Dr. Paul Broun, U.S. Congressman, Republican (GA-10), has sent out an email which came to me via Townhall.com containing information on House bill H.R. 45--Obama's gun control package. Among other things, this bill would establish a national gun registry database of every gun and its owner for the whole country. According to the email, "Your private information and every gun you own would be in the system."
Major findings included:Can anyone say Atlas Shrugged?
• Two-thirds, or 65%, of doctors say they oppose the proposed government expansion plan. This contradicts the administration's claims that doctors are part of an "unprecedented coalition" supporting a medical overhaul.
It also differs with findings of a poll released Monday by National Public Radio that suggests a "majority of physicians want public and private insurance options," and clashes with media reports such as Tuesday's front-page story in the Los Angeles Times with the headline "Doctors Go For Obama's Reform."
Nowhere in the Times story does it say doctors as a whole back the overhaul. It says only that the AMA — the "association representing the nation's physicians" and what "many still regard as the country's premier lobbying force" — is "lobbying and advertising to win public support for President Obama's sweeping plan."
The AMA, in fact, represents approximately 18% of physicians and has been hit with a number of defections by members opposed to the AMA's support of Democrats' proposed health care overhaul.
• Four of nine doctors, or 45%, said they "would consider leaving their practice or taking an early retirement" if Congress passes the plan the Democratic majority and White House have in mind.
Obama: “I’ve been fighting alongside Acorn on issues you care about my entire career. Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drive in Illinois, Acorn was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.”
I have heard rumblings of this over the last few months. It is a reflection, I think, of the growing fear that regular Americans have of government, and the immense swing to the left that Obama has attempted to take us on in his first few months in office. Add to that Obama's radical associations and the Chicago-style one-party politics that are Obama's forte, plus the fact that he stubbornly marches forward with his agenda in spite of the overwhelming opposition of the population at large, and you have ample reason for many people to entertain these fears.Some conservatives have begun to openly wonder if Obama is going to seize power in America. Would he want to do this? Perhaps so (a scary thought, but he has promised change.) No one dreamed that Carter, the worst president of the last century, wanted or planned to seize power. Clinton wanted to win power, but the worst anyone expected of Clinton was Huey Long bossism.For an alternative viewpoint (sort of) click here.
Obama rose in politics through the thoroughly corrupt one-party government of Chicago. His spiritual advisor sounds like a rabble-rousing storm trooper. His intellectual mentor, Saul Alinksy, like the Bolsheviks and Nazis, believed in state terrorism. If Obama wanted to follow their leads, could he? I believe not.
Once it became clear that Obama was acting without any pretense of constitutionality, he would need muscle to back him up. Yet the greatest source of that muscle, the United States Military, loathes Obama as much as he loathes them. He would need intelligence, yet his maltreatment of the CIA ensures that those operatives would toss more bananas peels in front of him than real information should he make an extraconstitutional move.
Obama would also need the police, yet the President’s comments about a Cambridge policeman, a member of what has to be among the most politically correct force in America, shows the natural antipathy between Obama and law enforcement officers. The police, “pigs,” to the crowd that Obama belonged to as a community organizer, cannot be a solid support of any seizure of power.
What about the civilian national security force promised by Obama during the campaign? Conservatives are much more likely to be veterans and own guns than leftists. The creation and coordination of a real civilian army would also profoundly antagonize all state and local police forces.
Our federal system still exists, although states’ rights have declined greatly, but state governments still exercise real power (as several governors demonstrated in rejecting stimulus funds.) Nazis, Soviets, and Fascists all had to first crush federalism before gaining absolute power. States founded America, something almost unique among nations – state governments still have a special role in our United States. Crushing states completely would be very hard and very risky.
Beginning a coup or a revolution from above, as some fear Obama may do, also presumes that the revolution will end in a certain direction. If Obama and his elitist cohorts began a revolution, it would surely end: but how? Not only are the military, the CIA, and the police generally disgusted with Obama, but the ideological sentiment of the American people is profoundly out of step with Obama.
In every single state of the nation, according to a recent Gallup Poll, conservatives outnumber liberals. Consistently over the last decade, including the most recent, Battleground Poll, sixty percent of Americans call themselves conservatives. It is impossible to imagine conservatives support a leftist coup or revolution from above.But the problem for Obama would extend beyond that. Attempting something like a seizure of power could be expected to alienate vast numbers of moderates and many self-defined liberals as well. Probably three-quarters or more of Americans would oppose any practical effort to end democracy, suspend civil rights, or end the Constitution which was open and clear.
