A vision of the future 20 years later if the healthcare highjack passes

The Democrat ducks will all say, "no thanks."

Technorati Tags: Video, Duck Song, Humor

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The Hell on Earth Series: Horowitz, Alinsky, Beck, Satan, and thee

The Lament Configuration is a portal to Hell from the Hellraiser movies

Every once in a while we need to remind ourselves that progressive neo-Jacobins, syndicalists, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists and fascists have stolen the name "liberal" and invented the fabulist lie "progressive" for what they do. Nobody likes their real names. Storybook demons don't like being summoned by their true names either. That is because using their true, or correct, name gives you power over them. For one thing, it does not allow you to be fooled by their deceptions. They, the neo-Jacobins, syndicalists, anarchists, revolutionaries, communists, socialists, progressives, and fascists believe that the state should take goods from one group and give goods to the other group. Yes, that is like a tribal society with eternal warfare between groups. They mistake the fact that some people have more money than others for a class structure, ignoring the truth that those who start poor and work hard end up rich. That is not a classist society. That is an economically and socially mobile society that rewards merit and effort. They are no more liberals than American conservatives are the same as traditional European Conservatives (monarchists who do not believe in free markets and transformational scientific innovation). American conservatives are the original liberals who believe in life, liberty and property, and all the other requirements for individual empowerment and the starvation of overweening state power. Neo-Jacobins et al believe in that overweening state power that crushes people underneath its hobnailed jackboots.

Hellraiser was just a movie. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was a bad one. But Hell describes a place that Lucifer created for himself, where he lives consumed with envy and self-pity. And Hell on Earth is a fair description of what Lucifer's most faithful recent disciple would have his followers create.

Saul Alinsky claimed to be a champion of the dispossessed against those who oppressed them. But he dedicated his masterwork to Lucifer, who created a Hell to live within. And so with everything that Alinsky and his disciples, such as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, want to create in the world. They all want to create a Hell on Earth in which they and their Progressive buddies could lord it over the Have Nots while killing off the old Haves. They are at war with everything good, right, and true. And they want to replace everything good with their coercive state that will scourge us of our humanity and make us into perfect, communist robots.

David Horowitz wrote a series of posts that covered much of what he said last week when he appeared on the Glenn Beck show. Here they are:

• Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me: Part I
• Hell on Earth: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part II
• Boring From Within: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part III
• To Have And Have Not: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part IV
• Post-modern leftism: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part V
• Means and Ends One: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI
• Means and Ends Two: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI Continued
• The Nazi Option: Alinsky, Beck, Satan and Me, Part VI (continued 2)

America opened the Lament Configuration last November 4. Now we are in for it. Go and read Horowitz's warning.

h/t: derhoosier

Technorati Tags: David Horowitz, Alinsky, Socialism, Communism, Revolution, Destruction, Lies, Lucifer

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What would a Free Market in Healthcare look like?

We do not currently have a free market in medical care. If we did, the prices would be lower and the government wouldn't have its fingers in every single medical care pie. Odysseas Papadimitriou lays out what it would be like if we restored a free market medical care system on The Street.

UPDATE: I liked it better before I read it all the way through. Everybody dies with a huge debt to the Government healthcare loan program. Government sticks more fingers in every healthcare pie. Yuk. I don't see how these reforms fit any definition of a free market.

Technorati Tags: Health, Economy, Healthcare, Free Market

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Illegal Immigration has Consequences

K. Gonzalez, the student of unknown (by me) gender who worked so hard to get into Berkeley, to pay for one semester, and wrote this about the experience, sounds like a wonderful person, with one exception: The part that breaks immigration law. But the editorial drone who wrote the headline needs to be slapped silly.

A College Dream Ends Too Soon
I worked hard to get into Berkeley and I worked even harder when I got there. But when my funds ran out, I had to leave.

That headline says one thing: This undocumented alien is a victim. But this excerpt from the article says something completely different: This undocumented alien is a very hard worker and is incapable of acting like a victim.

I found a tiny room near the campus, enrolled in classes, and landed a job selling jewelry in a San Francisco mall. From Friday through Monday, I worked full-time, waking up at 6:30 a.m. to get to work by 9. I couldn't spend the weekends like other students, lazing in the sun or exploring neighborhoods. Still, for two glorious days each week, Tuesday and Thursday, I had classes from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and was taught by some amazing professors. I would run from one class to the next, using my breaks to stop by the library. I slept odd hours, many days finishing homework at the crack of dawn. I was very well organized. Wednesday was the day I took care of business—everything from food shopping to laundry to paying bills.

Surprisingly, I found time to make friends and, perhaps more surprisingly, mostly with political conservatives. They proved to be remarkably open-minded, and I loved their outlandish conversations and unabashed candor. They never questioned my odd hours, nor did I offer to explain. They apparently believed that I was simply another workaholic. Perhaps not so "simply," but I was a workaholic for sure. I had no choice.

In case it isn't apparent, K. Gonzalez is still going to college, still working hard, still planning to go back to Berkeley, and still dreaming. The headline is misleading. Gonzalez is probably still making friends with conservatives, since they are so similar in principles and philosophy.

Analysis and Troubleshooting

There are two major problems here, neither one of which can be solved in time to ease K. Gonzalez' way to Berkeley, and a minor problem, which might have a solution.

1. College costs, even at a state university such as Berkeley, have gone through the roof.  I suspect that student loans and federal grants have a lot to do with this. Another issue is that college degrees have become a filter that businesses, prevented by the Supreme Court from using reasonable employment skills tests to filter out unqualified job applicants, use as a first pass filter to qualify applicants for a second step. This is why jobs that should not really require a college degree, such as journalism, computer programming, or working as a chef, are reserved for college grads. This drives more people into college than should be going. If demand for college was lower, colleges would have to compete for students and costs would be lower. But I don't really have a good answer, except that we encourage more community colleges and alternative learning solutions and let universities that are too expensive go out of business.
2. K. Gonzalez came to the US because the economy sucked so bad where Gonzalez came from that the job situation was worse there for its own citizens than it was for illegal aliens in the US. Gonzalez wanted to go to Berkeley because there is no such university in his or her own country. This is not a problem with the US but with Gonzalez' native country, which lacks basic requirements for a free market including a respect for and rule of law, inviolable property rights, and real choice between different political parties at the ballot box. This problem needs to be fixed by a transformative leader in Gonzalez' own country. Perhaps if Gonzalez is smart enough, and learns enough from his conservative friends and their role models among the American founders, he  could go back to that country and become such a leader.
3. When it comes to paying for Berkeley, this is a minor problem. All Gonzalez needs to do is find a sympathetic and highly successful legal immigrant who came to the US from his country, and convince that person to contribute the $5,000 per semester that Gonzalez needs. Maybe the owner of the jewelry shop could be just such a sponsor, or maybe they go to church with one. Stop looking for a solution from government. Look for a solution from the private sector.
   

