"Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected."It seems to me that when the laws become illegal & immoral, one is honor-bound to become an outlaw.
"If you think you have a right to force me to pay for your health care, then why don't you have a right to force me to pick your cotton?"
It was Jeffrey Quick who asked that over at Facebook, and it's one of the most elegant questions that I have ever seen on any subject.
I think I might have this done on a T-shirt, and I'm going to wear that sonofabitch out until someone answers me.
Let me get this straight: We're going to be gifted with a healthcare plan we're forced to buy and fined if we don't, which claims to cover at least ten million more people without adding a single new doctor but provides for 16,000 new IRS agents, written by a committee who's chairman says he doesn't understand it, passed a Congress that didn't read it but exempts themselves from it, and signed by a president who smokes, with funding administered by a treasury chief who didn't pay his OWN taxes, for which we'll be taxed for four years before any benefits take effect, by a government which has already bankrupted Social Security, Medicare, all to be overseen by a surgeon general who is obese and financed by a country that's ... broke! What could possible go wrong?"
The federal government is now $13 trillion in the red, the Treasury Department reported Wednesday, marking the first time the government has sunk that far into debt and putting a sharp point on the spending debate on Capitol Hill.
Calculated down to the exact penny, the debt totaled $13,050,826,460,886.97 as of Tuesday, leaping nearly $60 billion since Friday, the previous day for which figures were released.
At $13 trillion, that figure has risen by $2.4 trillion in about 500 days since President Obama took office, or an average of $4.9 billion a day. That's almost three times the daily average of $1.7 billion under the previous administration, and led Republicans on Wednesday to place blame squarely at the feet of Mr. Obama and his fellow Democrats.
"A $13 trillion debt is an alarm bell and a wake-up call combined, but Democrats are not even trying to pass a budget," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, Ohio Republican. "How out of touch can Washington Democrats get? Instead of continuing to pay lip service to this issue, President Obama should call on congressional Democrats to pass a budget that provides the fiscal discipline economists say is needed to create jobs and grow our economy."
The White House would not comment for the record, but an official speaking on the condition of anonymity said the administration is "committed to restoring fiscal responsibility."
The President has made a habit of using conservative talking points when trying to sell a liberal ideology because he knows that this is a center-right country that rejects his agenda when articulated honestly. His supporters have even tried to pin the blame of the potentially unconstitutional individual mandate on us. This approach brushes over the details of our research and ignores our ability to evolve past further developed research.
Over 16,000 new IRS agents will be hired by the government to enforce the President's mandate on the American people. The President's health care plan also raises premiums, taxes, and costs while lowering quality, and expanding Medicaid. These are not conservative ideas.
And let's be clear, these are not ideas Heritage has ever, or would ever, support. We made every effort over the past year to share our ideas for better health care reform with the President and members of both parties in Congress, but were not invited behind the closed doors. Now, after the bill is signed, it seems the President wishes we were along for the ride. We were not. We remain fervently opposed to the President's partisan plan, and urge its immediate repeal. This is not common politics, it's common sense.
Had President Obama limited his bill to centrist elements, he would have won wide bipartisan support for effective reform both within Congress and among the American people. He would have won it, too, at a fraction of the cost of this intolerable, huge and intrusive legislation. He would not now be facing popular rejection by the American people. And he would not need to misrepresent Heritage policies and positions in an attempt to give his radical health plan the patina of respectability.
Obama in Rude Denial
By The Prowler on 3.29.10 @ 6:09AM
IT'S ALL A GOP PLOT
The White House political and legislative operations were said to be livid with the announcement by several large U.S. companies that they were taking multi-million or as much as a billion dollar charges because of the new health-care law, the issue was front-and-center with key lawmakers. By last Friday, AT&T, Caterpillar, Deere & Co., and AK Steel Holding Corp. had all announced that they were taking the one-time charges on their first-quarter balance sheets. More companies were expected to make similar announcements this week.
"These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general," says a White House legislative affairs staffer. "Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative websites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It's BS."
