Up Yours, America

The Wall Street Journal offers a penetrating critique of ObamaCare, as the Senate prepares to vote.

Or as the Democrat Senator from Rhode Island would put it: Just another bunch of white male supremacist Aryan skinhead birther pistol fanatics going off the deep end:

Mr. Obama promised a new era of transparent good government, yet on Saturday morning Mr. Reid threw out the 2,100-page bill that the world's greatest deliberative body spent just 17 days debating and replaced it with a new "manager's amendment" that was stapled together in covert partisan negotiations. Democrats are barely even bothering to pretend to care what's in it, not that any Senator had the chance to digest it in the 38 hours before the first cloture vote at 1 a.m. this morning. After procedural motions that allow for no amendments, the final vote could come at 9 p.m. on December 24.

Even in World War I there was a Christmas truce.

To read the whole sorry tale, go here.

Health Care Reform by Legal Insurrection, Literally

By William A. Jacobson:

Saturday, December 19, 2009

This Is Why I Named This Blog "Legal Insurrection"

I was in the car most of the day, so I haven't had a chance to post on the Ben Nelson sellout. So here are some initial thoughts:

Yes, it is that bad. The Democrats are about to put in place the legislative, regulatory and bureaucratic infrastructure for a complete government takeover of health care. Just read the comments from the supporters and you will see a common theme -- this is just the beginning. They know it, we know it, and Ben Nelson knows it but doesn't care because he scored some pork for his home state, just like Mary Landrieu

This is the worst of Washington. Payoffs, lies, deceit, and deception. Oddly enough, I've come to have more respect for the left-wing advocates of single-payer than the so-called moderates who will sell their principles for money. At least the left-wing has principles, even if I disagree with those principles. The moderates like Nelson and Landrieu have no principles, at least none that cannot be sold.

Where is Evan Bayh? His silence has been deafening.

How amazing is the number of circumstances which caused this perfect storm, without any one of which we wouldn't be on Obama's precipice: Massachusetts changes its rules for a second time to allow appointment of a Democrat in Kennedy's place rather than having to wait for the special election; Al Franken outmaneuvers and out-litigates Norm Coleman to steal the Minnesota race; Rahm Emanuel recruits "blue dog" Democratic wolves in sheep's clothing and people fall for it; the media covers up the Obama agenda during the campaign, portraying Obama falsely as a moderate; [added] George Allen says "Macaca," and so on.

Democrats do not care about the 2010 election cycle, or 2012. Obama has said it. He'd rather get his restructuring of society in place and be a one-term president, than be a two-term president and not succeed in perfecting our imperfections.

There is a slight, slight chance this legislation can be stopped in the House, so don't give up until the last vote is taken.

This perfect storm likely never will be repeated. But it only takes one storm to wreak havoc and cause damage which will take years or decades to undo, if it can be undone.

The only ray of hope is that most of the provisions will not kick in until well after November 2010. I've said it before, this is the political fight of our lives for the future of the country.

Rescinding Obamacare needs to be the organizing theme of the 2010 election. And throwing out the bums who voted for it.

Now I remember why, as I saw the Obama wave rising last fall, I named this blog Legal Insurrection. That's what's needed, now more than ever.

Update: A couple of commenters correctly have pointed out that I should have included Ted Steven's defeat as another element in the perfect storm. Remember that Steven's conviction later was dismissed due to prosecutorial misconduct, but the Democrat who won the election remains in office, as I posted previously, Ted Stevens Conviction Reversed, But What About The Election? I noted the implications in that post: "Without the Begich vote, Obama would have a much more difficult time passing his agenda."

And, now we know why Evan Bayh was relatively silent in public. Behind the scenes, Bayh was a moving force in closed meetings to put the plan together:

Lawmakers who attended a private meeting between Mr. Obama and Senate Democrats at the White House on Tuesday pointed to remarks there by Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, as providing some new inspiration.