Technorati Tags: Immigration, Education, Media Bias, Conservatism

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My liege, the communists are attacking with their invidious HR3200 strategy

I did it, and you can too. Political madlibs at I Can Has Tarp?.

My liege, the Royal Majesty Representative Gene Taylor,

Forgive my impertinence, but we have sent many a messenger to date and have received no reply.

Word has spread from the tribes of the north of communists building a fleet of many a flat bottomed riverboat to attack the kingdom in response to your Royal HR3200 and other Healthcare Change Bills decree!

They must not be allowed to succeed. I beg thee, in the name of the Crown - order thy soldiers to take up the baseball bat to repel the evil invaders!

We have begun to organize the defenses around Vancleave in anticipation, but reinforcements are sorely needed; a plague of cholera has infected the camp and decimated our numbers; morale is plummetting and even the knights have taken to sweet tea! We require a reserve force of no less than 1.7 Trillion soldiers to hold the territory.

A glorious battle, to be sung of ages hence, is at hand. And lo, in those days to come, when peace reigns once more throughout the land, men will dine on crawfish and tell the tale.

May divine Providence be with us.

Duke Dick Butkis

Too funny!

Technorati Tags: Humor, Health, Obamacare

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Take Action: Use the other side's tools against the Healthcare Highjack

The calls for fixing America's "broken healthcare system" are misleading. America does not have a monolithic government monopoly for healthcare like the ones many socialist countries have that are so popular to those conducting UN funded studies. America has a healthcare market with a substantial part of the market controlled by several government monopoly healthcare systems including Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, S-CHIP, the VA, and various union and governmental pension and healthcare insurance plans. In addition, healthcare insurance market is distorted by massive government regulation, at both the Federal and State level, that prevents most individuals from being able to afford to purchase individual healthcare insurance, or even get insurance that covers exactly what they want it to cover. Medical lawsuit abuse and government regulation drives every bit of the increase in healthcare costs. The Democrats do not plan to fix the healthcare "system," because they do not restrict their plan to the portion of the market that is already the governmental system. They plan to highjack the healthcare market completely, replacing the market with a monolithic government monopoly over 10-15-20 years.

This highjack of the healthcare market must be stopped. We will have to do it without much help. There is no cavalry to stop it for us. We do not have the moneybags behind our side that the government monopolists do. They had Soros bankrolling the propaganda, but now the $800 billion 2009 stimulus and other funds looted from the taxpayer bankroll their propaganda efforts. The media is in the pocket of the pro-highjack side. Academia is too. And big business, chastened by the sight of the President of the US firing the CEO of GM, is scared to do anything but support a healthcare highjack. Doctors, retirees, and pharmacists are overwhelmingly against the healthcare highjack, but the AMA, AARP, and big Pharma companies have betrayed their constituents and are backing it. Stimulus funded so-called community organizers, union thugs, and their allies in the communist allied antiwar movement, are all being paid to push the Democrat Party's healthcare highjack.

We do not have their focused, organized resources. But we have numbers. We outnumber them. 85% of Americans are happy with their healthcare insurance and doctor. We outnumber them better than 5 to 1. All we need are the resources to allow us to get our voices out.

The healthcare highjack forces have made those resources available to the public. President Obama's Agitators Organizers for America have resources for their partisans that will help them get their astroturf pro-highjack message to mostly Democrat congressmen and congresswomen. Use their resources. But don't use the Democrats' anti-freedom agenda. Make sure to take literature along that expresses the pro-freedom point of view.

First, click to sign up for an office visit at your congressional jellyfish's offices. They will provide you with all the local office addresses, and with links to choose a time. This will not set up an appointment, but it is set up so that congressional offices get constant visits throughout the day. You will probably get a call from an Obama organizer. Humor them if you can.

Write a letter. Make it legible. Either use your best handwriting, or type and print it on the computer. There is a good list of 8 reality checks the healthcare highjack partisans have been falsely disputing about HR3200, the House bill, at Classical Ideals. You can print that out and add it to your letter, or print out any of hundreds of other wonderful online resources to attach to your letter. By the way, if you have any good resources, please mention them in comments so other people can use them. Make your letter itself short. Here is an example letter.

Dear :I am opposed to HR3200 and all other plans to replace the Medical and Healthcare Insurance marketplaces with government-run monopolies.

Not only are the bills that have been released to public view full of wasteful spending, they do nothing to reduce the cost of medical care. The primary solution that might reduce the spiraling cost of medical care is tort reform, and that is not under consideration in any of the public bills. On the other hand, the bills are full of giveaways to community organizers and labor unions, giving the impression that this is a simple partisan scheme to take taxpayers' money and give it to highly partisan organizations. Given that these bills do nothing to reduce the cost of medical care, that they enlarge government bureaucracy by no fewer than 45 new government agencies, that they vastly increase spending at a time when we are running unprecedented deficits, that they are giveaways to the same labor unions and community organizers that got so much stimulus money, and that they replace a functioning free market with a government monopoly, I believe it is your duty and obligation to vote against them, and in fact to do everything within your power to oppose them.

Sincerely, your constituent,

When you visit the offices, be friendly. Introduce yourself to the staff using your first and last name. Use their names as you speak to them. Most likely you will not be talking to the congress person. You'll be talking to staff. You can talk to volunteers, but make sure that you work your way to the paid staff when it comes time to deliver your letter. Tell them you live in their district and the neighborhood or town you live in. Be friendly. Make small talk at first. Then get down to business. Have two copies of whatever you will give them. Hand them the original of your letter for the congressperson and any supporting literature and ask them to sign a copy of the letter so you have proof it was received. If you have a cellphone with camera, or a small camera, ask if you can take a picture of you and the worker shaking hands for the memories.

When you are done, you might want to visit more. If it is remotely possible, visit the offices of both your senators and your representative. You know the healthcare highjack partisans will be.

If you are still wondering whether it is worth your time to visit your congress person's office, read this for motivation. Mitch Stewart writes for healthcare highjack partisans:

All throughout August, our members of Congress are back in town. Insurance companies and partisan attack groups are stirring up fear with false rumors about the President's plan, and it's extremely important that folks like you speak up now.

So we've cooked up an easy, powerful way for you to make a big impression: Office Visits for Health Reform.

All this week, OFA members like you will be stopping by local congressional offices to show our support for insurance reform. You can have a quick conversation with the local staff, tell your personal story, or even just drop off a customized flyer and say that reform matters to you.

We'll provide everything you need: the address, phone number, and open hours for the office, information about how the health care crisis affects your state for you to drop off (with the option of adding your personal story), and a step-by-step guide for your visit.

Click here to find your representatives' local offices.

As you've probably seen in the news, special interest attack groups are stirring up partisan mobs with lies about health reform, and it's getting ugly. Across the country, members of Congress who support reform are being shouted down, physically assaulted, hung in effigy, and receiving death threats. We can't let extremists hijack this debate, or confuse Congress about where the people stand.

Office Visits for Health Reform are our chance to show that the vast majority of American voters know that the cost of inaction is too high to bear, and strongly support passing health reform in 2009.

