computing field might say. They’re important to any cost-savings Obama-care claims to achieve, although no evidence exists that such savings will be realized. More, the government will now collect data not only on your health, but also on your behavior, your preferences, and all manner of characteristics with respect to you and the way you choose to live your lives. Politically-favored groups will get special dispensations in the name of some alleged notion of “fairness,” while others will be punished relentlessly through higher premiums and denied care. The worst thing a nation can do is to politicize its health-care, and that will be among the strongest results of the entire Obama-care tragedy.
I wish more Republicans had the guts to stand up and take credit for trying to stop this law. I wish fewer Americans were so easily manipulated by media. Nevertheless, the truth is what it is: Obama-care is the greatest attack on the American way of life in four generations. It will kill more Americans than al-Qaeda’s wildest dreams, and it will bankrupt us more rapidly than even our already spiraling expenditures would manage, reducing the whole nation to poverty. Who is willing to shut down government in order to carry this monstrosity forward, and what must be the nature of their motives? They might claim “compassion,” but the truth is that Obama-care represents the naked aggression of the state against its people.
After all, where is the compassion of Democrats for all the people who won’t be hired tomorrow because employers do not wish to increase their liability under the law? Isn’t it cheaper and easier to outsource to Asia than to hire an American? Where is the compassion of Democrats for all the Americans who are having their hours cut, in order to get below the Obama-care maximum part-time hours? Where is the compassion for all of the people who will now die prematurely, unnecessarily, because Obama-care will limit what sort of procedures may be done or which medical devices might be used on a particular patient? If you want to know the real compassion of Obama-care, it is encapsulated in the President’s infamous counsel to a 2009 town-hall questioner that granny ought to just take a [pain] pill rather than put her survivors through the expense of keeping her alive.
The truth about Democrats’ alleged compassion is that it extends in every direction in which they can easily buy political support, but in no direction at all when it cuts into their power. Democrats’ compassion isn’t for all the individual lives they will wreck in all the ways Obama-care will accomplish, but instead for the sake of their own political advantage. For power, they are willing to shut down government, starve granny, and hand her a pain pill if she becomes too loud in her agony. When people argue over who is willing to shut down government, we should all recognize the sad fact of the matter at least in this case: The Republicans are merely trying to stop a disaster from wrecking the whole country, but otherwise willing to continue funding government pretty much as-is. The President and his party of shameless power-hungry looters are willing to starve anybody if it will carry their newest program forward.
Americans should be calling their Senators, Democrat and Republican, to insist on joining Ted Cruz and Mike Lee on the de-funding of Obama-care, or simply resign themselves to take their pills and be quiet about it.
Observing the fight within the Republican Party over funding Obama-care, one might come to understand how thoroughly broken is the moral state of so many politicians. One might also begin to grasp the fullness of the amoral position of political advisers and analysts, who help to shape the debate while bearing none of the consequences for its outcome. The proposition advanced by Karl Rove and the hapless congressional Republicans who drink his brand of kool-aid is that threatening a government shutdown over the funding of Obama-care is dumb, since in their expressed view, it will somehow “collapse under its own weight.” I wish to direct your attention to the ethical position of this group of moral defaulters, and what it says of their view of fellow Americans, even if we take them to be sincere: They are willing to see billions or trillions of dollars wasted in order that the program will “collapse on its own.” There is a certain cowardice attached to this sentiment, but more, it speaks to a deep depravity that is part and parcel of their notion of governance: They wish for you to believe that “triumph” may be had by a moral default that will destroy the lives of millions.
Naturally, given the advocates of this position, one is right to wonder in the first instance how sincere they may be. After all, it is not exactly a state secret that many of these Republicans and their puppet-masters will make out like bandits from the implementation of Obama-care. If the program collapses in the end, it won’t matter because it will have been during the implementation phase that they had made off with the loot. Contracts of every description are being made between the federal government and vendors, so that a huge sum of money is flowing directly from the Treasury into the hands of cronies who are filling their pockets with cash. Not nearly all of those cronies are Democrats. For this reason alone, it is wise to suspect the sincerity of Rove and others like him who wish to continue implementing Obama-care on the basis that its collapse is allegedly nigh.
Taking them at their word, momentarily, let us imagine that they’re clean and pure as the wind-driven snow. Let us imagine that they’re not filling their pockets with as much Obama-care implementation cash as their pockets and the pockets of their friends can hold. Let us further stipulate that they may sincerely believe that Obama-care is so obnoxious to liberty and so burdensome to economic prosperity that it will be crushed under its own weight. Even if this is so, what can one say about the moral depravity of a person who stands aside as a children play with matches having doused themselves with gasoline? Is it possible to later claim that one hadn’t possessed some responsibility to intervene and to stop the certain disaster?
If and when Obama-care “collapses under its own weight,” I suspect this crowd will show up on television to gloat and to proclaim themselves “right.” It will be an empty victory dance to be sure, since along the path from the passage of the Affordable Care Act to the supposed collapse, trillions of dollars will have been wasted on implementing a bad idea, trillions of dollars in economic activity will have been suppressed, and real people will have their lives shattered or ended if they happen to lose life’s lottery and come to need substantial health services during the period Obama-care remains in effect. How many tax-payers dollars will have been squandered? How many people will endure extended, protracted poverty because they were unable to obtain full-time employment because companies will restrict workers to twenty-nine hours per week? How many will run head-long into those death panels Sarah Palin predicted while her critics chortled, only to later admit that rationing is a primary goal of Obama-care? How does one perceive victory in any of this?
When Senatorial lemmings like Richard Burr(R-NC) suggest that Mike Lee’s(R-UT) intention to fight Obama-care by de-funding it even at the cost of a government shutdown is the “dumbest idea” he’s ever heard, what one can detect in his further explanation with laments about 1995 is the pulse of a coward who hopes to escape the difficulty of taking a solid position, instead hoping to win by default. This man and all those like him, including Rep. Tom Cole(R-OK) hope to avoid controversy and avoid any political blame, but I must demand that they take the blame for failing to stop what they admit they already know will be a catastrophe.
I blame each and every Republican, whether elected or instead part of the consultancy class, because these alleged “leaders” who by their own statements on the terminal estimates of Obama-care, know full and well that it is a calamity. By standing up and being counted now, they could help the country to avoid the grotesque spectacle of a health-care law that is certain to fail and cause untold suffering for millions, perhaps tens of millions, but they are not haunted into action by the ghosts of their future victims. This disease that pervades Washington DC and its professional consultancy permits them to imagine they will be insulated from judgment, but every American, whether they had supported Obama-care, or instead like the vast majority who opposed its passage and implementation will have known or ought to have known that these default-merchants are really amoral merchants of death.
There is no moral abstention possible in a matter in which the lives and financial futures of three-hundred million Americans are at stake, and the outcome is already known. They claim to sincerely believe that it will collapse, but even if we imagine that they are not filling their pockets from the mad scramble to implement this program, these people claim to understand what a disaster the Affordable Care Act will be, so that they have a responsibility to act. Instead, what we get from these political cowards and opportunists is a dance of default, hoping to celebrate on the ashes of a program that will have destroyed trillions of dollars in wealth for average Americans and prematurely ended the lives of so many who need not have gone to their graves so soon. When I see the grinning face of the rotund, balding and bespectacled carnival-barker on FoxNews, holding up his whiteboard while advocating the acceptance of an onrushing disaster we should have avoided, I know I am seeing the Devil incarnate, because what he demands that we accept is a vast slaughter of Americans and their wealth so he can later claim: “It told you so.”
“Winning” by that sort of default is no victory. If conservatives wish to take the moral high road, we must first discard this shoddy notion of “triumph by default,” deciding instead to fight against this as the last living defenders of ourselves and our fellow man, knowing that if it does collapse under its own weight, Obama-care will crush the lives of millions. Worse yet, what will the wreckage be if it doesn’t collapse? Rove and his acolytes never answer this question, but it is one we must confront as we consider his advice. If the road to Hell is paved with allegedly good intentions, then the speed at which we travel down it will have been determined by our own moral default.
At the end of the road, you may pass a welcoming man with a whiteboard.
Imagine enacting a law that will be so devastating to the economy that you feel compelled to hide it through subsequent election cycles. That’s precisely what the Obama administration is doing, as the Democrats scheme for some way to take back the House in 2014. Worse, the Republicans are just stupid enough to help. As has been widely reported since Tuesday evening, the Obama administration, citing widespread corporate concerns, is delaying the implementation of the employer mandate. That’s right, they don’t want you to see how many people are going to lose their jobs, or how bad healthcare is going to become until after the mid-terms in 2014. Worse, a former Congressional Budget Office Director is calling the move “deviously brilliant.” Excuse me, but is there that sort of discretion in Obama-care? Does the law permit the administration to simply delay implementation of these “features” in this way? I don’t think we’ve yet determined if all of the waivers the administration has issued to various favored groups are legal, much less a wholesale roll-back of the law. We are being clobbered, and in largest measure, it’s because we are a country governed by tyrants who wish to manage us like a herd. Where are the Republicans on this? My apologies, I shouldn’t have asked because we all know John Boehner is busy figuring out how to shove amnesty down our throats. Maybe he can concoct another symbolic repeal vote!