Even his political party would have nightmares about any attempt by Obama to seize political power. The consequences of failure, which would be likely, could be a conservative counter-revolution. More likely, though, would be an electoral nightmare for Democrats which would last for decades. This is why a seizure of power is unheard of in the English-speaking democracies of Britain, Canada, America, Australia, and New Zealand.
The British Parliament, in which the Labour Party has huge majorities, has the theoretical power to pass a law which ended the requirement for new elections at least every five years. The Labour Party could simply make its power permanent. This would not even be an unconstitutional seizure of power. Yet no one believes Prime Minister Brown would ever propose that or that he could persuade his party to accept that. Even though he will be thoroughly trounced in the next general election, there will be an election in about nine months.
Politicians need elections just like lawyers need lawsuits. Without contested elections, Congress becomes as irrelevant as the Reichstag after Hitler got the Enabling Act passed. So even Obama's own party, or much of it, would oppose a seizure of power.
Finally, if Obama attempted an effective seizure of power and provoked a real national revolution, the repercussions for Democrats and the left in a successful counter-revolution could lead to a second American revolution in which vast amounts of political power could be explicitly returned to the states, the role of government in our lives precisely defined, the semi-divine status of judges overthrown, and power returned to the people.
Could the leftist choke hold on the media prevent a new revolution? Well, the left has tried to stop the Tea Party movement and the Town Hall protests with no success at all. Polling data shows the increasing ineffectiveness of the establishment media in controlling American’s thinking and actions.
Obama is not going to try to seize power, because he would fail utterly and damn his precious radicalism for decades in America. What he will do is what his predecessors on the left have done: acquire power through Fabian tactics; win one battle (like increasing union bosses’ power) and then move to the next lever of power in government and society. That is the dangerous path we have been on for many decades. We need to fight the very real enemies, not imaginary ones.
Saturday's "Tea Party" rally in Washington, D.C. may have far exceeded almost all expectations. According to individual reports on the internet late Saturday The National Park Service had reportedly estimated around 1.2 million people attended the rally. There is no mention of the rally on the Park Service website and I have been unable to confirm that they have released any official estimate.
Some websites citing the 1.2 million number have claimed to be quoting Park Service employees, but I can find no direct quotes from anyone connected to the Park Service that can be confirmed at this time. Phone calls to the NPS went unanswered on Sunday.
There were also several reports Saturday saying that ABC and Fox News had reported that the crowd was estimated to be as high as 2 million. ABC News is now saying they never reported that number. According to ABC they were misquoted by a rally speaker. At this time there is no report on the Fox News website that includes an estimated attendance figure.
Some liberal websites and blogs are putting the number much lower, with estimates ranging anywhere from 20,000 to 70,000. Based on photographs and video footage of the event the numbers would appear to be much larger than those estimates. The ticketed area of the National Mall alone has a capacity of 240,000 and the crowd clearly filled that area and beyond. The public access area of the Mall holds nearly 950,000 and photographs of that area show it to be at or near capacity, although it has been reported that other groups were holding events in that area.There was also this gem of a paragraph in the article:
On Friday the White House claimed they had no idea the rally was even planned. A ridiculous assertion that shows how dismissive the Obama administration and the Democrat-led Congress are of those who oppose their agenda. It is impossible to believe that President Obama knew nothing of the event. The denial is a perfect example of why the President is losing the trust of many Americans. He stretches his credibility to its limits, and beyond.
Obama, the Mortal(pictures added by The River.)
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, September 4, 2009
What happened to President Obama? His wax wings having melted, he is the man who fell to earth. What happened to bring his popularity down further than that of any new president in polling history save Gerald Ford (post-Nixon pardon)?The conventional wisdom is that Obama made a tactical mistake by farming out his agenda to Congress and allowing himself to be pulled left by the doctrinaire liberals of the Democratic congressional leadership. But the idea of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pulling Obama left is quite ridiculous. Where do you think he came from, this friend of Chávista ex-terrorist William Ayers, of PLO apologist Rashid Khalidi, of racialist inciter Jeremiah Wright?
But forget the character witnesses. Just look at Obama's behavior as president, beginning with his first address to Congress. Unbidden, unforced and unpushed by the congressional leadership, Obama gave his most deeply felt vision of America, delivering the boldest social democratic manifesto ever issued by a U.S. president. In American politics, you can't get more left than that speech and still be on the playing field.