Don't worry if you've never done anything like this before. The congressional staff is there to listen, and your opinion as a constituent matters a lot. And if you bring a friend, you'll have more fun and make an even greater impact.

Click here to sign up for an Office Visit for Health Reform.

Wherever you live, these visits matter: Many representatives are pushing hard toward reform, and they are taking a lot of heat from special interests. They deserve our thanks and need our support to continue the fight. But those who are still putting insurance companies and partisan point-scoring ahead of their constituents must know that voters are watching -- and that we expect better.

Earlier this week, the President wrote that "this is the moment our movement was built for" and asked us all to commit to join at least one event this month. This is the way to answer that call, and rise to the challenge of this moment together.

Technorati Tags: Healthcare Highjack, Obamacare, Health, Action Alert

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Revisited: Cancer Coverage Denied by Government, but assisted suicide covered

Rest in Peace Barbara Wagner. She has died in the year since this was news, but Barbara Wagner's story was discussed some in late Summer 2008. Not much discussion went on, since there were no healthcare hijack bills on the floor of the House and Senate. But now the White House is discounting claims that the government would pay for suicide pills for sick people before it would pay for life extending treatment.

And yet it has already happened!

A recap of the story.

• Barbara Wagner, age 64, was a lung cancer survivor whose case was in remission.
• She was a low-income divorcee on the Oregon Health Plan, which is a low income Oregon State government healthcare plan.
• Then the cancer came back.
• Her last hope was a $4K a month drug (Tarceva by Genentech) prescribed by her doctor.
• Oregon Health Plan wouldn't cover it. Medicare doesn't either.
• But after being denied by OHP, she got a letter in the mail informing her that she was eligible to receive a suicide cocktail on the state's dime.

So did she get the cancer treatment before she died? Yes. Genentech, the fabled big pharma company, was more sympathetic than the government and gave her Tarceva free of charge. Tell those who claim the government is kinder than free market companies that they are dead wrong.

There is video.

Note: As the ABC article noted, there is a proven "strong link between cost-cutting pressure on physicians and their willingness to prescribe lethal drugs to patients -- were it legal to do so". How would the pressure on doctors change if the government ran all insurance companies? Is there any chance that putting the government in charge of all health insurance would reduce pressure on doctors?

Does your stomach drop when you get a letter from the IRS? How's that for low pressure?


h/t: Drudge.

Technorati Tags: Fact Check, Obamacare, Healthcare, Health, Government, Video

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We Scare because we Care: An Obamascare Roundup

Obamonsters Inc.© has been flooding the zone with pure insanity about the health scare plan, much of it actually in the bills. Not only are the bills filled with billions, perhaps trillions, in giveaways to ACORN, Americorps, the SEIU, and foreign tourists, they have abortion and euthanasia mandates that would, in turn, close Catholic hospitals and deny curative care to sick old folks while paying doctors to kill them. There are lies galore about the contents of the bills from the flapping gums at the White House. The whole Cloward-Piven mess of lies is confusing because the Dems want it to be. Where is a poor conservative seeker of truth to go in this world of lies and confusion constantly being spit out from the government, newspapers, television news and all those who have long claimed the mantle of truth-telling only to betray the trust we gave them? If you go look at the census data, you will see that those earning above the average income are more likely to be uninsured than those below. People with more money are more likely to have no insurance than those with less. This is clearly not a problem with affordability, but with making a big deal out of nothing. It's the Chicken Little syndrome.

So since Obamascare is so senseless, we need all the help we can get to make sense of it. Thus the round-up. I'll put out my links. Readers add their links. I will keep up the updates with your updates for a while. Comment up a storm to make it better.

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The Awful and Unbearable Bills Themselves

• Senate: HC09 (pdf only) as of July 29. Index here.


• House: HR3200 (and pdf) as of July 14. Index here.


• The Infamous Healthcare Flowchart

Reading the Bills

• HR3200: el_cid01, Dianna Cotter, Fleckman


• HC09: Betsy McCaughey, Deroy Murdock, 24/7

Blogs and Resources

• New Atlantic: Diagnosis Blog


• RedState: healthcare, health care, obamacare.


• Keith Hennessey


• Mike Shedlock


• Jeannieology: 66.6 Elder Deathscare Initiative


• nessa, Take the Pill and Go Quietly into the Night


• wellsy, Health care reform’s misconceptions and why it’s now delayed


• Betsey McCaughey at Defend Your Health Care


• Shikha Dalmia: Obama's Top Five Health Care Lies, Myth of Free Market Health Care


• George Newman: Parsing the Health Reform Arguments


• American Economic Institute for Research: "Elder Inflation" and Health Costs, Lessons from Massachusetts


• American Enterprise Institute: Health Policy Studies


• Heritage Foundation: Health Care Reform

And I would be remiss if I did not mention my most recent thinking on the Health Care debate: Chicken Little is not a story to emulate.

UPDATE #1

• National Taxpayers Union: Analyzing Obama's Health Care Rhetoric, House Democrats' Health Plan Contains Words of Coercion -- not Choice -- Text Analysis Shows, Obamacare: Rhetoric vs. Reality, Visualized


• Gateway Pundit: President's own Physician is Against Obamacare (and at NPR)


• Randy Streu, Obama, Ezekiel and the Rationed Health Care Lifeboat


• Hunter Baker: 5 Simple Arguments Against Government Healthcare

Technorati Tags: Obamacare, Obama, Health, Government, Common Sense

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Shouting from the Rooftops to be Heard in the Debate over Health Care

The Debate on Health Care is over. At least that is what the hard-left Democrats and their lackeys and lickspittles in the Pravda Media tell us. This was a surprise to me, since I never saw the debate, heard it, or read it. I have a television. I watch the news. I am on the Internet. Man, am I ever on the Internet! No debate there! When was it? Where was the debate? Who debated on each side of the debate? Why am I thinking that I've been hoodwinked, flim-flammed, bamboozled, and given the old okey-doke with a wink and a sly, ravenous grin?

["Foxy Loxy said "Hello Girls, don't you look like a dainty dish today!""]

This panicked rush to legislate a thousand-page, Obamacare "fix" for medical care that will get re-jiggered in reconciliation (that means the smokey back room where Congressional hacks hide their nasty surprises in the bills with even less transparency than usual) gives me the feeling that I'm caught in the cautionary tale Chicken Little.

The skinny pipsqueak Chicken Little screamed "the sky is falling!" with such convincing, bloodcurdling fright she infected all the other farm animals with panic. They fled the farm for the woods and met the smooth-talking Foxy Loxy, who led them all into his lair to be out of the open. "Never mind the bones and the smell of death in the corner, girls," Foxy Loxy whispers. "The sky can't fall on you in here." Well, we all know what happened to Lucy Goosey, Henny Penny and Lucky Ducky. They ended up as Foxy Loxy's lunch. Chicken Little escaped though.