The simple fact of the matter is that our government is under the complete control of criminals and people who must be considered criminally incompetent. Do you know what this really means? This means that the Obama administration and their stooges on Capitol Hill have crunched the numbers, and what will come with Obama-care is massive unemployment and lost wages just in time for an election season. If that were to occur, you would see massive anti-Democrat turnout, which while possibly helpful to the hapless Republicans, would threaten to take away John Boehner’s excuse that he’s only one-half of one-third of the government, as the Senate would come into reach. What’s more frustrating than this is the fact that so many Americans are so disconnected that most will not know of this even with all of the hoopla. Most of those who notice will go back to their reality television and their sports and forget all about it before the election.
At the current rate of alienation of their voting base, Republicans will manage to miss this opportunity as they continue their drive for amnesty, and the large corporations are getting it. Surely, they can drive away far more conservatives than the number of independents who will notice or remember this story some sixteen months from now. Don’t worry, because the individual mandate will go on as scheduled.
Now the real and unvarnished truth of Obama and Obama-care is revealed: It’s a job-killing, care-rationing act of tyranny from which corporate giants can find relief with the Obama administration, while individual citizens must pay fines, er, uh, “taxes,” according to some particularly treasonous Supreme Court justices.
Ladies and gentlemen, there is no fixed law. Law is whatever Herr Obama decides it will be from day to day, while Johnny, Mitch and the boys on Capitol Hill are content to leave it that way, with John Roberts giving his seal of approval. Think what you will, because while what is being done by design and carefully plotted intention to this country might have landed the culprits on the gallows in years long bygone, nowadays there exist nobody who is going to do the first little thing about it. Nobody.
Last week, I brought you a video from the National Prayer Breakfast speech of Dr. Benjamin Carson. His words were heartening in many respects, and many in conservative media leaped at the notion of his political potential as a candidate. I thought at the time that it was a bit of a fad, and I was therefore surprised to see Hannity run a full hour-long show on FoxNews devoted to talking with Dr. Carson. (You can see the full video, here in parts 1 and 2.) I am glad Hannity had him on because my own caution seemed justified by something Dr. Carson said. As I listened to him address the question of health insurance, it struck me as odd that he sees an inherent conflict of interests between an insurance company seeking to make a profit and its customers seeking health coverage. When I hear such things said, I often dismiss them as the vapid utterances of mindless politicians, but since Dr. Carson has been receiving so much press, including on this site, it’s time to address the matter. What Dr. Carson the practitioner of health-care seems to think about insurance is a common misconception, and it offers one more reason why conservatives must be cautious in their choices of leaders.
Dr. Carson said on Hannity’s show that there exists an inherent conflict of interests between health insurance companies and their insured clients. This is not true. The actual conflict begins a good deal sooner in the process, and as I think you will see, exposes a wider misunderstanding of the problem. Ask yourself this: Who are the majority of purchasers of health insurance? If you said “individuals,” you’re wrong by a mile. The truth is that the largest purchasers of health insurance are institutions, including the Federal and states’ governments, and corporations. The problem here is that the people who consume the service are not the people directly paying for it. Any time you break the connection between the end user and the provider of goods and services, you effectively destroy likewise the natural market signaling that provides feedback in both directions.
As an example, imagine you are a smoker looking for health insurance. If you were approaching insurance companies directly, they would undoubtedly quote you a price many times higher than the one they propose to a non-smoker. Obese? Same thing. This would mean that as a matter of natural market forces, you would either amend your behaviors and condition, or you would bear the burden of higher prices. Insurers would naturally consider everything about you in determining what they would charge for a policy, but perhaps more importantly, you would be free to shop for insurance among many providers. This would act as a restraint upon overcharging, and would also cause them to offer special discounts if you lived an exceedingly healthy lifestyle. In short, personal responsibility would have a good deal to do with how much you pay for health insurance, as it should in a free market. At the same time, a particular company’s profitability would hinge on making consumers happy with their coverages.
What many people ignore is that if one had to pay cash for the whole bill each time one became ill, or injured, most of us would go untreated indefinitely, because few of us have the resources to pay cash for extensive or invasive health-care procedures. Dr. Carson talks a good deal about Health Savings Accounts, but such plans are more useful for mundane purposes of a less critical nature than their utility in life-threatening circumstances. While I support Health Savings Accounts, I believe insurance is a necessary hedge against calamities. If we change our focus from health-care insurance for ongoing maintenance, to a paradigm in which what we insure against are catastrophic circumstances, while letting things like HSAs pick up the slack for ordinary health maintenance, in a market environment, one would see the market begin to perform in a natural fashion. Unfortunately, this means that people would need to shop for insurance like they do any other commodity, and seek out the best deals on their ordinary health maintenance and preventative care, and most Americans have become far too complacent about such matters, expecting it all to be automatic.
The truth of the matter is that if Americans want health-care to improve markedly in the United States, while restraining the growth in costs, without resorting to some sort of death-panel or other government-mandated rationing mechanism, there is a mechanism, however imperfect: The free market. Unfortunately, since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, and even widespread employer-purchased health benefits(prompted by government wage and price controls,) we haven’t had a free market for health-care in the United States, never mind health insurance. The government is now the largest consumer of health-care services in the country as a direct payer, by many times over, and yet there is still an illusion held by many who receive health-care services paid for or otherwise subsidized through government payments that they are in control of their health-care. They’re not.
If Dr. Carson’s criticism of corporate health insurance providers were true, then it must be even more thoroughly the case that no institution more than government would wish to avoid costs by denying care. Do you need evidence? Consider Paul Krugman, longtime leftist economic propagandist and one-note statist, quoted as follows in a piece at Western Journalism:
“We’re going to need more revenue…it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well…And we’re also going to…have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits…death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.” -Paul Krugman
What Krugman is saying is entirely true, but only ifgovernment becomes the source and payer for health-care, because otherwise, the free market would regulate prices in the same manner it does for virtually everything else. Some will object, insisting that “health-care is different,” just as they have insisted that every other human need is different, from food to housing to education to Internet service to cellular phones. All of these claims are equally wrong, and equally immoral. These claims all begin by demanding that some basic human needs be met, and all of them end with a gun to tax-payers’ heads. Allof them.
I admire a number of positions taken by Dr. Carson, and I have no objections whatever about his participation in the public policy debate, but at some point, if he wishes to keep my attention, he will be required to offer more than platitudes and generalities about Health Savings Accounts. He devoted several lines of rhetoric to the attack of ideologues, but I am always cautious when people attack broad sets of philosophically bound principles in vague terms. I am curious to hear more from Dr. Carson, but I hope there will be a good deal more specificity. Talk of presidential runs and other such notions are fanciful and premature at best, and while I’ve heard a number of truncated statements about various topics from Dr. Carson, what I’ve not heard is a guiding philosophy that informs his opinions. Absent that, I have no grounds upon which to base any opinion of his suitability to any office, much less his qualifications to be President of the United States, and I find it unseemly that Hannity and others would talk of Dr. Carson in presidential terms given that we know so little about his positions. It may turn out that Dr. Carson is wonderful in all respects, but we already have a President who sailed into office through the propagation of vague, nice-sounding generalities, and I do not believe we can afford another.
Each year, my wife and I celebrate Thanksgiving, and depending on where our daughter is, and where her soldier may be, the two generally join us for a modest but plentiful meal of turkey and other typical dishes. This year will be like most, as my daughter joined us while her husband serves a tour in Afghanistan. We talk about him, wishing he’d been here, and gave thanks for all we have, but this year is a little different than most. Life on a farm can be hard, but when you deal with livestock, there are certain hazards you accept, and while you seek to mitigate and minimize them through thinking about safety first, on some occasions, due to bad luck, absent-mindedness, or simple miscalculation, when things go wrong, they can go wrong all at once, leaving a disaster in the wake. This week has been such a time on our farm, when the mundane and simple task of feeding our horses turned into a nightmare. As it has happened, we wound up quite lucky, but it could have gone differently for this will go down in the family book of lore as the Thanksgiving that almost wasn’t.
