One of the worst things about Obamacare is that while you and I will be stuck with it, all Federal and State employees, including all of Congress, will be exempt from it. If it so good for us, why isn’t it good for them?
For one simply reason. Federal and State employees, including Congress and the executive branch, currently enjoy the finest health insurance in the country, courtesy of you and me. They don’t want to give it up. We might not want to give up whatever it is that we have, either. Even if what we have isn’t the limousine health care plan they have, we still might like to keep it. Too Bad. Obama, Pelosi and Reid are determined.
This is the key test for the Medi-Grab bill. Any member of Congress who votes against it reveals his or her true stand on America’s founding principles. Anyone who votes for it shows that he or she actually gets it. There are many terrifying parts of this Medi-Grab bill, but this is the simplest litmus test.
It’s so simple that everyone in the country can understand it. It’s do-or-die in terms of the integrity and honesty of the takeover of one-sixth of the economy that Obama is so determined to drive through Congress.
and,
Socialist regimes reveal their true nature by the special treatment they give to their permanent ruling class; they deny such treatment for ordinary schlubs like you and me. The worst corruption in socialist regimes flows from that simple two-caste system. In Europe, the ruling class hardly bothers with elections any more. The same people just turn over in their lifelong careers, or they just stay in the tenured bureaucracy.
That’s Obama’s future for us and our children. It has to be stopped. It can be stopped.
At this point Pelosi does not have the votes to pass it. If she did the vote would already have been held. The minute she has the votes the vote will be held, even if it’s 3:00 A.M. If you hear the vote has been scheduled or if is being held, you won’t need to wait for the count. You will know then and there that our goose has been cooked.
But Steny Hoyer said today they are going to meet Obama’s deadline of March 18. That means they don’t have the votes today, and don’t expect to have them in the next 9 days. Call, write and telephone your Congressperson if you live in a Democrat district. Tell them you will give as much money as you can to their opponent in the next election if they vote for this nightmare.
Well, I’d have to post this video. I mean, it’s about what this blog stands for: Truth, Justice and The American Way. The “American Way” is many things not least of which is liberty and justice for all. The pursuit of happiness is closely related to independence and self reliance. “Self Actualization” is at the top of the hierarchy of the innate needs of every human being, according to Abraham Maslow. America is where “We The People” have instituted a government to secure those blessings. We’d like to keep it.
As a gloomy, snowy February came to a close in the nation’s capital, so did the most recent circus attraction on Capitol Hill. Several days of congressional hearings on the Toyota recalls didn’t exactly deliver many more facts for Americans but they did leave behind a plethora of speculation and opinion to feast upon. While the saga now known as GasPedalGate flailed around quietly for several years, it’s suddenly taken center stage and today plays out like a bad made-for-TV-movie, complete with its villain, its victims, and most telling, a very long list of opportunists.
To see the full picture, the story begins in California with the history of General Motors and the United Auto Workers in the 1980’s, and GM’s rescue by Toyota through a little venture called NUMMI. Today, in 2010, the NUMMI chapter nears its close. But before it does, the Fremont, California plant and its rank and file workers will serve as unwilling pawns in what could turn out to be an orchestrated blueprint for incapacitating the strongest competitor to Government Motors and one of the most significant threats to labor unions here and around the globe.
Today’s rendition has been so manipulated and so propagandized, the facts have all but been removed from the storyline. The bread crumb trail of truth has been trampled upon and so broadly scattered about, the trail is almost beyond the point of recognition.
The story that emerges is the collusion of forces in Big Labor, Big Government, Big Journalism, Big Litigators and Big Progressive Philanthropy. And no, I’m not talking Breitbart sites.
I’ve posted on this before, but let me say it succinctly: The House vote on the Senate Bill is the endgame. If the House passes the Senate Bill, it’s over. It’s over because the House and the Senate will have both passed the same bill. All the talk of “reconciliation” in the Senate is a red herring.
Theoretically, Pelosi could hold it and not send it to Obama. Anyone who believes she will do that may as well buy a bridge. Even if she holds it just long enough to make up some excuse, it will go to Obama very quickly and he will sign it immediately.
If Obamacare becomes law, Obamacare will be forever. Like herpes.
The House Democrats have a choice: either stand with the American people and kill the bill or endorse the deception, betrayal, and bribes of Harry Reid, Obama, Pelosi, and the Senate Democrats, in addition to the destruction of the US health system. Either way, the American people will never forget.
“In 1902 Argentina was one of the world’s richest countries. Little more than a hundred years later, it is poverty-stricken, struggling to meet its debt obligations…”
This video is from Wednesday of this week at a Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle. Supporters and opponents clashed over Starbuck’s announcement that it will not go along with demands to prohibit customers who may legally carry firearms from bringing them into their stores. In the video a woman who supports Starbuck’s policy talks to a woman from the Million Mom March.
Whenever I hear the message of The Million Mom March, that no one should have a gun, I think of the forced march made by some Jewish moms nearly 70 years ago. It’s been called the “First Million Mom March.”