Chicken Little is not a story to emulate. It is not one I intend to relive, if that is even the right word, with my wife and children. Perhaps "repeat," as in "those who forget history are condemend to repeat it," is the right word. I intend to scream "NO" from the rooftops at the Chicken Littles. Let their imaginary sky-chunks fall on my head. I know I'm safer under the sky than in Foxy Loxy's lair, or in Congress' hidden lair where they reconcile the Obamacare bill into its final, nightmarish form.

To the proponents of Obamacare I plead, if you want to live out a Kafka story in your doctor's office, please, just move to Canada and have at it. Leave my doctor's office alone!

---

We do, after all, know the history of what happens when countries replace a free market in health care with a government run insurer. Private insurers cannot afford to continue and drop out of the business. Employers throw employees on the public system. There is a two-tiered medical system. Rich people and government employees get top-notch care. Everybody else goes to the Kafka Clinic. Doctors quit the profession. They emigrate if they can. Doctors who stay in business cut their hours drastically. Pharmaceutical companies do not do any research on new drugs. Even if they did, it wouldn't help because government bureaucrats do not approve payments for new drugs to treat anything. Government rations health care, and decides whether people are allowed to receive treatment or will just be given painkillers while they die, or perhaps are directed to an assisted suicide center. Death is cheaper than living, after all, to unaccountable government bureaucrats. At least, as long as it's your death we're talking about instead of theirs'. The cost of health insurance doubles when it is collected through the tax system, approximately, and government health insurance service in comparison makes the DMV look like the service desks at Wal-Mart, where you can return anything that any Wal-Mart sells even without a price tag on it, let alone a receipt. That is the height of luxury compared to the Kafkaesque nightmare suffered by those in the bowels of the government run health care system.

What are the problems with health care in the US? I've often wondered why the problems I see with health insurance don't seem to be the problems that hard-left ideologues in the Democrat party see. From what I understand the debating points about Health Care are only found on the Obama post-campaign-campaign Organizing for America site (!). I have enclosed the entire debate as it exists.

The Current Situation

Making sure every American has access to high quality health care is one of the most important challenges of our time. The number of uninsured Americans is growing, premiums are skyrocketing, and more people are being denied coverage every day. A moral imperative by any measure, a better system is also essential to rebuilding our economy -- we want to make health insurance work for people and businesses, not just insurance and drug companies.

The Solution

1. Reform the health care system:We will take steps to reform our system by expanding coverage, improving quality, lowering costs, honoring patient choice and holding insurance companies accountable.


2. Promote scientific and technological advancements:We are committed to putting responsible science and technological innovation ahead of ideology when it comes to medical research. We believe in the enormous capacity of American ingenuity to find cures for diseases that continue to extinguish too many lives and cause too much suffering every year.


3. Improve preventative care:In order to keep our people healthy and provide more efficient treatment we need to promote smart preventative care, like cancer screenings and better nutrition, and make critical investments in electronic health records, technology that can reduce errors while ensuring privacy and saving lives.

According to the evidence of the Debate, the main problems with Health Care are:

1. The number of uninsured Americans is growing,


2. Premiums are skyrocketing,


3. And more people are being denied coverage every day.


4. Changing it is a moral imperative


5. A better system is also essential to rebuilding our economy


6. We want to make health insurance work for people and businesses, not just insurance and drug companies.

Let's go over these serious problems one at a time.

1. The number of uninsured Americans is growing

Yes, every time Obamanomics drives another person into unemployment the number of uninsured Americans rises. Unemployment has been rising ever since the far-left Democrats took over Congress in 2007, creating the same crisis the far-left Democrats are trying to use to panic us into giving them the 54% of health care the government doesn't already control. It's funny how that works, isnt' it? The same gang of hacks that creates a problem wants to be given extraordinary powers to get rid of the same problem they have been so busy creating in the first place!

Fact is, the 47 million uninsured Americans so frequently ciited consist of 10 million non-Americans, 14 million people who are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid but never enrolled, and 17.6 million of those who make over $50K but do not want to pay for insurance. The remainder includes people who are really uninsured for the entire year plus those who were temporarily uninsured between jobs. And Obamacare won't insure all 47 million of those cited people anyway. It will insure 13 million of the cites, leaving 33 million still uninsured under Obamacare, which is going to cost a trillion or more over ten years. You know, if you just buy a group insurance policy for those 13 million you'd be spending more in the neighborhood of 26 billion per year to do it. That costs a lot less over ten years than a trillion dollars.

2. Premiums are skyrocketing

How about a story?

Imagine you are the CEO of an insurance company. Your company offers a Blue Cross/Blue Shield Insurance Plan to individuals and employers. You also offer Malpractice Insurance to doctors, hospitals, and other medical providers. OK? Now imagine that an ambulance-chasing lawyer like John "voice of the unborn" Edwards sues one of your doctors and wins 50 million dollars that you have to pay out. Tragic, right? Not really. The next year you increase the malpractice premiums to cover your $50 million loss. Doctors demand increased payments to reimburse them for their increased insurance bill and for all the trendy and expensive tests they have to run to cover themselves against more lawsuits. So you increase the BC/BS Insurance rates you charge individuals and employers. Every year you pay out less than $50 million in malpractice awards you collect the difference in profit. If you ever pay out more than $50 million in a year, you increase next year's malpractice insurance to cover the difference.

The cycle repeats. Ambulance chasing lawyers extort money out of insurance companies. Insurance companies charge more to doctors. Doctors charge more to insurance companies. Insurance companies charge more to consumers and employers.

At the end of several years of this, the insurance company gets easy profit when lawsuits are below previous levels. But no matter what, they are collecting more in premiums from both consumer and provider than they used to, before the cycle of lawsuits and rate increases started. Their gross income is higher. If malpractice payouts are unpredictable, the difference between malpractice collections and payments will frequently result in large windfall profits. And if they aim at a 10% profit, 10% of a much higher gross is a much higher profit to report on their annual reports. That means big bonuses for executives.

There is one way to stop this cycle of lawsuit abuse. It's called tort reform. Obviously ambulance chasing, flim-flamming lawyers like John Edwards don't like this idea. He, after all, was netting $11 million a year with his 40% cut of lawsuit proceeds for many years in the 1990s, by claiming that toddlers with cerebral palsy got it because the ob/gyn that delivered them let them be born naturally instead of cutting them out with a c-section. There is no scientific evidence that natural childbirth is a credible cause of CP. Actually, c-sections increase the risk of CP in the infant. The incidence of CP is lower in less developed countries where few c-sections are performed. But because Edwards was a handsome, charming and homespun hornswoggler, and because he often and infamously channeled the voice of the unborn child during delivery, he was able to hoodwink juries into giving huge awards to his clients. And he took 40% of those huge fees home to his 28,000 square foot mansion.

Tort reform works. My home state of Mississippi, which had previously had no caps on damages or penalties and was a plaintiff's dream state, passed tort reform in 2004. From the ATRA website:

The Medical Assurance Company of Mississippi (MACM), which provides medical malpractice insurance to about 70 percent of doctors in the state, announced a 5-percent decrease in premiums for 2006 (The Natchez Democrat, 10/19/05). MACM did not raise base premiums in 2004 or 2005, and previously had been raising rates annually up to 20 percent (Associated Press, 9/24/04).