Working the hours we do, plus tending to all the chores of the farm, one of the seasonal adjustments that happens each year is that due to shortening days as we near the Winter solstice, the evening feeding time moves up a bit to permit all chores to be completed before the sun goes down. No group of people is more tuned to the changing of the seasons than those who labor in agricultural endeavors, because that floating orb of superheated plasma that lights our days and warms our Earth is really the dominant force governing life on this planet. When I depart work this time of year, the sun is already low on the horizon, and the daylight is nearly gone. For this reason, my better half sets out to feed the herd and to dispense with the evening chores because by the time I arrive home, the last embers of burning daylight are slipping from the sky.
So it was this week that as my wife came to the last pasture that as she began to dispense the feed, the band of mares was typically unruly as any zoo at feeding time. Determined to be done with the days chores, as she began to distribute the feed, there arose a bit of euphoria among the mares: “Hurrah, it’s supper time.” One of the mares, in uncharacteristic exuberance, launched into a flurry of bucking and kicking, as a young colt might do under the watchful gaze of his dam. Unfortunately for my wife, she didn’t see it coming, looking up just in time to catch a flying hoof about her brow. An inch closer to the mare, and she’d have never placed the phone-call, but as the blood streamed from the crater, she called me at work. “I just got kicked in the head by one of the mares.”
I rushed home and kept her on the line, knowing head trauma victims are best kept calm and conscious. She refused to let me call an ambulance, insisting I would be faster anyway, without the cost. There is some reason to think she’s right, but as I told her, the EMTs in the ambulance can do things I can’t. She insisted. I continued to roll, with all apologies to any relevant authorities. I pulled into the yard, and she was standing there waiting for me, so I pulled alongside her and threw open the door. As she climbed in, I looked at the wound, and I had to look away because I didn’t wish to upset her more than necessary, as I sped down the road to the hospital ER just ten minutes away, as the Mustang flies. Arriving at the Emergency Room as she walked through the door, the nurses at the front desk couldn’t conceal their shock and they ushered her immediately back.
After a CT scan mercifully revealed no brain hemorrhaging, but also no fractures, the team in the trauma center began the process of flushing the wound and then stitching her brow and forehead back together. Multiple layers of stitches later, her face swelling as her left eye became a slit, our daughter present, we talked about happier times while we all contemplated how close this ugly accident had come to outright disaster. Life is so fragile, and our time here so short, in the hustle and bustle of the everyday grind, it is well that Americans have a day set aside to count their many blessings and remember to say thanks to the Almighty.
This evening, as we clean up the kitchen, and put up the left-overs, we’ll be thankful to remember this as the Thanksgiving that almost wasn’t. I will keep it as a reminder of how temporary life is, and how suddenly it can be lost, and how dear to me are all whom I love. For all of the ugliness of the last few days, I am still surrounded by the people I love, so that through all the travails and tribulations our nation may yet endure, we can still count ourselves among the very lucky. I hope on this day of turkey, and shared celebration, each of you find yourselves in similar company, knowing full and well the blessings of the day. Say “Thanks.” Say them often. Hug those around you a little tighter, since we never know the day or the manner in which it can all end.
Note: I wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers! May you have so many reasons to be thankful as I.
Every doctor in America who is worth his or her salt should quit. Apparently, given the impending implementation of Obama-care, they’ve been contemplating it. How many? Eighty-three percent! Unfortunately, most of them will not quit, and more is the shame because if we want to defeat Obama-care, that’s the way it could be done. That, or the statists would need to unmask completely and simply enact in law what they intend: Health-care professionals, from doctors to nurses to orderlies must now be the slaves of the state. If you think this is an overstatement, consider the facts. When you are forbidden from negotiating your wages, and must accept whatever some bureaucrat tells dictates, you are a slave. You can pretty it up any way you like, but that’s where all of this will lead. Eventually, those skilled enough, smart enough, and diligent enough to be doctors will realize they would be better off doing something else. Instead, the ranks of doctors and nurses will begin to be filled with the incompetent, the slothful, and the under-qualified. This is what always happens under socialized medicine, and every one of these would-be slaves has the same moral right to refuse this servitude, and the sooner they do, the better the chance that they will spawn a movement in opposition.
If you’re not a doctor or nurse, and you’re not a skilled radiologist, and you haven’t the foggiest about how to operate an MRI machine, you might want to hold on a moment before joyfully proclaiming your new “right to medical care” under the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care.”) Those who foolishly believe they will maintain some form of private health insurance over the longer haul ought to pay attention too. Let us imagine everybody has insurance, as the Utopian masterminds behind Obama-care promise. Then what? It is not only money that can be inflated out of all value. An insurance to purchase a service that is in shortage isn’t much of an insurance, is it? Imagine having auto insurance of this sort. You have your fender-bender, and your insurance company estimates the damages, sending you out in search of a shop to perform the repairs. What if you can’t find one? What if you sit there with the check from your insurer, satisfying your claim in full, but there exists no shop to perform the work, or so few, that you will be without your vehicle for weeks or months, or perhaps longer. How will you maintain your job? How will you get to the grocery store?
Naturally, if you’re a welfare leech, you’re not much worried about that, but if you’re a working American with bills to pay, you’d better begin to think about it now. Under Obama-care, slowly, but surely, this will become the inevitable conclusion: Care will be of poorer quality, more scarce, and since everybody will have their coverage, there will be no advantage by offering more in payment. How long before a black-market medical system develops? Do you deny the possibility of all of this? Are you stuck on the notions of what you have known, rather than what can(and likely will) now come to pass? What happens when it’s your six-year-old daughter down at the emergency room with a fractured wrist, in a line that stretches up and down the hallways and side corridors, because there exists a severe shortage of medical professionals? Will your wishes mute your daughter’s agony?
You think doctors and nurses are endless, bottomless pits of human compassion, but they’re not, and no person is, because it’s simply not possible. More, if you want their compassion, shouldn’t you offer them yours? Why do you wish to have them work as slaves to your needs? Isn’t that what this whole corrupt system has become? Tax-payers must be slaves. Doctors and nurses and orderlies must be slaves. Everybody must be slaves but he who has nothing to offer, and no intention of offering it, since he has no intention of obtaining it by his own efforts.
Am I being too crass, and too obnoxiously terse in my appraisal? Brother, you haven’t seen the half of it yet. Wait until doctors are unionized, since it will be the only way to protect their diminishing wages, and they look at you and your suffering child, parent, or spouse and say simply: “I’m on break.” At the ends of their shifts, they will walk away, as carelessly as the country has walked away from them. What do you think is the meaning about the endless delays in Medicare payments, and the inaction of Congress year after year in adjusting reimbursements to doctors? Were I a physician, I wouldn’t have a single patient who is in a government system of any sort. Why would one wish to accept patients whose payment will always be less than it ought to be, while robbing from paying patients in order to subsidize the government-paid accounts?
Imagine running any other enterprise like this for long. All of your paying customers would abandon you. You wouldn’t be able to carry off this sort of con-game, because they’d price-shop the matter and move briskly to another provider, whether the product is a widget or the service is the measurement of blood-pressure. What Obama-care offers, and indeed what all forms of socialized medicine promise is to deliver something many people desperately want without regard to their ability to pay. That’s it, in a nutshell, and if I were a physician, I’d be looking to set up a clinic somewhere off-shore where I could live out my life unmolested by big government mandates. Nobody should be compelled to labor. Neither you, nor I, and certainly not doctors. We’d better begin to consider if we wish to coerce the people who we expect to save our lives.
Back in 1978, Dr. Milton Friedman discussed all of this at length. I’ve provided his talk on the matter, in six pieces, here:
There, I’ve said it, though I will be damned for it. The problem we have had in the Republican party comes to surface at times like this, and I’m not going to participate in the reckless concealment. There are those of political motives, who care not for the disaster that is the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care”) because it serves their political ends. Within some circles of the elite Republican establishment – that thing George Will assures us does not exist while telling us this ruling is really a ‘victory’ – there are those who are absolutely giddy with anticipation in the wake of this ruling, though they must presently conceal it. It comes down to two things: Some of them are purely fifth-column statists, who actually want this law, and others are motivated solely by the opportunity they see in the political sphere. After all, what better way to unite wayward Republicans and conservatives then to hit them with a true disaster? If you’re a Republican party hack driven by purely political considerations and motives, this ruling is a gift from on high that will help drive the vote.
Sure, it does horrendous damage to the body of case-law. Yes, it does gut the constitutional limits on Congressional power. Absolutely, it permits Congress to tax in any way it likes so long as some moron in a black robe can dismiss its unconstitutional aspects as irrelevant or insignificant. True, it really has no manner of a silver lining if you’re an actual conservative, but so what? At least it will help Mitt Romney get elected by driving the herd! It will permit the Republican establishment to foist their own version of it upon us, tinkered-with and massaged as it will be, but still the heart of the bill will remain intact, and the Beltway crowd can be ecstatic that they will have finally killed the meaning of the constitution, the rule of law, and the entire notion of American self-reliance and self-determination. Nevertheless, it also offers the chance to the GOP establishment to round up the herd, and get them all running in the same direction. That it had been an establishment Republican who sabotaged this ruling should be the dead giveaway.