In a center-right country, that was problem enough. Obama then compounded it by vastly misreading his mandate. He assumed it was personal. This, after winning by a mere seven points in a year of true economic catastrophe, of an extraordinarily unpopular Republican incumbent, and of a politically weak and unsteady opponent. Nonetheless, Obama imagined that, as Fouad Ajami so brilliantly observed, he had won the kind of banana-republic plebiscite that grants caudillo-like authority to remake everything in one's own image.
Accordingly, Obama unveiled his plans for a grand makeover of the American system, animating that vision by enacting measure after measure that greatly enlarged state power, government spending and national debt. Not surprisingly, these measures engendered powerful popular skepticism that burst into tea-party town-hall resistance.
Obama's reaction to that resistance made things worse. Obama fancies himself tribune of the people, spokesman for the grass roots, harbinger of a new kind of politics from below that would upset the established lobbyist special-interest order of Washington. Yet faced with protests from a real grass-roots movement, his party and his supporters called it a mob -- misinformed, misled, irrational, angry, unhinged, bordering on racist. All this while the administration was cutting backroom deals with every manner of special interest -- from drug companies to auto unions to doctors -- in which favors worth billions were quietly and opaquely exchanged."Get out of the way" and "don't do a lot of talking," the great bipartisan scolded opponents whom he blamed for creating the "mess" from which he is merely trying to save us. If only they could see. So with boundless confidence in his own persuasiveness, Obama undertook a summer campaign to enlighten the masses by addressing substantive objections to his reforms.
Things got worse still. With answers so slippery and implausible and, well, fishy, he began jeopardizing the most fundamental asset of any new president -- trust. You can't say that the system is totally broken and in need of radical reconstruction, but nothing will change for you; that Medicare is bankrupting the country, but $500 billion in cuts will have no effect on care; that you will expand coverage while reducing deficits -- and not inspire incredulity and mistrust. When ordinary citizens understand they are being played for fools, they bristle.
After a disastrous summer -- mistaking his mandate, believing his press, centralizing power, governing left, disdaining citizens for (of all things) organizing -- Obama is in trouble.
Let's be clear: This is a fall, not a collapse. He's not been repudiated or even defeated. He will likely regroup and pass some version of health insurance reform that will restore some of his clout and popularity.
But what has occurred -- irreversibly -- is this: He's become ordinary. The spell is broken. The charismatic conjurer of 2008 has shed his magic. He's regressed to the mean, tellingly expressed in poll numbers hovering at 50 percent.
For a man who only recently bred a cult, ordinariness is a great burden, and for his acolytes, a crushing disappointment. Obama has become a politician like others. And like other flailing presidents, he will try to salvage a cherished reform -- and his own standing -- with yet another prime-time speech.
But for the first time since election night in Grant Park, he will appear in the most unfamiliar of guises -- mere mortal, a treacherous transformation to which a man of Obama's supreme self-regard may never adapt.
Next, we have the Democrats, champions of the people! These brave heroes never miss an opportunity to stand up for fairness, justice, and the little guy, thumbing their considerable noses at special interest groups, big corporations, and evil right-wing Nazis like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. Truth is their Gibraltor and they will fashion that Gibraltor on their potter's wheel into whatever form best suits their political ends. We might point out that one cannot be a champion of the people while robbing individuals of their rights and property, but in doing this we prove ourselves to be just the mind-numbed minions of Rush Limbaugh. We should learn to think for ourselves . . . think like Democrats! We must be at one with the beautiful and important people. Watch them as they hail the great leader!
And for what reason has this regal assemblage been called? Is it a call to war? Is the kingdom at stake? Must some catastrophe be averted? It is all three. This coven has gathered to expose and then cast out that infernal disease, that enemy of the state, corporate greed, along with its sibling, profit, and its progenitor, irresponsibility (that wicked criminal which has ever haunted us under the pseudonym freedom.)
"South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted "You lie!" after Obama had talked about illegal immigrants." - Fox News article.
My dear readers (all four of you), if you come to this blog with the idea that I am an apologist for the Bush administration, or think that perhaps because I lambast Democrats in Congress and in the White House that means I approve of everything Bush did, then you are mistaken.