Medical malpractice insurance premiums had been rising in Mississippi at 20% per year before tort reform. After tort reform they dropped by 5% the first year. I can't find what happened in later years, but I know that the number of ob/gyns in my part of Mississippi has not dropped like it was before the reform.

And tort reform doesn't just lower the cost of going to the doctor. It lowers the cost of doing all kinds of business. Manufacturers came to Mississippi after the reforms of 2004. We needed those manufacturers and the jobs they brought with them when Hurricane Katrina devastated the state the next year. Just imagine how slow rebuilding would have been without decent jobs to employ people whose homes had been severely damaged or destroyed.

How much money would that take out of a non-productive part of the economy (insurance and lawyers) and restore to a productive part of the economy (the consumer’s pocketbook)?

Changing the mission of the FDA to establishing food and drug safety, with truth in advertising claims being handled through the civil courts, would vastly reduce the cost of pharmaceutical R&D and the consumer’s price of pharmaceuticals. If a drug is safe for a guy to take, why is it the government’s business whether he uses it to lower his blood pressure or regrow hair? It’s his doctor’s business and his what they use a drug for, yet the government gets involved with its regulations. Tort reform would also reduce the costs of prescription drugs to Americans. Fore more ideas about pharmaceuticals see here.

Before voting in Obamacare to ruin our health care forever, fix Medicaid first. It's much smaller than Obamacare and it is already broken by the same things that will break Obamacare. If someone can find a way to repair Medicaid, other than imposing a much larger version of Medicaid doomed to fail even more cataclysmicly than Medicaid and Medicare, they will have the credibility to tackle health care for the portion of the nation that still pays its own bills. While at it, tackle SCHIP and Medicare as well as the VA system.

Also, insurance needs to be decoupled from employment by letting other organizations that are made of freely associating members, such as civic organizations, clubs, private gyms, and other such organizations, obtain 100% tax deductible group insurance plans, from any insurer in any state, for members and their families. The availability of health insurance that doesn’t go away when you lose your job would immediately increase entrepreneurship, spur job creation, and lower the cost of insurance and health care since people would have to pay the whole bill out of their own pocket.

3. And more people are being denied coverage every day.

This is a complaint about insurance company bureaucracy denying payment for a covered sick person because of some shady loophole snuck into a contract in a smokey room far away from all oversight. Is putting the government in charge of all health care decisions really going to make the bureaucracy better, more efficient, kinder, and the smokey rooms more transparent to oversight? How, by taking more money from the pockets of the people and giving it to those bureaucrats and Congressional hacks?

Actually, the truth is that government health plans always ration care.

4. Changing it is a moral imperative

Yes, getting the government out of health care is a moral imperative. 46% of every health care dollar is spent by government now. Every health dollar is regulated to death so badly that I'd guess half of them are wasted on unnecessary paperwork and tests. Once again it demonstrates the truth that Democrats want the government to take more money out of the pockets of the people for the pleasure of federal government bureaucrats.

5. A better system is also essential to rebuilding our economy

Huh? How about those far left "progressive" Democrat ideologues stop destroying the economy before we let them have a whack at health care with their unworkable, many times failed socialist schemes?

The American people trusted Democrats more with the economy than they trusted Republicans. I don't think they'll make that mistake again, not for a long time. George W. Bush and his Congress spent like drunkards, but once Congress got turned over to the Democrats in 2007 everything went to perdition. Housing collapse followed by banking collapse followed by automaker collapse followed by bloodthirsty takeovers of business after business by the federal government in a panic driven charge toward total command-economy fascism. Is that what Hope and Change meant to voters, or did they have a more benign idea about what it meant? I don't think the voters expected this!

6. We want to make health insurance work for people and businesses, not just insurance and drug companies.

When the government takes over business roles from the private sector it is a great danger to the economy. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the abusive government policies that aggravated their flaws brought down the world economy last year. From what I have seen the far-left Democrats want to take more money from the pockets of the people and give it to slow-moving government bureaucrats. That doesn't help anybody's health. I want to make health insurance work for consumers and providers, and not particularly for insurance, employers, the far-left unions and their pet Democrats, or the leviathan of government. Consumers and medical providers are doing God's work. The rest of them are just collecting protection money out of the pockets of the people. The best way to help consumers and providers is to stop government meddling.

Government interference in health care adds tons of paperwork so that no busy doctor’s office can ever get by with only one person spending all their time doing paperwork. You need at least two. Every time I see my primary care doctor I have to deal with a clerk, a nurses' assistant, and an office manager who just take care of paperwork. Where does the money come from to pay for them? How much does their piece of the puzzle add to my healthcare budget? How much does it improve my health? Government paperwork requirements need to be cut by 90% or more. The page count of government regulations also needs to be slashed. Currently, with tens of thousands of pages of government regulations it is literally impossible to know when you are breaking the law. This means that the law has become impossible to obey, and people hold it in contempt. The federal regulations need to be cut to no more than 100 8×5 pages of 10pt Times Roman, and limited forever to the same page count (no changes in font size or margin size allowed either).

Solutions

The Obamacare argument finishes with its solutions.

1. Reform the health care system


2. Promote scientific and technological advancements


3. Improve preventative care

To which I answer

1. Reform the health care system by kicking government out of it. Government already spends half the money in the system and regulates every single dime in it. That amounts to total government control of the system. If the health care system is broken, it isn't because there is too little government, but too much.


2. Promote scientific and technological advancements by using the profit motive so that pharmaceutical firms continue to conduct research and development. Change the FDA so it stops standing on pharmaceutical firms' necks. Government price control of pharmaceuticals will kill off the world's pharmaceutical industry, which only exists to any degree in the US.


3. Improving preventative care will increase costs and improve human lives. I think that's worth the trade-off. But this flies in the face of actual history, that teaches us that all government health plans ration medical care. All. Of. Them.

Don't be hoodwinked, flim-flammed, bamboozled, and given the old okey-doke. Obamacare may promise great things, but it is just another far-left Democrat scheme to take money from the pockets of the people for the pleasure of government bureaucrats.

Also read Jeff Emmanuel's two cents at RedState. More on Obamacare here. And say "NO" to Obamacare, STAT!

Technorati Tags: Obamacare, Obama, Health, Government, Common Sense

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Toward a New Ethics of Journalism

The Code of Ethics of The Society of Professional Journalists is a flawed document because it holds journalists to inhuman and contradictory standards. No intelligent journalist with an ounce of empathy who learns about the facts of a situation can ever be non-biased and free of attachments to people in the community in the way that the code demands. Can a journalist who receives hard information about the identity of a murderer truly claim to hold no opinion about the murderer's guilt? Can a journalist who watches corruption take place at a city council meeting fail to draw inferences and conclusions about the corrupt official's other official actions? Any posture claiming non-bias and non-attachment requires either an extraordinary lack of curiosity, memory, and empathy or wholesale concealment of facts.