It happened at Mizocz Ghetto, Poland on October 14, 1942. These mom’s husbands were sent to labor and/or death camps. Then the moms were marched to a ravine to be shot. Some were holding infants.
After the mass shooting, some of the Jewish moms were still alive. This picture shows a German policeman shooting them.
It’s astounding that the Germans took pictures of this. The source of these photos is the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It’s also astounding that the current members of the “Million Mom March” are unmoved by them, or unmoved in any way that might be effective in assuring this sort of thing never happens again.
The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.
Good ideas don’t have to be imposed by force. People will adopt them voluntarily. Health savings accounts are an example of a good idea. Government need only allow them and they become widespread. In fact, people will flock to HSA’s until government steps in with force to prevent people from having them.
Another good idea are retail health clinics such as the ones Walmart started offering in its Supercenter stores. These have spread throughout Walmart as well as other places. Without any government force, expenditure or involvement retail clinics have grown from 200 in 2006 to 1,200 at the end of 2009, an amazing 6-fold increase in three years. Mark Perry at Carpe Diem says:
At the same time that Congress and the President orchestrate a government takeover of America’s health care system and capture all of the media attention, a more silent revolution is taking place, as market-based alternatives like convenient, low-cost retail clinics are expanding daily, saving American consumers millions of dollars and putting Americans back in charge of their health care spending.
In contrast, idiotic ideas have nothing going for them. Most people who voluntarily adopt idiotic ideas in their private lives soon abandon them if these ideas hamper their ability to thrive in the real world. The only way to implement an idiotic idea widely and surely is through force – which is the root of Obamacare.
In a new Rasmussen Poll 69% of Americans say city governments do not have the right to prevent citizens from owning handguns. Just 25% of adults think city governments do have that right. 70% of all adults believe the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right of an average citizen to own a gun. In many ways the gun issue is not divided on political party lines. However, sixty-five percent (65%) of Democrats think America needs stronger anti-gun laws. Sixty-five percent (65%) of Republicans and 52% of voters not affiliated with either major party disagree.
We all have seen how the presidency changes the ones who hold that office. For example:
But those changes were over an 8-year period. The current occupant of the White House has experienced the most dramatic change of any previous president, and in only a little more than one year:
The post just below from yesterday suggests that Obama may be trying to snooker the House of Representatives into passing the Senate version of Obamacare with the promise that the Senate will then take up the bill under “reconciliation” and make changes to it before sending it to the President’s desk for signature into law. The snooker job is that as soon as the House passes the Senate Bill Obama will just sign it into law. In that scenario there will be no reconciliation in the Senate. The House will be left holding the bag and Obama will get the last laugh.
Jeffrey Anderson at The Corner also holds that view:
All of the talk about “reconciliation” seems to have distracted people — like a red herring — from a simple but crucial fact: If the House goes first, as now appears to be the plan, and passes the Senate health-care overhaul, the president would then have a bill in hand that had passed both houses of Congress, and — whether reconciliation subsequently succeeded or failed in the Senate — we would have Obamacare.
Reconciliation would then be like the exhibition ice skating in the Olympics after the medals have been awarded: interesting to some, but wholly irrelevant to anything that really matters.
The attention is on the Senate, but the battle is in the House. It’s time for Americans from coast to coast to communicate their clear desires to their congressmen. If Americans don’t want Obamacare — and every indication is that they emphatically don’t — now is the time for swing-district Democrats to hear that full chorus of opposition: loudly, clearly, and forcibly.
Reconciliation is not an appropriate procedure in the Senate. Obama can try to cover his tracks by getting Harry Reid to make an attempt in the Senate that will be frustrated when the Senate Parliamentarian issues a ruling that it is out of order to make changes to the then House-passed Senate bill by the reconciliation process. Obama will then say to the House Democrats who voted for the bill, “Well, sorry guys. I tried but I guess it just won’t work. Rejoice! Obamacare lives!”
Jeffrey Anderson also has a brilliant article in The Weekly Standard that is available on line without subscription. He offers another example of an Obama ruse that might be trotted out to placate House members who can be expected to be surprised and angry at having the rug pulled out from under them:
The President would then already have gotten a bill through both chambers, and while House members would complain powerlessly, he would dip his pen in the ink and visualize himself in the history books. He might even try to score a few extra political points by saying, “As you know, we intended to use the reconciliation process to make a few small changes to the Senate bill. While I know that there was some disagreement from some people, I think that that process would have been entirely appropriate to pursue. But some people are uncomfortable with it, and I think that’s a legitimate concern. It’s important to remember that our democratic institutions deserve the benefit of the doubt. Also, the American people understandably think that we’ve been focused on health care long enough. So that’s why I am making the decision not to pursue “reconciliation.” Instead, I am moving on to a jobs bill….”
This is all too rich to believe it could be happening in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But, Lord help us, it is.