I would ask my conservative brethren to consider the evidence. Even a flimsy, often obtuse Anthony Kennedy ruled our way, so absurd is this law. A man who is able to imagine that Arizona has not the authority to protect its own citizens from foreign invaders, as in Arizona v. United States was not able to imagine the Affordable Care Act as constitutionally permissible. Think of that! This law is so preposterous, and the arguments of the administration so bizarre and absurd that Anthony Kennedy could not sustain them, but John Roberts, Bush appointee, did. Do we think John Roberts is truly the idiot that his ruling implies? Do we believe John Roberts is so intellectually vacuous that he could not see the absurdity of his ruling? If we believe this, why are we not demanding Boehner and the beltway boys impeach this man as an incompetent? Why? I’ll tell you why: Because Boehner and his toadies would never do it anyway.
We are being herded. We are being driven. We are being run through the political squeeze-chutes of the GOP establishment. These people are worse than our open enemy, the leftists. They are using subterfuge and stealth to reorganize our society into their global vision of statism, a nanny-state version in which you have little freedom to choose, and even less money or property with which to exercise that choice. We are descending into a death of one-thousand cuts, and we have Republican party bosses who are gleeful that we are angry, because they intend to use that as the fuel to recapture power, not for conservatism or freedom, but for the aggrandizement of their own statist vision, complete with open borders and vast social programs to which we are all enslaved, but as a bonus, with our votes, too!
How else does one explain the servile pronouncements by some conservative commentators that the ACA ruling had been a victory? How else does one discount the accurate assessments of stalwarts like Mark Levin, who sees this monstrosity clearly? How in the name of most unholy Hell does one derive the notion that this is anything but a national tragedy? In some respects, I place this ruling above Pearl Harbor Day. In terms of the long-term damage it will do to America, I place it above 9/11. I place it as the greatest attack on the United States and her people since before its current constitution had been adopted. It will certainly lead to the death of more Americans. It was certainly a plot hatched against us. The delivery of the fatal blow was no less a shock. I must go all the way back to General Benedict Arnold to find an apt analog for the sort of sabotage this infamy represents, and all brought to you by a bi-partisan Washington DC establishment that seeks to rule over you.
Remember, when some conservatives reflexively screamed at the notion of the appointment of Harriet Miers, many felt relief when George Bush put up John Roberts, who was seen as more reliably conservative and eminently more qualified, as was my pet goat. That was the sham in all of this. Roberts is no conservative, and his ruling in this case makes that plain, lest there be any confusion. Harriet Miers was a throw-away nomination, and Roberts was the goal all along. This is how politics is done. I was astonished at the speed at which the reaction to the Miers controversy was brought to a head, and more astonished still at how quickly they dropped the ostensibly reliable Roberts on us. Do you remember who screamed first and loudest at the Miers nomination? I do. Odd how that critic is now a rabid Romney-bot these days, isn’t it? I hate conspiracy theories, but I always thought it odd how that whole situation turned out, with Rehnquist retiring just in time to re-nominate Roberts for the Chief Justice position.
Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that the GOP establishment exists to keep us in check, to keep us to a dull roar as the statists reorganize our nation into their vision of global, social, welfare-statism. The GOP establishment advances the ball(never spiking it, of course,) and we permit them to manage us like puppets. If you accept their talking points these last three days, you’re playing directly into their hands, and you had better believe that they see this as a victory, because for their agenda, it is. They will be immune to Obama-care. They won’t worry about death panels. They won’t worry about government-enforced rationing. They won’t be waiting in the endless lines. They won’t have any need to concern themselves with the entirety of the system they’re building, because they are above it, after all.
The same people who tried at every turn(and often succeeded) to blunt the conservative Reagan revolution are once again making political hay over this decision, as they now know you have no alternative. They engineered it that way. Feel free to believe what you want, of course, but for me, the matter is clear. I have seen suppositions that somehow, Obama bullied Roberts into this decision, but I find that unlikely. Roberts was placed in this position to uphold Obama-care. There are those who will become apoplectic at the mere suggestion, but for me, the matter is now painfully obvious: If we do anything short of replacing the Republican Party, this nation will be damned. I’ll not be kept in line any longer. The Republican Party must rip this law out from the roots, or we must make a new party.
Some are still convinced that there exists a win in all of this. They offer as evidence that we are still free, this moment, and that this affords to us a chance, somehow. This is akin to saying that as the last breath escapes your lips, the hooligans choking the last of your life from you, there is still some chance. Technically? Sure. Practically? No. Violence is being done to us, and the best we get from most Republicans indicate that many of them don’t mind, in fact, although there are a few notable exceptions. On the 11th of July, we will have a pointless exercise of repeal in the House of Representatives, a tale told and believed only by idiots, that for all its sound and fury, will signify nothing. The GOP establishment loves a charade, and too many of us likewise adore one.
I wish to thank Chief Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. He has made plain what I have been arguing for some time: This nation is dead. Everything that had made it a nation, indivisible, has been wiped away, and in its place is a stinking, festering carcass of past glory. What remains is the fetid, reeking, scorched remains of a free people, now subjugated into tyranny by a United States Supreme Court dominated by a cabal of leftists and pragmatists, the former seeking to overturn our constitution, and the latter willing to join them in order to remain popular. There is no political liberty anywhere on Earth any longer.
There will be some number of conservative talking heads who will urge calm, and if you feel inclined to listen to that hogwash, you should follow your leanings, but I will have none of it. There is nothing in this but pure, unmitigated evil. This law has converted us to the Soviet Union. The walls are not [yet] built, and the barb-wired fences to restrain us are not [yet] erected, but all the necessary elements of a slave state are now in place.
Freedom of choice? Gone.
Freedom to be unmolested by outrageous governmental persecution? Gone.
Freedom to worship(or not) as one sees fit? Gone.
Freedom to live one’s life according to such beliefs? Gone.
Freedom to be secure in your person and your effects? Gone.
Freedom to decide what is in one’s own best interest? Stripped, wrecked, tormented, and tossed aside by John Roberts and the rest of the Statist Judicial activists on the Supreme Court.
Do you realize that to decide as he did, John Roberts had to ignore the plain language of the law, and imagine what is a penalty provision into a tax?
We have here a case of judicial activism writ large across our constitution, and it is a red-letter stamp: Null and Void.
Do you expect Mitt Romney to save you from this? Do you expect him to step up and do so?
Ladies and gentlemen, this has been rigged. The least-qualified Republican to campaign against Obamacare is our presumptive nominee. The least-qualified to criticize it will now be our candidate?
Shall I play the funeral dirge now, or wait until November 7th?
While the media has immediately leaped into the considerations of the horse-race aspects of this Supreme Court ruling, nobody is addressing the fact that our liberties have been stripped from us. Nobody but a few lonely conservative bloggers, Sarah Palin, and Rush Limbaugh. I expect other talk-show hosts will address this matter, but what we have in this case is a complete dissolution of the United States as we have known it.
I will not pay for Obama-care. I am looking into pulling my own health insurance, and making them force me to pay. SCREW THEM! This is my life, my money, my health, my choice.
The Republic that is our constitutional, representative form of government stands upon a precipice. We have a President who has undertaken to set aside the constitution at every turn. We have a Congress divided, split between a Senate controlled by a maniacal shill for the President, and a House of Representatives led(and I use that verb very loosely) by a Speaker who is unwilling to do battle with the President, unwilling to attempt even the most basic defense of our Constitution, and incapable even of holding an outrageous Attorney General to account without much hand-wringing and waffling. We have a United State Supreme Court that has most recently ruled that States have no sovereignty to speak of, and not even the authority to protect its own citizenry. We are told by the presumptive Republican nominee that he will repeal Obamacare, despite implementing a similar program in the state he governed, while his various mouthpieces talk about “replacement.”
Do you think we face long odds? Do you believe our Republic can survive or recover? The decision expected from the Supreme Court on Thursday will either re-shape our country forevermore, or allow us one more opportunity to restore it. Make no mistake about it: If the court upholds the Affordable Car Act, the Republic is dead.
I have given this a good deal of thought, busy as I have been these last two months, and as we’ve all waited to see what tomorrow will bring, I’ve decided that if the Supreme Court of the United States upholds this legislative abomination, a de facto state of war exists between the United States Federal Government and the people whose rights it had been constituted to defend. Those who will perceive this as true will be branded enemies of the state, in one fashion or another, and the decline of this Republic will accelerate at a breathtaking pace. There can be no recovery of the Republic if this law is allowed to stand, and the urgings to repeal it from we citizens, with platforms large and small, will fall on the same deaf ears that have ignored our pleas for more than two years. If this law stands, there is no constitutional, representative republic.