Strong claims, indeed. Read on if you wonder whether they can be defended. Before we start, please familiarize yourself with the Code.

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The principles are clear, and with one exception are good.

1. "Seek truth and report it" is the nut of it all, isn't it? It means you do not begin to investigate with a hypothesis in your mind. That is crusading, not journalism. It means you go out and find the answers to the questions who, what, where, when, and how. Answering "why" requires mind-reading that is impossible for human beings, even human beings who believe in it, and has no place in journalism. It's just as bad as "anonymous sources," which is a phrase that conceals the reality of slanderer, libeler, traitor, and rumor-mongerer in a pretty package as if it wasn't a corruption of truth-telling and journalism. After answering the questions of who-what-where-when-how to the best of his ability, the journalist writes the story from the beginning and stops at the end. Opinion, mind-reading, anonymous sources, and speculative rumor-mongering do not belong in journalism.


2. "Minimize harm" is meant to protect innocent individual people from being victimized by the journalist, especially if they have already been thrust into a tragedy the journalist is covering. It is not meant to protect governments, belief systems, criminal gangs, journalists, newspapers, or politicians from inconvenient facts or to sustain a political narrative. It is meant to protect individual human beings from degradation, crime, and retaliation. And it is meant to protect law abiding private citizens. Governments and criminals can take care of themselves. Journalists are supposed to serve as a counter to government spin and as the white light of truth when it comes to criminal enterprises.


3. "Act independently" is inherently wrong-headed.Now if you are just looking at the principle, "act independently," you might wonder what the problem is. As is usual, the devil is in the details. Here are the SPJ's bullet points under "act independently."
   

   Journalists should:
   

   
   
   1. Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
   
   
   2. Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
   
   
   3. Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.
   
   
   4. Disclose unavoidable conflicts.
   
   
   5. Be vigilant and courageous about holding those with power accountable.
   
   
   6. Deny favored treatment to advertisers and special interests and resist their pressure to influence news coverage.
   
   
   7. Be wary of sources offering information for favors or money; avoid bidding for news.
   
   

   
   

   
   The first three bullet points show the problem. They are not about acting independently, or about revealing the truth. They are about protecting the appearance of integrity. And they also presume that all ties to the community are bad. Do you just perhaps think that attitude might sneak into reporting? The fourth point, if followed, would testify as to the reporter's failure to uphold the first three points. I've never heard of a reporter doing such a thing. To the contrary, I've seen journalists defending their own political party from inconvenient evidence without hesitation.
   
   This whole rule puts the journalist in the impossible position of affirming that he has no biases at all. Bias is human. Only an inhuman robot could meet this requirement. Further, the rule forbids the journalist from trusting those on whom he reports. It presumes that ties are bad. Trust goes both ways. If he doesn't trust, he and his stories will not be trusted. And this enforced distancing from the community makes the journalist not part of it, and unable to understand or report accurately on it. It forces the journalist into solitary Egotism and Narcissism (or "me-ism"), the characteristic flaw of journalists today. Journalists need to join their communities, tone down the ego and distancing, become part of the community, and put their biases front and center. So do editorial boards.
   
   I'm not saying that journalists should write propaganda as covert agents for a political group or an ideological position. That would violate "Seek the truth and report it," which includes the truth of what is within the journalist's soul, and also the fourth principle "be accountable." But journalists should be part of their community. They should feel free to join voluntary associations, to fall in love with their beat, or even run for political office without losing their status as "journalists." These are what good and capable people do. Those who prevent themselves from acting like good and capable people demean themselves for a false principle.
   
   The third principle should be replaced with "Reveal the reporter's and editor's ties and biases."


4. "Be accountable" is absolutely true, but not followed by most journalist organizations. It is mostly ignored because it is directly opposed to the official third principle, "act independently." How can you "act independently" of the people in a community and also "be accountable" to the same people? In the long run, it is impossible. So current journals assign the accountability function to an ombudsman whose actual function is to spin and deflect rightful criticism about biased and outright false stories.Not only do journalists need to be personally accountable, but they also need to refrain from associating with organizations that are dedicated to falsehoods, such as criminal gangs, enemies at war, or those groups that are destructive of society in general. These kinds of organizations treasure their associations with journalists because friendly journalists buy them sympathy and public acceptance. And journalists must not let themselves be used as weapons against the social contract or law and order. Not if they have any wish to be the fourth estate of government. You see, they should be instinctively opposed to government, which extracts income by force from the citizenry much like a protection racket, but not to society.

If you have ever been the direct or indirect subject of a news story you can check this yourself. Were the facts reported correctly or incorrectly? Did they even get the names of the people involved right? Did the reporter delve into the thought processes of people involved in the story in ways that are literally impossible for the reporter to have known? Was the conclusion or lesson of the story transplanted into the facts of the story as if it was an invader from Mars? If you complained about it was it corrected, on page 17B, in white ink on a white background, with new falsehoods introduced in the correction? That's barely an exaggeration. If newspapers were honest about the quality of their reporting most would have more corrections than original reporting in every issue.

And that is why newspapers are failing. They are not worth their cover price, even in debased 2009 dollars. Their version of "truth" is nothing but rumor, lies and bias: a tale full of sound and fury, told by an idiot, signifying nothing. It is why newspapers will continue to fail. It is why the failure will accelerate. Even if the gubmint bails them out for now, once a Republican gets into office the reign of US gubmint newspapers (our Pravda and Izvestia) will be over.

Repairing the ethical code is a necessary step for recovery. The code requires journalists to take a step back from their community and look at it as outsiders. They may not trust things to be as they seem. This would allow them to be more objective, if they were capable of it. But they aren't. Everybody has biases, and not only do journalists have their own biases, because they mistrust their sources they are also biased in favor of man bites dog stories.

More on detachment, the original principle three. When writing freely from the imagination, nothing comes out but bias. See Maureen Dowd, Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass. When writing of something in the real world, as in the example of Plato's cave, the writer actually records an image of the real world projected on his own thought-patterns; or bias. Without a connection to the community to provide a feedback and sanity-checking mechanism, the writer's bias is never corrected. Instead, the reporter's bias adds to the bias of the editor who never even sees the real world with his own eyes, but only through the keyboards of his minions. This idolatry of detachment from real life causes the "ethical" journalist to let his bias grow until it is the monster that controls him.

Rather than purifying a journalism based on detachment and obscured bias, the answer is a journalism based on involvement and an insider's understanding: an insider's journalism instead of an outsider's journalism.

If insider's journalism sounds like blogging, perhaps it should. In ye olde days, journalists were amateurs who had other jobs but wrote about what they knew for the broadsheets. It was only with the advent of cheap newsprint and the automobile that it became possible for a single newspaper to bundle together the news of the day, stock quotes, classified advertising, commercial advertising, comics, sports, and the other categories of news and distribute this news cheaply to a large metropolitan area. Newspapers collected a "monopoly rent" because their distribution system was expensive to recreate, a defacto monopoly. And now that the internet has developed into an instant distribution system, newspapers can no longer extract those monopoly rents and have to radically restructure to deal with changing realities.