Mr. Bayh said that the health care measure was the kind of public policy he had come to Washington to work on, according to officials who attended the session, and that he did not want to see the satisfied looks on the faces of Republican leaders if they succeeded in blocking the measure.

Jewish Atheist Knows a Tyrant When He Sees One

From John W. Whitehead's December 11, 2009 interview with Nat Hentoff "America Under Barack Obama":

Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist, anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the ideological left.

At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because she was Caucasian; called into a talk show hosted by Oliver North to agree with him on liberal intolerance for free speech; was a friend to the late Malcolm X; and wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan's second album.

A self-described uncategorizable libertarian, Hentoff adds he is also a “Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro-lifer.” Accordingly, he has angered nearly every political faction and remains one of a few who has stuck to his principles through his many years of work, regardless of the trouble it stirred up. For instance, when he announced his opposition to abortion he alienated numerous colleagues, and his outspoken denunciation of President Bill Clinton only increased his isolation in liberal circles (He said that Clinton had "done more harm to the Constitution than any president in American history," and called him "a serial violator of our liberties.").

Born in Boston on June 10, 1925, Hentoff received a B.A. with honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. From 1953 to 1957, he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He has written many books on jazz, biographies and novels, including children's books. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Commonwealth, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for more than 25 years. In 1980, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Education and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1985, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Northeastern University. For 50 years, Hentoff wrote a weekly column for the Village Voice. But that publication announced that he had been terminated on December 31, 2008. In February 2009, Hentoff joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow.

Hentoff's views on the rights of Americans to write, think and speak freely are expressed in his columns. He is also an authority on First Amendment defense, the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, students' rights and education. Friends and critics alike describe him as the kind of writer, and citizen, that all should aspire to be—"less interested in 'exclusives' than in 'making a difference.'" Critiquing Hentoff's autobiography, Speaking Freely, Nicholas von Hoffman refers to him as "a trusting man, a gentle man, just and undeviatingly consistent."

Hentoff took to heart the words from his mentor, I. F. "Izzy" Stone, the renowned investigative journalist who died in 1989: "If you're in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told."

Nat Hentoff has earned the well-deserved reputation of being one of our nation's most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers. He began his career at the Village Voice because he wanted a place to write freely on anything he cared about. And his departure from the publication has neither dampened his zeal nor tempered his voice.

Hentoff, whose new book, At the Jazz Band Ball—Sixty Years on the Jazz Scene (University of California Press), is due out in 2010, took some time to speak with me about Barack Obama, the danger of his health care plan, the peril of civil liberties, and a host of other issues.

Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system. If the American people have their health care paid for by the government, depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives are worth living much longer.

In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore? Throughout Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though he promised not to.

So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that this guy is a phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a very dangerous mindset for a president to have.

JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?

NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense, "evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing weakens the Constitution.

In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Obama has done nothing about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it. He has absolutely no judicial supervision of all of this. So all in all, Obama is a disaster. ...

JW: One of the highest unemployment rates in the country is among African-Americans.

NH: Not only that, the general unemployment rate is going to continue for a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum. As usual, the people who are poorest—the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people—are going to suffer more than anyone else under the Obama administration. This is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the unemployment statistics of the Obama administration are not believable. I can't think of a single area where Obama is not destructive.

JW: A lot of people we represent and I talk to feel that their government does not hear them, that their representatives do not listen to them anymore. As a result, you have these Tea Party protests which the Left has criticized. What do you think of the Tea Party protests?

NH: I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. A lot of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights. ...

JW: You lived through the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Is it worse now than it was then?

NH: McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone too far. What we have now may be more insidious. What we have now in America is a surveillance society. We have no idea how much the government knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a long time. You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say, and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, but the technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.

There is much more here. MUST reading.

Take Over the Health Care of All To Provide it to 5% Who Don't Have it Now?

This article appeared here.

December 17, 2009

Government Shouldn't Control Health Decisions

By Larry Elder

Americans overwhelmingly like their health care and their health insurance. While Americans reject ObamaCare, the President and Congress insist on driving it through.