If the law is overturned, even then, our jeopardy will only have begun, because this President will ignore the ruling of the court, as he has done repeatedly, and as he has done remorselessly. He will attempt to impose his program anyway, and even should our milquetoast House of Representatives act to impede him, he will turn to incitement, outright. He will attempt to raise a mob, and force his will by virtue of threats and violence. He will do everything in his power, and many, many things beyond their legitimate exercise in order to create chaos. Barack Obama will not rest, and none of the looters or moochers who ride upon his coattails will allow this to be overturned. We may see what can only be termed a civil war, and it will be bloody.
This is the direction in which this nation has been lurching for generations, since the so-called “progressives” took over both parties. We have been led into a box canyon, from which none may escape unscathed. Today, idiotic former Democrat Congressman from Rhode Island, and latest family ne’er-do-well, Patrick Kennedy warned:
“If the Court upholds the law, dangerous Tea Party extremists will go on a rampage.”
We should be so lucky. The truth is that if the court upholds this law, Tea Party types will not go on a rampage, because they are not dangerous, although they probably should have been.
Rampage or not, civil war or not, this piece of legislation and all that has followed in its wake serve to demonstrate how fragile our Republic has become after a century of unceasing statist agitation. In the 1930s, we could have sustained this condition had our court exhibited such staying power as to have overturned all of the New Deal legislation, because the American people were still a moral people by a vastly overwhelming majority. By “moral,” I mean specifically in the sense that they respected the notion of property rights, the idea of self-sufficiency, and the concepts that once buttressed our constitutional foundation. Who now can claim this description would apply?
I spent most of the first decade of my adult life serving under an oath by which I swore to uphold and defend the United States Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I have never yielded on my oath, neither for comfort nor for ease; neither for the sake of a false unity nor for the sake of familial peace. Sadly, many of my countrymen no longer even understand what principles that oath had been constructed to honor, and to protect, but still, I observe it, while our Supreme Court ignores it, our President demolishes it, and our Congress abandons its defense. No branch of government seems interested in upholding it any longer, and by this procedure, they have slowly stolen our Constitution from us. Thursday, we will learn if we shall have even one more chance to resurrect our Republic, but if we are given that chance, we must neither squander it nor revel too long in our temporary reprieve. “Rampage?” Indeed, we of Tea Party orientation must rampage at the polls, where we must not permit even the most thuggish brigands of the President to deter us from our electoral duties. We must now walk back the entire statist menu, or watch our Republic perish. If the Supreme Court does not present a sentence of death, we must make the most of any temporary stay. We must undo it all, or be undone by it.
The question has been asked here on this site, and on others what will become of the state of health-care if Obama-care falls. I’ve heard the gnashing of teeth among those who think we need some kind of health-care reform, and while I agree, I doubt most would agree with my own prescription. Cold-hearted. Selfish. Greedy. These are all the terms that would be used by statists to describe my own visions of health-care reform. Even a few alleged conservatives can’t quite bring themselves to endorse my view because at heart, they’re not free market capitalists. You shouldn’t be surprised, as there are many self-proclaimed “conservatives” who are really nothing of the sort, and who would just as readily inflict and impose their vision of “fairness” as any left-wing socialist radical. The difference is that they claim to be motivated by other ideas, or beliefs, but what remains universally true is that to impose them, they too must destroy liberty. I oppose any such plan, plot, or program, irrespective of the source, and I think it’s time we had this little talk lest there be some confusion: I don’t support government involvement in any aspect of healthcare. None.
The first thing one must know about the free market is that it is destroyed the moment government becomes involved. If you want to destroy innovation, efficiency, and industry within any segment of any market, introduce government as a buyer. This is because government is a terrible consumer because it is not spending its own money, but instead yours. It’s also because the government has undue leverage in a market where it is not the ultimate consumer. Of course, there will be those of you who will demand to know the fate of the poor, with the stabbing of a pointed finger against my chest, since the poor, by definition, don’t have a good deal of money with which to purchase health services. As ever, those who wish to control others rely upon the poor to furnish the excuse for their power. The question is not “what should we do about the poor,” as Ayn Rand famously observed, but “should we do anything about the poor?” This is where the compassion-fascists show up to berate free-marketeers, claiming that the advocates of this viewpoint are heartless and mean-spirited and greedy. Balderdash!
In order to have any sort of system in which various “necessities” are provided, it is first necessary to obtain them. Once government is placed in this role, it is inevitable, and in fact a prerequisite that the government employ cruelty against others, from whom the necessities (or the money to purchase them) will be taken. Ladies and gentlemen, there is no escape from this, and when I observe statists of either left or right political persuasion making this argument, I remind them first of the inescapable, inexorable moral breech: Government has only force and on that basis, government becomes a murderous villain in the hands of a statist. Pay, or die. There are those who enjoy shading the black and white behind a curtain of gray fog, but the simple, undisguised fact is that for any such program to exist, government must become evil. That’s right, I wrote it: Evil. I take it as an act of evil whenever one initiates force against another, or threatens force, in order to make material (or other) gain. If one is an advocate of a government-funded, implemented, or regulated healthcare system by any name, one must admit from the outset that one is in favor of robbery through an agent.
Call it third-party theft. Call it whatever you will, but when government, on the behalf of some citizens, extorts money from the pockets of other citizens, government has assumed the role of a mafia protection racket. One can dress it up in all the Sunday’s finest of “compassion,” or “brother-love,” but what one is doing is to attack one person for his wealth on the basis that it should be provided to others on the basis of their needs. That’s Marxism, and if one supports this in any measure, he or she is not a conservative. One can claim it. One can prefix it with words like “compassionate” all one pleases, but the simple fact is that to threaten one’s fellow man with injury and death; violence and expropriation; robbery and slavery is as abominable and un-Christian as one can be. There is no mitigation. There is no excuse. There will be a long line of those accustomed to robbing their neighbors who will come forth to claim that they possess some right – yes, they’ll actually claim a right – to do through government what they would never consider doing themselves for fear of eating a shotgun: Robbing their neighbors willy-nilly, and with abandon.
Yes, this is the ugly nature of statism, and it’s why I cannot support any health reform that doesn’t get government out of the health-care business altogether. It is at this point that some will ask me: “But what of veterans?” To the degree veterans have been injured in the performance of their duties, just as with any worker injured or maimed on the job, the employer must carry that cost, and since we are the employers of soldiers, yes, it is proper for us to pay for that healthcare necessary to make them well, to rehabilitate them, and to compensate them for permanent loss/injury. That does not mean we need a vast and inefficient system of providing care to veterans. While it is true that certain afflictions and injuries are not common in the civilian sector, nevertheless, to the degree we can, we should job this out through private providers. Speaking as a veteran myself, and having seen what have been deplorable conditions at VA hospitals when I’ve volunteered my time there, I cannot but think that most of the veterans I saw would have been better served in the private sector.
Everybody else? You’d better figure it out. One has no entitlement, natural or otherwise, to the contents of his neighbors’ wallets. Since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, too many Americans have adopted the notion that it is okay to steal from one’s neighbors, or to steal from one’s grand-children so long as government acts as the agent and instrument of that theft. To steal remotely, through a third party is no less a theft, but it is at once doubly cowardly. Imagine walking next door to one’s neighbor, and demanding a meal, or an aspirin, or a dollar, or to move in. In any civilized society, one making such demands would be laughed at, and if he tried to obtain his demands by force, he would be short-lived indeed. For many millions of Americans, this has become the all-too-common procedure, except that they have the middle-man of government doing their dirty work, never casting the first thought in the direction of the absolute tyranny they’re inflicting on their neighbors, or dismissively concluding that “everyone does it,” which is not only a falsehood, but also a psychological confession of one’s ill intent.
As Rand explained more eloquently, and succinctly, one can do anything one pleases for the poor, out of one’s own pocket, and out of one’s own sense of charity or compassion, and there is naught but good to be born of that approach, be it food, clothing, healthcare, housing, or education. What one must not do is force others to do one’s will in terms of charity or compassion, because it becomes neither, it breeds contempt, and it is a grave evil of its own in the first instance, for which there can be no ethical justification, despite endless rationalizations born of statist delusion.
I’ve been asked what we should replace Obama-care with, if it’s overturned. My answer is simply: A system in which government has no say, and no money in the distribution or provision of health-care, of any sort, as an entitlement for citizens who have done nothing more than breathed. It is only because of governmental involvement that such shameless thugs as the current dictator of New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, can claim to be acting in the public interest when he bans soft-drinks larger than 16 ounces, or table salt in restaurants, or any of the myriad other tyrannical dicta he puts forth, all “for your own good.” That sort of monstrous conduct by a public official is just the beginning, and it’s also why I wait along with millions of other Americans to see whether the United States Supreme Court will do its duty, or whether it will enable the advance of tyranny.