THE WAY FORWARD

How could a newspaper take advantage of its strengths? One of the still thriving and growing newspapers is the Wall Street Journal, which daily features actionable information that can give a tactical advantage to those businessmen who read it before their competitors. In other words, the WSJ is an intelligence service for businessmen. That is valuable, and people will pay for it. But intelligence doesn't have to consist of new information, it can also consist of the patient assembly of extant source information and connection to breaking stories for a first draft of history that will give those who read it a tactical advantage. The idea of connecting current events to history with minimal bias, vetting the connections, and maintaining a useful and actionable understanding of history as one of the roles of journalism is very new, when compared to the actual performance of journalists. It would make journalism into an intelligence service of use to everyone, not just to nations. It contributes to the transparency of world events, which should make the world safer for us all. And it combats the left's post-modern attack on history with the truth, which is that reality is knowable and truth gives an advantage to those who know it.

I ask you, would you pay for a newspaper if it gave you a competitive advantage versus those who didn't read it?

I would. But newspapers today do not.

More Reading...

Links Concerning Ethics

• Society of Professional Journalists Ethics and FAQL


• Err on the side of ethics


• Ethics and new media


• Reader's Reactions


• Consider Potential Harm and Public Interest


• Ways to Prevent Ethical Lapses


• Editors must be Ethical Purists

Papers' Ethical Codes

• New York Times


• Tampa Tribune


• Kansas City Star


• San Jose Mercury


• San Antonio Express-News


• Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Other notes.

• Newspaper Ad sales plummet.

Technorati Tags: Media, Bias, Ethics, Journalism, Culture War

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Union Corruption: Transparency v. Opacity

Don't be hoodwinked, don't be bamboozled, don't fall for the okey-doke

If any among my dear readers have ever flicked on a light switch at midnight in a kitchen infested by roaches, they will have seen the stomach-turning sight of a room in sudden, swarming motion as hundreds of roaches scuttle for the cracks at the edges of the room. Roaches don't like the light. They prefer to operate in the dark. The way to cure a roach infestation is to keep the light on and clean the house, throwing out nesting materials (even behind walls) and poisoning the roaches where they hide. Unfortunately, all too many people, in the face of an infested kitchen, simply shudder, turn off the light, and go back to bed. A particularly determined denier of roach-reality might prefer to paint over the light fixtures with black paint. That would hide the roaches from sight for good.

Apparently, under the Obama administration, the Department of Labor doesn't mind roaches so much as it curses the light that reveals them and tells us, the Americans who live in the house, to go back to sleep. For instead of fostering transparency, one of Obama's key words when running for president, the Dept. of Labor fosters opacity when it comes to what unions are doing with the money they hold on behalf of their members, just like the AFL-CIO wants.

The Indiana State Teachers Association's Insurance Trust exists to pay benefits for disabled teachers. It has $19 million in assets against $86 million in liabilities, is the subject of a FBI investigation, and is being taken over by the NEA. The ISTA's trust is in such bad shape because of funny business from the former executive director and the investment broker he chose to manage the trust. Most likely taxpayers will be stuck with the bill. James Sherk and Dan Lips write about the mess for NRO.

Sunlight protects against corruption and unethical practices. Congress passed the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) in the wake of scandals in the 1950s involving ties between organized labor and organized crime. Congress believed that workers had a right to know how their unions spent their dues. Lawmakers hoped that transparency would discourage kickbacks to the mob.

For over 40 years, however, the Department of Labor barely enforced the law. The disclosure forms allowed unions to list multimillion-dollar line items for “other” and “miscellaneous” expenses with no further details. In practice, the law did nothing to hold unions accountable.

Elaine Chao, President Bush’s labor secretary, made changing that a priority. Her Labor Department enacted reforms that required unions to itemize their expenses and meaningfully disclose their finances. By the end of her tenure, Secretary Chao (who now works with us as a distinguished fellow at the Heritage Foundation) had updated the LM-2 union financial disclosure form, the LM-30 conflict-of-interest-reporting form, and the T-1 forms for union trusts.

Other unions have been caught recently with their hands in the cookie jar: SEIU for instance. The Obama administration's Department of Labor is rolling back Secretary Chao's transparency reforms and returning to the previous, opaque standard for union financial reporting. Union members might as well look forward to their pension funds and insurance trusts going broke, just like the ISTA did. For the teeth of the LMRDA are being removed.

Is this the transparency Obama promised? Or is it the opacity his rivals saw in him? To echo the words of Obama:

Don't be hoodwinked, don't be bamboozled, don't fall for the okey-doke no matter what Barack Hussein Obama may say.

Truth to power!

Technorati Tags: Unions, LMRDA, Obama, Corruption, Crime

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Opposing Sotomayor: A Line in the Sand

As Andrew C. McCarthy wrote on Tuesday, "It’s not the rule of law, it’s the rule of lawyers: That’s the central message conveyed by Pres. Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor." She is, after all, widely admired among the Obamanist left for her empathy, not her temperament or wisdom. That plus her compelling life story and her love of Nancy Drew mysteries.

We also know that she has had many of her decisions reversed on appeal by the Supreme Court, that she is argumentative and unpleasant, that she believes the place of a judge is to create policy, rather than to apply the law impartially, and that she believes her race and gender make her better than whites or men.

Racism does not have a good track record. It's been tried a long time. And you would think by now that we'd want to put an end to it instead of putting it under new management.

(Thomas Sowell, 5/27/09 on the Glenn Beck Show)

Democrats and the partisan Democrat media have started their campaign for Sotomayor by blackmailing Republicans; saying if they oppose her that Republicans will never get another Hispanic vote. And they are also preemptively accusing Republicans of hypocrisy because George H. W. Bush mentioned upon nominating him that Clarence Thomas's inspirational life story should arouse Americans' empathy.

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Let's deal with these lines of attack.

Hypocrisy and Empathy

I'll take the second one first. When Bush pere nominated Thomas he praised him for his learning, his wise and brilliantly written opinions, and the respect he had earned from his colleagues and those who appeared before him. He also mentioned Thomas's background as an interesting sidebar. Then Thomas, who was a child of an impoverished single black mother became the target of the most hateful, vicious slanders and character assassination from the Democrats and their catspaws in the media, government bureaucracy, and academia. Let me repeat this. The Democrats insulted and attacked a black man who had overcome incredible odds and difficulties to rise, through merit, to the peak of his profession. In America, he had become through his own efforts an honest to goodness role model that should have made all black Americans proud, that should have inspired black Americans to become great jurors like Clarence Thomas.

Thank God the Democrats lost that battle, and Clarence Thomas survived it to become a great Supreme Court Justice.

Blackmail

Did Democrats suffer any backlash from their relentless, hateful, awful demonization of one of the best and the brightest among black Americans? They did not. Why not? Because they claimed he was a misogynist, that he liked porn movies, that he told off color jokes to women. So they claimed he was a misogynist, and that privileged them to attack him.