Most Americans, up to 85 percent, already have health insurance and are satisfied with it. Lacking health insurance is different from lacking health care -- which, by law, emergency rooms must supply. Millions go without health insurance by choice and not due to lack of resources. Deduct from the number without insurance those who have access to it via entitlement programs, those temporarily without it while between jobs, those here illegally and those who could go on their parents' insurance plans by paying affordable amounts -- and you're down to 10 million to 15 million people without health insurance for longer than a year. This represents 5 percent of Americans.

To address this, the President and the Democrats are this close to a complete government takeover of health care. And a takeover it is. Assuming some kind of plan reaches the President's desk, it will -- at minimum -- force all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay fines or worse. It will force nearly all employers to provide health insurance or pay fines. It will tell health insurers that they must accept applicants with pre-existing illnesses and restrict their ability to "discriminate" based on factors like sex and age.

Incredibly, the President and Congress tell us that our economic recovery hinges on "health care reform" and that they can achieve it -- providing millions of people with health insurance estimated to cost a trillion dollars in the first decade -- while simultaneously reducing the deficit. The plan anticipates cutting hundreds of billions from the popular Medicare programs, whose beneficiaries vote in numbers greater than any other age group. Doctors and hospitals already complain that Medicare reimbursements fall short of costs, let alone profits. Good luck with that.

"Health care reform" achieves its deficit-reducing magic by collecting taxes in the early years -- building up money -- while paying out very little. Only after the first four years does money go out. It also forces states to pick up part of the tab. So, voila, it actually reduces the deficit -- at least in the first decade.

Then what? The Congressional Budget Office -- in cost estimates full of caveats, conditions and on-the-one-hands -- says that it could/might/may reduce the deficit in the second and third decades, too. Again, this assumes continued cuts in doctor and hospital reimbursements.

Despite the White House photo op of docs in their white frocks, most physicians oppose ObamaCare. They resent further government supervision and control over their practice. A poll commissioned by Investor's Business Daily found that 65 percent "oppose" ObamaCare and that 45 percent would consider taking early retirement or leaving their practice if the bill went through.

Given the broad opposition -- most Americans, most doctors and seniors in fear of cuts in Medicare -- why do it?

First, the Democrats -- now in control of all three branches of government -- have convinced themselves that they face a political price if they fail. ObamaCare supporters, based on bogus assumptions and inflated numbers, argue that many, if not most, bankruptcy filings are due to health care bills. If, as President Obama asserts, "reforming" health care and economic prosperity go hand in hand, how can they abandon it?

Second, while a large majority of Republicans and most independents oppose these "reforms," Democrats overwhelmingly support them. They consider health care and health insurance a right -- never mind the Constitution or the price tag -- and think "the rich" should bear the costs. Congresspersons fear an electorate upset at a failure "to deliver" a victory over the evil, money-grubbing insurance companies.

Third, many believe in good faith that this is the "right thing to do." This breathtakingly ignores the mountain of evidence that government command-and-control health care reduces quality, reduces innovation and inevitably leads to rationing. The president of the Canadian Medical Association says Canada's system -- a single-payer kind, favored by President Obama -- is "imploding." She calls for more competition.

Critics of America's health care system say that citizens in other countries enjoy longer life expectancies. But after adjusting for homicides, increased infant mortality due to teen pregnancies and low birth weights, obesity and other behavioral factors, the discrepancy disappears. Compare American medical outcomes against those of other countries. Our system produces the world's best results for cancer patients who go into medical care at the same time similarly situated patients enter their countries' care. Our pharmaceutical companies lead the world in coming up with new life-extending and -enhancing drugs, a record at risk given new controls and taxes under the guise of "reform."

When the ObamaCare bill comes due -- when the deficit explodes and the costs are "controlled" through government-directed rationing -- supporters, including President Obama, will long have departed Washington, leaving others to deal with the mess. In the meantime, bend over and cough. Or else.

Copyright 2009 Creators Syndicate, Inc.