Jeffrey Anderson finishes up his Weekly Standard article:
House members would be left holding the bag. Target squarely on their chests, they would now get to face their fuming constituents after having passed a $2.5 trillion bill that would allow public funding of abortion, would send $100 million to Nebraska, $300 million to Louisiana, $100 million to Connecticut, would exempt South Florida’s Medicare Advantage enrollees from annual $2,100 cuts in Medicare Advantage benefits, would raise taxes, raise deficits, raise health costs, empower Washington, reduce liberty, politicize medicine, and jeopardize the quality of health care. Most of all, they would feel the citizenry’s wrath for having voted to pass a bill that only 25 percent of Americans support.
Right now, the House holds all the power over ObamaCare. Nothing can happen unless it acts. But if its members are foolish enough to expect promises not made in writing to be followed through on at a future date, they deserve every bit of backlash the voters would have in store for them.
You can read the entire article by following the link above.
This 6-minute video of Paul Ryan on the Fox Business Channel is well worth your time. It is a good lesson is what is going on, Paul Ryan is eloquent, and it suggests another way out for Obama to avoid keeping his promise to change the bill in the Senate before signing it. There may not even be 51 votes in the Senate to do reconciliation. Who knew? [Everyone but us chickens, that’s who.]
Any House Democrat who falls for the ruse currently being advanced by Obama and Nancy Pelosi should lose the next election for being so gullible if not for being too socialist. I’m betting that even socialists aren’t that gullible and that the Senate bill will not pass the House unless the Democrats in the House are in on the gag and are willing to go along knowing that they whole thing is actually not a trick on them, but a trick on the American people.
The plan is for the House to pass the Senate Bill, which already passed the Senate last December, after the Senate demonstrates to the House that they have the votes to use “wreckinciliation” to pass all the fixes in the Bill that the House members want to make it more like the Bill the House has already passed.
So, do the members in the House realize that they could get snookered by Obama, the Senate, and their own leader, Nancy Pelosi. If the House passes the Senate bill there will then exist a bill that has been passed by both the Senate and the House without any changes. At that point what is to stop Obama from just signing it into law? And then what guarantee does the House have that the Senate will do anything. The Senate will have the bill it apparently wanted. It will be the law of the land at that point. Why do anything?
Surely the House members are not so dense they don’t see this. I don’t think for a minute that Nancy Pelosi would be the least upset.
By the way, if that happens the law will contain all the things that have been the most criticized such as the cornhusker kickback, the Louisiana Purchase, the Union exemption from the Cadillac health plan tax, the Florida exemption to enable Florida seniors and only Florida seniors to keep their Medicare Advantage Plan, and the restriction on abortion funding that the lefties in the House and the feminists are most angry about.
Obama once said it wasn’t a good idea to enact such a fundamental change in the country without a broad consensus because if you do that, he said “You cannot govern.” Those were his words. Doing it not only with a bare majority in Congress and 73% of the American public against it, and to have done it by trickery to boot, doesn’t seem to be the ideal model for the ability to govern.
If 48% of the people want Congress to start over with a new bill and another 25% want them to just forget it, that is 73% against Obamacare. It’s hard to fathom that they’re are going to defy the voters so blatantly. These numbers are coming from CNN. They can’t blame this on Republicans.
An article in today’s yesterday’s Denver Post says it’s possible. A biologist has found at least 15 scats and/or footprints that she claims are from wolves. Of course, it is already known that lone wanderers have been in Colorado recently, but that doesn’t mean a pack has taken up residence.
It’s not certain now, but no one believes that wolves will not eventually re-establish themselves in Colorado.
I hate to make my rancher and hunting friends angry but I think that is a good thing. Hunters claim wolves deplete available game but I think wolves enrich the hunting experience by restoring it to its original challenge. Their predation may also strengthen the deer, elk and moose herds making more trophy animals available to hunters. Unlike human hunters, wolves just want meat and care little for the antler point score. To conserve their own energy they seek out the sick and the weak that hunters don’t want anyway, so I’ve never understood the argument that hunters are making.
Ranchers, of course, don’t relish seeing their bank accounts eaten by wolves, which could be the end result of losing stock to wolf attacks. I have limited sympathy for that view because ranchers are compensated for their losses and wolves that attack stock can be shot.
Ranchers hate coyotes about equally as much as wolves, so there is some good news for them. Once you have wolves, you probably no longer have coyotes. The wolves kill all but the most cagey ones. There is no compensation for coyote kills and shooting coyotes just seems to increase their numbers, to the great frustration of ranchers.
Sitting around a campfire in the wilderness listening to a wolf pack setting up a howl somewhere in the distance is sublime. For a moment It can take you back, way back in time.
At the end of 2006, there were only 200 retail clinics in the United States. As of March 1, 2010 the number of retail clinics operating surpassed 1,200, which is an amazing 6-fold increase in just over 3 years for the number of convenient, affordable retail clinics operating in the U.S. At the same time that Congress and the President orchestrate a government takeover of America’s health care system and capture all of the media attention, a more silent revolution is taking place, as market-based alternatives like convenient, low-cost retail clinics are expanding daily, saving American consumers millions of dollars and putting Americans back in charge of their health care spending.