There are those who argue that Obama-care must be replaced by something, and my answer is that it should be: The US Constitution. There exists no entitlement to the wealth of others, whether that wealth is to be taken in order to finance beans and rice or blood transfusions and open heart surgery. Some will ask where is my compassion, but I maintain that my compassion is with those whose property and wealth is expropriated in the name of the compassion of others. Unless and until the United States returns to the rule of Constitutional law, the country will continue inexorably downward. There is no compromise between good and evil, yet what all of this redistributionism endorses is plainly evil. None of my readers would walk next door and demand from their neighbors such provisions as they might from time to time need, but too many Americans are all too comfortable sending a government agent in their stead. That’s not liberty. That’s not freedom. That’s not right.
As the nation awaits the US Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a “Obamacare,” Speaker of the House John Boehner, (R-Ohio) has issued some advice and counsel to Republicans if the Obamacare law should be struck down. In typical surrender-monkey fashion, Boehner has said that Republican shouldn’t gloat, and shouldn’t “spike the football.” This is typical of Boehner’s temperament: Don’t make waves, don’t stir up trouble, and don’t celebrate victory. During his speech as the health-care bill passed the House, Boehner said, choking back tears, that the law wouldn’t stand. To date, he’s done remarkably little to assist in seeing that promise through. One would think that with so passionate a statement at the time of the law’s passage under the dictatorial control of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrat majority in the House, even the tepid John Boehner would be moved to celebrate a bit if the law is struck down by the court.
Unfortunately, Boehner is made of tears but no anger. Americans are rightly angry over the enactment of Obama-care, but for some reason, the GOP insiders in Washington don’t quite grasp it. This is emblematic of the entire GOP establishment, some number of whom want the law to remain in place so they can benefit from crony-capitalism with the state exchanges created under the law. They simply don’t share our passion for liberty, and when it comes right down to it, they don’t really represent we conservatives. I’ve got some bad news for Speaker Boehner, and it’s not recklessly intended, but instead purposeful: If Obama-care is struck down by the courts, I am going to spike the ball. I’m going to carry on an extended celebration in the endzone, and if the referees say anything about it, they might get the ball spiked in their faces too.
“No one knows what the court will decide,” Boehner said in a memo to fellow Republicans. “But if the court strikes down all or part of the president’s healthcare reform law, there will be no spiking of the ball.”
He underlined the last eight words to emphasize his reference to the NFL football end-zone celebration.
Boehner fears Republican gloating over a court victory could detract from the party’s emphasis on the struggling economy and the need for job growth, two campaign issues that consistently trump healthcare as voter priorities in national opinion polls.
“We will not celebrate,” Boehner said, during a time of unemployment and rising government debt and healthcare costs.
If you’re a conservative, you probably wonder why it is that an allegedly conservative Speaker of the House might take such a stance, and why there’s anything wrong with a little celebratory “ball-spiking” should the law be overturned. The answer is simple: For those who rule over us in Washington, DC, even the leadership of the party that claims to represent us, liberty is not important. What upset John Boehner to the point of tears over the passage of the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the content of the bill, so much as the way in which it was passed. While it’s true that Pelosi, Reid, and Obama used every device of the villain in order to pass the law, and suspended rules, and played fast-and-loose with House and Senate rules in order to shove this law down our throats, that’s still not the most important part of the matter. At the heart of the matter is the question of liberty, and for that, John Boehner had few tears, and those in the GOP establishment didn’t shed any, either. For Boehner, it was about the process, and how he had been closed out of it, and how then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi(D-CA) shoved a bill through that really had no business coming for a vote. You will doubtless recall the whole “deemed passed” business, and the entire fiasco of passing a bill originating in the Senate as though it had been the House bill all along, in order to sidestep the ordinary legislative process. This is what wrinkled Boehner’s shorts.
The fact that the government was taking over one-sixth of the US economy was not the salient issue in his view. The fact that the American people would now see the intentional destruction of private health insurance and markets was not the cause of his tears. The idea that the government could claim to be regulating non-existent commerce, precisely because it did not exist had not been the source of his discomfort. No, none of these bother John Boehner so much as the way in which the bill was passed. Boehner had been concerned about process. With his focus on the employment situation, one would think Boehner could see that Obama-care is itself a job-killer, and for that reason alone, there would be good cause for celebration if the law is overturned by the court, but as usual, Boehner is worried about process and politics.
If you want to know why it is that John Boehner is urging restraint should Obama-care be struck down, it’s simply because he’s trying to look at the political ramifications. In general, it’s true that nobody likes a sore loser, and few more like an obnoxious winner, but in this case, I believe Boehner and the rest of the political calculators are missing the point. Nearly three-fourths of the American people believe this law is unconstitutional. Three-fourths! If this is even close to accurate, then ball-spiking may not present any particular political dangers, but it also may actually assist Republicans in the Fall. After all, conservatives can now point to the fact that we do have a limited government, despite the usurping proclivities of Barack Obama and the Democrats, and they can further point to all the reasons why any Republican president who would presumably appoint conservative Supreme Court justices must be preferable to the current president who will continue the trend of appointing justices obnoxious to the US Constitution.
The simple fact is that when a people overcomes governmental treachery, and what this author views as treasonous legislation, there is every good justification to celebrate, or “spike the ball.” If John Boehner wasn’t such a predictable, unfailing beltway insider, he too would understand that if this law is turned back by the courts, it will be every reason for the celebration of those who have fought tirelessly against this law, from it’s introduction to its passage, and even beforehand. While John Boehner has whined about being “one-half of one-third of the government,” he has failed to make a stand on behaf of liberty. Instead, he’s been a plodding, tepid Speaker of the House, and he’s done nothing to risk his position, and I believe that’s the trouble: Boehner is risk-averse to a pathological extent. He’s been more apt to stick it to his own party than he has been willing to do battle with the Democrats in the House, or face off against Majority leader Harry Reid(D-NV) in the Senate or the resident at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.
All of this talk assumes that the bill will be struck down in part, or in whole, but we won’t know that until the decision finally comes out, sometime later this month. What we must learn from this is that should a Republican majority re-convene next January, we conservatives must exert maximum pressure on our respective House members to ensure that John Boehner is not retained as the Speaker of the House. We simply cannot tolerate this brand of hand-wringing leadership, devoid of the passion for liberty we conservatives share, and to have a Speaker telling his members that they should not celebrate when victorious is abominable. Of course, maybe that’s the problem Boehner has with all of this: If the Supreme Court strikes down Obama-care, Boehner has a whole new problem: How does he manage to re-write the law, if it’s to be written at all? Billions upon billions of dollars have already been spent in terms of the implementation of the law. That money cannot be un-spent. Many things will be left in limbo as a result, and you can bet that left in place, Boehner will fail to pursue the righting of things, particularly if Obama manages to beat the presumptive Republican nominee this Fall.
We need leadership, and that leadership must press advantages, politically as well as legislatively, but to do so requires a principled view of the issues at hand. Boehner’s unwillingness to do a victory dance in the end-zone signifies that he doesn’t understand what moves the grass roots, and average, ordinary Americans, who will be thrilled to hear of it should the court strike down Obama-care. It will be the first sign in more than four years that government is finally being brought under control, and that is most definitely something to be celebrated, but if John Boehner can’t understand that, and thinks it improper, I suggest he do what he does best.
There’s a good deal of talk about how the oral arguments before the Supreme Court seemed to have gone badly for the government, particularly Solicitor General Verrilli, with a good deal of talk about how unprepared he seemed to make the arguments before him, but let’s be careful about two things: I’m sure Verrilli is an able attorney, but there’s no way to plaster enough lipstick on this pig to disguise its true nature, but more importantly, I don’t think we should take for granted anything about how this or any other court will rule based on their questions alone. If all the people who’ve spent the week trying to read the tea-leaves are wrong, we may be in for a serious disappointment come the end of June. For my part, while the questioning offered some measure of hope, I won’t count my chickens before they’ve hatched, or even count Obama’s before they have gone home to roost.
Listening to the media, you would think Verrilli had been the constant butt of jokes, and while it’s clear that there were a few laughs at his expense, I think this says more about the impertinent character of the Obama-care legislation than it says about Verrilli’s legal scholarship. He was placed in this position by a Congress now long gone, defeated and sent home by voters in 2010, and a President who was willing to sign this tract of tyranny into law despite a 2 to 1 disapproval by the American people at the time, that has only managed to worsen, now just shy of three-fourths of Americans considering the law unconstitutional. As any litigator will tell you, if you have his client with a smoking gun in hand over the dead body with a signed confession, and thirty eyewitnesses, you’re not going to make it far on the defendant’s claims of innocence, but as an attorney, if your client says he will plead not guilty, you must still stand in and defend him. That he’s left you with no conceivable method for doing so isn’t your fault, so I’d prefer we not tread too heavily on Verrilli. He may be a left-wing goon for all I know, but he was doing his job.