When Republicans proposed to appoint Miguel Estrada, another Hispanic, to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Democrats opposed him precisely because he is Hispanic. Karl Rove writes:

The media has also quickly adopted the story line that Republicans will damage themselves with Hispanics if they oppose Ms. Sotomayor. But what damage did Democrats suffer when they viciously attacked Miguel Estrada's nomination by President George W. Bush to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the nation's second-highest court? New York Sen. Chuck Schumer was particularly ugly, labeling Mr. Estrada a right-wing "stealth missile" who was "way out of the mainstream" and openly questioning Mr. Estrada's truthfulness.

What is wrong with Sotomayor? What makes her an out of the mainstream, left-wing stealth missile? What is wrong enough with her that even a Democrat would agree she is the wrong choice? Quite simply: She is a racist. Republicans, the party of Lincoln, the party that passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments against Democrat opposition, the party that was targeted along with black Americans by the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws alike, has a venerable history of opposing racism. A racist is a racist, "straight up," and we can hardly doubt that the woman who said any Hispanic woman can out-think any white man would think the same of a black man or woman. She is a racist. She believes in protecting her own group, her own race, at the cost of others. The law is only a secondary concern. Appear before Sotomayor in court and be sure that if you are white you will lose. If you are an employer you will lose. If you are a man you will lose. If you are Republican you will lose. The law is not the most important thing to her. Empathy is: Empathy for those who are most similar to her.

She believes in tribal justice, and she will always defend her tribe. Are you sure you want to appear before her in court? Are you sure you're in her tribe, and not in some other tribe? If the law changes with every new plaintiff how can anybody know how to act lawfully? If the written law is irrelevant then why should anyone obey it in the first place?

Judge Sotomayor's judicial philosophy is not to obey the law as written. It is to rule by her whim. That is the worst kind of rule. It is a wholesale rejection of what America stands for with the Rule of Law, and a return to medieval times.

Can a judge who believes as she believes take the Oath of Office without, at least on a subconscious level, expecting to break it? How can she administer justice without respect to persons when empathy for persons is the most important aspect of her c.v.? How can someone who is so passionate and partisan claim to be impartial? How indeed?

"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God."

She is wrong about the law. She is wrong for any court. With all due respect, she is most definitely wrong for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Those are the principles upon which Republicans should respectfully oppose Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court.

If it is a lonely fight, so be it. Let us draw a line in the sand. We will not let the anti-Revolutionary forces of those who would return us to the rule of kings advance without a fight. We will make a stand here, because it is important. And even if we lose this fight it's worth the fighting.

The choice to fight on principle says a lot about the party’s courage in a tough place. Instant retreat says just as much about cowardice. To fight will draw support both from those who have given up on Republicans (for good reason), and from those minority Americans who see that Republicans are actually willing to fight to protect them. Republican principles are true. They work for everyone: Black; white; yellow; red; English speaking; Spanish speaking; and even those who speak Mandarin. If Republicans fight for and articulate those principles every day, then the fight will inspire allies that Republicans need. Republicans need to fight for every step, every inch of ground. And instead of giving ten feet, or one foot, or one single inch, Republicans have to try to take an inch, or a foot, ten feet, or a mile.

Sirs, draw the line. Gird yourselves.

And when we are forced back, outnumbered, bloodied but still standing tall, then we draw the line again and once again prepare to fight. By fighting we will attract new allies and strengthen the will of our moribund support.

There is a principle in the opposition to Sotomayor: We will not accept racist or partisan or tribal interpretations of the law as just, but inevitably know they are as unjust as anything. The 14th Amendment stiffens our spine against them. And we will not accept “policy setting” and legislation from the bench as Constitutional. That is a lie. There is only one meaning to "interpret the Constitution," and it is to follow the original, plain English meaning of the words. Anything else is making it up by whim. Anything else is post facto legislation.

Ever since the revolutionaries of 1776 stood for the Rule of Law against the Rule by Whim of the English King, America has stood for the Rule of Law, not the Rule of Whim. America will not change that now. America will not change that ever.

Maybe some inspirational language from another time and another place will help stiffen the spines of conservatives to take a lonely stand and oppose Sonia Sotomayor. I have two inspirational passages from Winston Churchill to offer.

"I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat."

We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim?

I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. Let that be realised; no survival for the British Empire, no survival for all that the British Empire has stood for, no survival for the urge and impulse of the ages, that mankind will move forward towards its goal. But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope. I feel sure that our cause will not be suffered to fail among men. At this time I feel entitled to claim the aid of all, and I say, "come then, let us go forward together with our united strength."

And here is another, just as stirring. Obama gave back the bust of Churchill given to America after 9/11. He didn't think we needed Churchill's inspiration. I think we do.

"We shall fight on the beaches"

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be,
we shall fight on the beaches,
we shall fight on the landing grounds,
we shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."

Victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory there is no survival.

The battle begins today and every day for those who will take up the mantle to protect America against those who would overthrow America's Revolution of 1776 and return us to kingship, taxes, bread & circuses, the persecution of Christians, and tyranny.

Technorati Tags: Sotomayor, Constitution, Republicans, Racism, Post-racial

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Federalism Amendments - Reload

Randy Barnett continues to work on the Bill of Federalism (previously blogged on here). His updated version is here (PDF).

The Bill of Federalism was drafted by Professor Randy Barnett of Georgetown University Law School and is supported by The Nationwide Tea Party Coalition. You can support The Bill of Federalism by downloading the pdf above and delivering it, via email or print, to your local state legislator, requesting that they introduce a bill in their legislative body to petitition Congress to hold a Constitutional Convention for the purpose of passing all 10 amendments of The Bill of Federalism. You can find local contacts to help you in your state here.

So Barnett is moving ahead with the plan to advance it through the states. Individuals are to print the PDF out and give copies to their state and federal representatives, while explaining why it's a great idea.

I'm still thinking the last clause is the hardest part of that plan to actually perform.

Technorati Tags: Federalism, Constitution, Government

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Wayward Republicans need to be herded back to civilization

Want to see what is wrong with the Republicans in elected office? Take a look at the following table from Pew.

Allahpundit has plenty more. But that table shows where the Republican party has been going wrong for the last 10 years or so. It shows the Republicans have been doing the wrong thing so long it might not be possible to recover. But I still think it's worth trying to rescue the Republican party from its so-called leaders who have tried to turn it from the party of fiscal responsibility and economic strength into the "slightly less socialist than the Democrats party."

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UPDATE: We are the cowpokes we've been waiting for. Let's ride!

Thanks to David Hinz for the youtube idea!

Trackposted to Blog @ MoreWhat.com, Rosemary's Thoughts, Nuke Gingrich, Woman Honor Thyself, The World According to Carl, The Pink Flamingo, Leaning Straight Up, and CORSARI D'ITALIA, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Technorati Tags: Republicans

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