On Friday White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were calling the CEOs and Washington office heads of the companies that took the financial hits and attacked them for doing so. One Washington office head said that the White House calls were accusatory and "downright rude."
The companies are taking the charges because in 2013 they will lose a tax deduction on tax-free government subsidies they have had when they give retirees a Medicare Part D prescription-drug reimbursement. Many of these companies have more than 100,000 retirees each. AT&T may have more than three-quarters of a million retirees to cover.
"Most of these people [in the Administration] have never had a real job in their lives. They don't understand a thing about business, and that includes the President," says a senior lobbyist for one of the companies that announced the charge. "My CEO sat with the President over lunch with two other CEOs, and each of them tried to explain to the President what this bill would do to our companies and the economy in general. First the President didn't understand what they were talking about. Then he basically told my boss he was lying. Frankly my boss was embarrassed for him; he clearly had not been briefed and didn't know what was in the bill."
It isn't just the President who didn't understand his own proposal. Late Friday, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and Rep. Bart Stupak, chairman of the Oversight and Investigations panel, announced that they would hold hearings in late April to investigate "claims by Caterpillar, Verizon, and Deere that provisions in the new health care reform law could adversely affect their company's ability to provide health insurance to their employees."
Neither Waxman or Stupak -- who betrayed the pro-life community by negotiating for more than a week with the White House to ensure his vote on the health care bill -- had anything more than a cursory understanding of how the many sections of the bill would impact business or even individual citizens before they voted on the bill, says House Energy Democrat staff. "We had memos on these issues, but none of our people, we think, looked at them," says a staffer. "When they saw the stories last week about the charges some of the companies were taking, they were genuinely surprised and assumed that the companies were just doing this to embarrass them. They really believed this bill would immediately lower costs. They just didn't understand what they were voting on."
"The President was right about one thing: The vote on Obamacare last night was a historic one.
The Democratic Party has in the course of the nine-month health care debate revealed itself to be an anti-democratic Party and an anti-liberty party. It is a party that has demonstrated its contempt for the Constitutional framework, for the democratic process, and for the expressed will of the American people. Its brazen contempt for the compact that holds the diverse factions of this country together has initiated a political war at home that will extend not only into the next elections but into the next generations that will be encumbered with the trillions in debt and oppressive government controls that the socialist majority in Congress has demonstrated that it is intent on inflicting on this country.
The people of this nation are still sovereign, and their voice will be heard. Last night’s vote was lost but it is not the end of the battle.
It is the beginning."
"We are governed by predators, perverts, and parasites: of the trash, by the trash, and for the trash. "
"Last night the Democrat party died as it drove a spear through the torso of the Constitution and passed legislation that the majority of Americans overwhelmingly opposed. Nancy Pelosi sauntered into the capitol surrounded by fellow socialists, carrying the gavel used in 1965 to pass the now-bankrupt Medicare.
All summer long Americans filled town halls, emailed, called, and faxed their lawmakers, and they were forsaken. They were called Nazis, racists, homophobes; they were threatened, beaten, and called stupid because they disagreed with the minority who feels that the government should run our lives. Our lawmakers unofficially stopped representing us last spring.
Last night, our legislators officially broke the contract with America that is the Constitution. Last night, they ceased to represent us. Last night, a new party was born; the malignant tumor that is the progressive caucus consumed the Democrat party from within and gave birth to the mainstream Socialist Party."
The problem with your premise—that everyone in America doesn't have health care—is that it's wrong. They do!And that my friends is the plain and simple truth. What you might call "pithy".
If you pay for your health care it is convenient. If you don't pay for your health care it is inconvenient.
"Liberals say Democrats have to pass this bill to prove they can govern. But will the public see wasting a year on something that’s not a priority, then pushing a bill they don’t want through multiple payoffs, and ending up with something they think will make their lives worse as a species of “governing” they want anything more to do with? Meanwhile, the Democrats are in the intensive care unit, their president wounded, their members demoralized, their coalition in tatters. Come November, voters may decide they’d rather be much less “governed”—or governed by somebody else."