The question of severability on Wednesday seemed to cause the greatest stir from the leftist members of the court, because they wanted to find some way, any way at all, to salvage some part of the “Affordable Care Act.” One after the next, they tried to set up questions designed to muddy the water, but fundamentally, the problem is this: If the individual mandate is struck down as unconstitutional, the rest of the bill is eligible because it would be difficult to imagine how the exchanges and the rest of the complex structure of the law operates without the mandate provision. Some have assumed that the court may bounce the remainder of the bill, because Justice Scalia pointed out the impossibility of going through the law and figuring out what stays and what goes without risking larger damage. In other words, keeping some of the Act might well wind up causing more trouble than it fixes.
I think that’s the proper way to view it, and you might wonder in light of this why the liberals on the court are so intent on keeping such parts of it as they are able. The answer is simple enough once you understand their highly political motive: The mandate, if carved out, would merely affect the funding mechanism, but it would not do anything to the spending side. The spending would go on, and the Congress would face deficits even greater than those already envisioned with this irresponsible law, and the entitlement would become firmly rooted in the American culture. Once that happens, repeal becomes almost impossible. For the liberals, therefore, preserving as much as the bill by severing only the mandate becomes the object of the ruling.
The conservatives may not be inclined to tamper with any of it. They may not wish to toss out the entire bill for what will to some be an appearance of a political ruling, but the truth is that no matter what the court rules, it will certainly have political ramifications. The question is whether that matters to all of the justices. We know it drives the liberals on the court, but the problem is the conservatives are generally disinclined to weigh politics in their considerations on rulings. If that is the case, you could well see a bifurcated ruling in which they throw out the mandate but leave the entirety of the remainder in place. This too would constitute a disaster because the spending would commence in full as the law comes into force, with the revenue then [more] uncertain.
It could also happen that the court rules 5-4 that the mandate is constitutional, and if that happens, the country is thoroughly screwed. At that point, the whole severability question is moot, and the law is implemented on schedule. Of course, there are many theories about how this may play out, but the fact remains that we won’t know until late June. Liberals are preparing for the scenario in which some or all of the law is tossed by preemptive strikes in media against various justices, particularly Justice Scalia. I expect those attacks to ratchet up, even though the voting is already complete, and all that remains is to write the ruling and publish.
This process is important to the function of our republic, and yet there are those who disparage it as anachronistic, but I believe that if we are to remain a nation of laws, we must give the process its due. Leftists want to know the ruling now, and you can bet every court clerk is being prodded for answers by media who want to know in advance. I would urge conservatives not to become to happy over what they have heard and read from the oral arguments. Politically, you should remain engaged as though the law is going to be upheld. You won’t be surprised if it is, and you won’t wonder about what to do next.
We already knew that Mitt Romney would never stand up for capitalism, but on Jay Leno’s show on Tuesday night, Romney said that he would seek to repeal Obama-care and replace it. We don’t need to replace it with a different big government plan like Romney-care, which is almost the same thing. We need to get the government OUT of health care to the degree we can. That’s going to be impossible with Mitt Romney who intends to extend the welfare state just the same. It isn’t a question of repealing Obama-care only to replace it with another big-government program, but instead getting government out of all such programs. Mitt Romney would tinker around the edges, only, as I’ve been reporting here for months, and this clip is effectively his confession.
Here’s the video, with the relevant portion at roughly half-way through:
The other problem with Romney’s claim is that he will issue waivers for Obamacare, but the truth is that no waivers are permissible under the statute, and the left will immediately take a Romney administration to court. There will be no waivers. This man is lying to the American people when he hangs all of this on a supposed waiver. Sure, Obama is issuing waivers, but there’s nothing in the law that suggests this is permissible.
In Tuesday’s oral arguments before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli said something in response to a question from Justice Antonin Scalia that I believe was intended to mislead. Scalia was much too clever for Verrilli, and why he didn’t call Verrilli on it, he made it clear that he understood full well what Verrilli was doing with his wording. It might not have been a “lie” in the strictest sense of the word, but it was intended to obfuscate the issue, and to do so in such a way as to shield the government from the very basis on which I have been criticizing the “individual mandate” since its proposal. To understand this “lie,” “misleading statement,” or “obfuscation,” whichever you will prefer to call it, you must understand the basic issues in context. In my view, Verrilli tried to hide something crucial, and you should know it.
What General Verrilli tried to conceal is the fact that this “cost-shifting” that Obama-care’s mandate is intended to address was created by government statute. Let us start with the transcript, available in full here:
GENERAL VERRILLI: That — that absolutely is a justification for Congress’s action here. That is existing economic activity that Congress is regulating by means of this rule.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Mr. Verrilli, you could say that about buying a car. If people don’t buy cars, the price that those who do buy cars pay will have to behigher. So, you could say in order to bring the price down, you’re hurting these other people by not buying a car.
GENERAL VERRILLI: That is not what we’re saying, Justice Scalia.
JUSTICE SCALIA: That’s not — that’s not what you’re saying.
GENERAL VERRILLI: That’s not — not –
JUSTICE SCALIA: I thought it was. I thought you’re saying other people are going to have to pay more for insurance because you’re not buying it.
Now for the key exchange:
GENERAL VERRILLI: No. It’s because you’re going — in the health care market, you’re going into the market without the ability to pay for what you get, getting the health care service anyway as a result of the social normsthat allow — that — to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.
Here, Scalia absolutely demonstrates he understands the issue:
JUSTICE SCALIA: Well, don’t obligate yourself to that. Why — you know?
And now, for the slam dunk:
GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, I can’t imagine that that — that the Commerce Clause would — would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.
JUSTICE SCALIA: You could do it. But does that expand your ability to issue mandates to — to the people?
Let me explain why I’ve italicized the portions above. When Verrilli argues that the receipt of healthcare by the so-called free-riders is the result of “the social norms that allow,” he stammered through a self-correction, “to which we’ve obligated ourselves so that people get health care.”
What Verrilli is here talking about is that Congress has enacted laws prohibiting an emergency room from turning away patients on the basis that they cannot show an ability or willingness to pay. Verrilli tried to hide this behind a “social norm,” and later a “deeply embedded social norm,” but in fact, Scalia understood with acute perception why it is that Verrilli would do this, and he spat it back in Verrilli’s face, as was right and proper: “Well, don’t obligate yourself to that.” In other words, if you don’t want people to receive treatment without having paid, repeal the law that provides that treatment must be provided.
Verrilli wasn’t satisfied with this, and he claimed that “[he] can’t imagine that the commerce clause would forbid Congress from taking into account this deeply embedded social norm.”
Here, Scalia might have asked him: “How deeply embedded a social norm is it that has been enacted within my lifetime,” but he did not, preferring to underscore the larger point:
“You could do it. But does that expand your ability to issue mandates to — to the people?“
What Scalia is asking here is plain enough: The government may claim an interest in taking this “deeply embedded social norm” into account in creating its policy, but a desire to support a “social norm” (deeply embedded or otherwise) confer upon the government the authority to stand in demand of participation in the social norm?
What Scalia here recognized is that which I’ve been telling you all along: The government may enact a law forcing somebody to provide a good or a service(I reject that too, by the way) but the fact that the government creates a legal obligation for itself does not give them an additional claim of authority over you.
A good example is this: You let one of your adult children move their entire family into your home with you, despite the fact that they can or should afford their own domicile on their own, but when you perceive it is too burdensome, you then go to your other adult children and demand they help you support them, since it’s now bankrupting you. Your other adult children would rightly say to you: “Don’t let them live their any longer.”
What kind of mind would actually propose this to their other adult children? The other adult children would be best to remove themselves from the conversation and ignore the demanding parent. The problem is that in this case, it’s the government that’s making the demand, and we(the other adult children) are prohibited from ignoring it.
What Scalia recognized, and every one of you must know, is that there is a cost to the choices one makes, but having made them, there is no authority to shift the costs of those choices onto unwilling others who would have chosen differently. This is at the heart of the entire Obama-care insurance mandate argument: The government voluntarily decides to fund or subsidize something for somebody, and then mandates that you participate in the payment. There is no right to health-care, or any other material commodity or service, and nobody is obligated to pay for it. This should be the basis upon which the entirety of the New Deal and the Great Society are tossed out to the curb, but what’s particularly objectionable about Obama-care’s mandate is that it compels you to purchase an insurance against such costs that you may well never incur.