Camille Paglia, columnist, uber-liberal, and Obama aficionado, agrees with me and this blog concerning Nancy Pelosi . . . and . . . the town-hall protesters.But who would have thought that the sober, deliberative Barack Obama would have nothing to propose but vague and slippery promises--or that he would so easily cede the leadership clout of the executive branch to a chaotic, rapacious, solipsistic Congress? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whom I used to admire for her smooth aplomb under pressure, has clearly gone off the deep end with her bizarre rants about legitimate town-hall protests by American citizens. She is doing grievous damage to the party and should immediately step down.In fact, Paglia speaks a lot of truth in her column and I recommend you go there and read all of it. The admissions will be shocking coming from a liberal, but that's Paglia.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Obama's aggressive endorsement of a health care plan that does not even exist yet, except in five competing, fluctuating drafts, makes Washington seem like Cloud Cuckoo Land. The president is promoting the most colossal, brazen bait-and-switch operation since the Bush administration snookered the country into invading Iraq with apocalyptic visions of mushroom clouds over American cities. . . .
From the Politico: (click here for the entire article)Former Alaska GOP Gov. Sarah Palin defended her claim that the Democratic health care proposal would create “death panels” in a statement Wednesday night slamming President Barack Obama.
“Yesterday President Obama responded to my statement that Democratic health care proposals would lead to rationed care; that the sick, the elderly and the disabled would suffer the most under such rationing; and that under such a system, these ‘unproductive’ members of society could face the prospect of government bureaucrats determining whether they deserve health care,” Palin wrote in a note on her Facebook page.
“The provision that President Obama refers to is Section 1233 of HR 3200, entitled ‘Advance Care Planning Consultation.’ With all due respect, it’s misleading for the president to describe this section as an entirely voluntary provision that simply increases the information offered to Medicare recipients,” she continued.
“Section 1233 authorizes advanced care planning consultations for senior citizens on Medicare every five years, and more often ‘if there is a significant change in the health condition of the individual ... or upon admission to a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care facility... or a hospice program.’"
The White House and Democratic lawmakers have blasted Palin in recent days for suggesting that her own son, Trig, would have had to face a bureaucratic panel to get access to health care under the provision in the House health care proposal because he was born with Down syndrome.
“The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s ‘death panel’ so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society,’ whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil,” Palin wrote last week.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs identified Palin on Wednesday as one of the GOP leaders he says is spreading “wrong” information about the health care debate.
The news from Barbara Wagner's doctor was bad, but the rejection letter from her insurance company was crushing.
The 64-year-old Oregon woman, whose lung cancer had been in remission, learned the disease had returned and would likely kill her. Her last hope was a $4,000-a-month drug that her doctor prescribed for her, but the insurance company refused to pay.
What the Oregon Health Plan did agree to cover, however, were drugs for a physician-assisted death. Those drugs would cost about $50.
"It was horrible," Wagner told ABCNews.com. "I got a letter in the mail that basically said if you want to take the pills, we will help you get that from the doctor and we will stand there and watch you die. But we won't give you the medication to live."
"There is a lot of disinformation about health insurance reform out there, spanning from control of personal finances to end of life care. These rumors often travel just below the surface via chain emails or through casual conversation. Since we can’t keep track of all of them here at the White House, we’re asking for your help. If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov."
"For the record, the President has consistently said that if you like your insurance plan, your doctor, or both, you will be able to keep them."
"I think you’ll hear states and governors standing up and saying 'no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their healthcare," Perry said. "So my hope is that we never have to have that stand-up. But I’m certainly willing and ready for the fight if this administration continues to try to force their very expansive government philosophy down our collective throats." - Rick Perry
Dick Morris nails Obama once again, this time in the New York Post."President Obama's rhetoric last night summoned the memory of 1984, George Orwell's novel of a nightmarish future--where the slogan of the rulers is 'War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength.'
The president assures us that he will cut health-care spending. . .by adding $1 trillion to health-care spending.
He says that 'health-care decisions will not be made by government'. . .while he sets up a new Federal Health Board to tell doctors what treatments they can offer and to whom and under what circumstances.
Obama told the media, 'I will free doctors to make good health-care decisions'. . .by telling the physicians what to do. . . ." - Dick Morris
"Obama says that his START will be a great boon, setting an example to enable us to better pressure North Korea and Iran to give up their nuclear programs. That a man of Obama's intelligence can believe such nonsense is beyond comprehension. There is not a shred of evidence that cuts by the great powers -- the INF treaty, START I, the Treaty of Moscow (2002) -- induced the curtailment of anyone's programs. Moammar Gaddafi gave up his nukes the week we pulled Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole. No treaty involved. The very notion that Kim Jong Il or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will suddenly abjure nukes because of yet another U.S.-Russian treaty is comical."