Understanding this, you should see why it is that what Solicitor General Verrilli attempted to conceal, but Scalia didn’t permit, is that more than “deeply embedded social norms,” these are laws inflicted and imposed upon us by Congress, and that Congress is free to repeal them, but the creation of these obligations does not disparage our liberties. I hope Antonin Scalia lives to be one-hundred-twenty years old, or longer, and delivers us from as much evil as he is able. His agile legal mind, and his clear understanding of the issues at stake is among the best hopes we have for maintaining our liberties, or reclaiming those we have forfeited already. Our lives quite literally depend on it.
Appearing on Fox News with Megyn Kelly, former Massachusetts Governor and putative GOP nomination “front-runner” Mitt Romney was caught a bit flat-footed when Megyn Kelly asked him about his support of a Federal insurance mandate. As Kelly pointed out, it’s going to be difficult for Romney to run away from this, although he’s been trying for months. The truth, no matter how you slice it, is that Romney has previously stated that he thought the model he used in his home state for so-called “Romney-care” would be good for the entire nation. Kelly played a clip for Romney to attempt to refute, but the problem is that it’s basically irrefutable. This isn’t simply about insurance mandates, bad as they may be, but instead goes to the veracity of anything this candidate says or promises.
One cannot argue in support of a Federal insurance mandate in the first instance, only to disclaim it in the second instance, but claim never to have said what one has clearly said. It would be a different matter if Mitt Romney said that he had changed his mind on this issue, and no longer supported the idea, but what he is trying to do is say that he never supported the idea at all. Clearly, that’s simply not so.
Rather than confront the issue head-on, he tries to weasel away from what he said in the 2008 primary season, and that simply won’t do. Some in the media wonder why Mitt Romney isn’t catching fire with conservatives, and I strongly believe you need look no further than this exchange between he and Megyn Kelly. He could have straightened it out, and he could have admitted he removed a line from his book about taking Romneycare nationwide, but instead, he’s trying to trick conservatives into thinking he didn’t say what he said and wrote.
This is a problem, because one must ask what his motive might be. After all, under the pressure of public opinion, most candidates will back-pedal at least a little when presented the opportunity, but Mitt’s not doing that. The problem is, he can’t claim it’s because he’s taking a “principled stand” on the issue, otherwise he would be more forthright about it. He’d say he’s changed his view, suck it up, and move on. He’s not doing that either, leading one to wonder why.
I have my own thought, and it goes back a few weeks to when Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi was interviewed on the matter, and she as much as admitted she would be part of Romney’s program to take Romneycare nationwide as a replacement for Obamacare. At present, he can still claim he never changed his mind, despite implying otherwise, but never really reversing himself. He wants to be able to go into the Fall election and promise only to replace Obamacare. He won’t care about conservative opinion at all, at that point, because he will figure that he has them anyway. If he gets the nomination, he may have a point, because what will conservatives do? Will they stay home and permit Obama’s re-election, or as a matter of personal and familial self-defense, and in the defense of the nation, simply go pull the lever, or punch out the chad for Mitt Romney?
Romney is willing to bet it’s the latter, and his whole campaign is predicated on winning the nomination predominately in liberal locales and doing what he can in the South, but knowing that once he has the nomination, he can ignore the South almost entirely and focus on those swing states. If this is his strategy, and it surely seems to be, then once he has the nomination in hand, what’s to prevent him from flipping back a bit on the issue of a national mandate for health insurance? It will satisfy many Democrats after all, particularly those fatigued with Obama’s disastrous economic policies, and his gamble will be that he may pick up more around the middle than he will lose from the conservative base of the party.
I believe this may well be the reason he’s still hedging his bets on this issue. It’s either that, or his ego won’t permit him to say he’s changed his mind, or some political strategist is telling him to capitulate on the issue will do him more damage than good. Whatever is going on here, Romney isn’t credible simply because the facts and his own historical statements refute his current ones, but his current statements seem to contend his historical statements don’t exist. If you can follow this, then you must see as I do that Mitt Romney is plainly lying. I know not how others may choose to vote, but we already have one liar in the White House, and I’m not inclined to replace him with another.
Remember when Congress was running the numbers through the Congressional Budget Office to get a scoring of the costs of Obama-care? Not surprisingly, these estimates fell well short of the real numbers under the arm-twisting and politicking of the Democrat leadership of Nancy Pelosi(D-CA,) then Speaker of the House. In short, they engineered a lie, and that lie was that over ten years, the costs of Obama-care would be “just” $900 Billion, but now the CBO has revised its estimates, and that number has sky-rocketed to nearly $1.8 Trillion. You might wonder how badly you’re about to be hammered, but you can expect that by the time Obamacare is fully implemented, most working Americans will see their premiums sky-rocket(and in truth, many already have in just the last two years since the bill’s passage.) Expect to pay more in taxes, and if you’re an employer, you may want to consider what they intend for you with all the new penalties.
Back in 2009-10, when the bill was being debated, they kept going back to browbeat CBO as repeated modifications of the bill continued to exceed one-trillion dollars. They finally came out with a cost estimate of $940 billion, and this was sufficient to get the support of some wavering Democrats who didn’t want to be tagged with a $1 Trillion expenditure. At the time, many Congressional critics said that it would come in far higher since the CBO was using a static scoring that didn’t account for economic conditions at large. Much of the near doubling of the costs are accounted for by a weaker economy than they had estimated at the time. This is typical CBO estimating: Look at the sky today, see it is blue, and estimate the cost for umbrellas over the next ten years will be zero. As you’re drenched for lack of an umbrella, they will explain that their estimates didn’t account for the dynamics of weather.
The entire Obama-care scam is just now kicking into high gear. Over the next eighteen months, as new features and taxes kick in, along with the mandates and penalties, I don’t think most small or even medium businesses quite grasp how badly this is going to affect their bottom lines. This is because much of it has been hidden, and many large corporations have managed to obtain exemptions from the Obama administration. It’s not clear that those exemptions are even legal, and it’s fairly certain they will end early in a second Obama term. Our best hope is that the Supreme Court overturns the whole law, since there is no severability clause in this law, meaning that to throw out one portion, for instance the individual mandate, all portions of the law must go. If that happens, we’ll be extraordinarily fortunate, but we must plan on the fact that this is going to go forward irrespective of the desires of more than 65% of the American people, who oppose it.
When you see Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or Barack Obama, or any other Democrat who supported and voted for this law, you can assume they are liars, one and all, and that they knew full well that this program was going to cost significantly more than advertised. They lied, because it was the only way to get even their own members to vote for it, not because those members believed the lies, but because it gave them plausible political cover. Know this: If your member of Congress or your Senators voted for this bill, despite what they may say now, they knew it was an underestimate based on willful ignorance. You should cast your votes accordingly at the next opportunity.
It has been my contention throughout this primary season that Mitt Romney will not be able to defeat Barack Obama because he will be unable to differentiate between himself and Barack Obama on the matter of Obamacare. It is nearly impossible to believe Mitt Romney on this issue, because when he claims that on the basis of federalism and the Tenth Amendment, he would never prescribe for the nation the same sort of mandate he imposed on the people of his own state of Massachusetts, the evidence contradicts his own words on the matter. I have shown you videos that demonstrate the point, but here is one more from none other than leftist Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC, who was offering a ‘warning’ to Romney. Before the election is over, if Mitt Romney is the nominee of the Republican party, the left and their lap-dog media intend to make we conservatives rue the day, and it will be with Mitt Romney’s assistance.
I think it’s going to be worse than O’Donnell admits. I doubt whether the Obama campaign or Barack Obama himself will wait for Romney to make this into an issue. It’s my bet that he’ll do his best to avoid the issue altogether, because the left-wing media will not permit him to get away with the lies in the general that they have forgiven in the primary season. When Romney lies to other Republicans, the mainstream media won’t object, but you can bet that if Romney tries to pass off this same lie in the general campaign against Obama, he will never be permitted to get away with it.
Romney is vulnerable to defeat for this reason, and because his pronouncements on the campaign trail have to date promised repealing Obamacare, it’s going to be raised whether he likes it or not. The way it will be raised is by labeling Romney both as a liar and a hypocrite, two charges he surely seems to deserve in the matter. It will be done in the weeks leading up to the election, probably after the middle of October, and it will be used to massacre the Republicans.
More, I suspect that if he secures the nomination, Romney will try to walk back all of this “repeal Obamacare” talk almost immediately. He’ll talk about fixing it instead, and as I reported some time ago, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi has let that cat out of the bag. What this means for Republicans is that once the party nominates Mitt Romney, they’re going to find themselves stuck with a clunker who probably will go down to defeat in November, not merely because of Romneycare, but because of Mitt Romney’s ongoing attempt to conceal it.
