November 03, 2009
The health care bill headed for a vote in the House this week costs $1.2 trillion or more over a decade, according to numerous Democratic officials and figures contained in an analysis by congressional budget experts, far higher than the $900 billion cited by President Barack Obama as a price tag for his reform plan.While the Congressional Budget Office has put the cost of expanding coverage in the legislation at roughly $1 trillion, Democrats added billions more on higher spending for public health, a reinsurance program to hold down retiree health costs, payments for preventive services and more.
Keep in mind these are the purposefully low-balled estimates. Invariably government-mangled programs end up costing ten to twenty times as much as proposed once implemented.
The cost of government-rationed health care has ballooned from $900,000,000,000 to $1,200,000,000,000—over $300 billion—in less than a week, without ever leaving paper... just imagine how bad it will get if it ever becomes law.
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November 02, 2009
"The American people spoke loud and clear at town hall meetings all across the country throughout August. But, it would appear that Congress didn't hear a word they had to say. The Democrats' latest health care proposal unveiled late last week may be packaged a little differently, but itÂ’s the same old bad bill as before."This bill is a trillion-dollar, budget-busting, government takeover of our health care system. It will put bureaucrats between people and their health care. It will lead to rationed care, hurting the most vulnerable amongst us first. It will break the bank, leaving our children to pay the bill with diminished freedoms and dwindling prosperity.
"The American people need to stand up again and make sure that Congress hears them this time. Speaker Pelosi is putting her bill on fast track to a vote – and it remains to be seen if the House will even get a chance to vote on the commonsense Republican alternatives. The people need to make a House Call on Washington this week and tell their Representatives to vote no to a government take-over of one-fifth of our economy. This is gangster government at its worst.
"I urge all Americans to come to Washington this Thursday. Come and meet up with your Representative and tell them that you want to control your health care."
"Gangster government at its worst."
That's putting it mildly.
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A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama's pastor of 20 years praising Marxism and discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government. Equally important, Wright is being introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration and dedication to the transformation and control of the private media in the U.S.In an article in the socialist Monthly Review, "Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle," McChesney declared, "Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism."
In the video, which captures Wright's appearance at a September 17, 2009, anniversary celebration of Monthly Review, Wright said that while the "corporate media" provide a "binary lens" of the world, in such terms as "communist versus Christian," Monthly Review offers what it calls "no-nonsense Marxism."
He added: "You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism."
He called America "land of the greed and home of the slave."
It's a nice Republic we have, if we can keep it.
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The ice and snow that cap majestic Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are vanishing before our eyes.If current conditions persist, climate change experts say, Kilimanjaro's world-renowned glaciers, which have covered Africa's highest peak for centuries, will be gone within the next two decades.
"In a very real sense, these glaciers are being decapitated from the surface down," said Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. Thompson is co-author of a study on Kilimanjaro published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study's authors blame the disappearing ice on increases in global temperatures and diminished snowfall at Kilimanjaro's summit.
Previous studies of Kilimanjaro's glaciers have relied on aerial photographs to measure the rate of the retreating ice. For this new survey, scientists climbed the mountain and drilled deep into the glaciers to measure the volume of the ice fields atop the 19,331-foot (5,892-meter) peak.
And this is reality:
"Kilimanjaro is a grossly overused mis-example of the effects of climate change," said University of Washington climate scientist Philip Mote, co-author of an article in the July/August issue of American Scientist magazine.Mote is concerned that critics will try to use the article to debunk broader climate-change trends.
He hastens to add that global warming is, indeed, responsible for the fact that nearly every other glacier around the globe is melting away. Kilimanjaro just happens to be the worst possible case study.
Rising nearly four miles from the plains of eastern Tanzania, Kilimanjaro has seen its glaciers decline steadily for well over a century — since long before humans began pumping large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, Mote points out.
Most of the world's glaciers didn't begin their precipitous declines until the 1970s, when measurable global warming first appeared.
Also, recent data from Kilimanjaro show temperatures on the 19,340-foot volcano never rise above freezing. So melting triggered by a warmer atmosphere can't be the reason the small summit ice sheet is retreating about 3 feet a year, said Georg Kaser, co-author of the new article and a glaciologist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Man-made global warming (creating glacial melt) cannot be a factor in a glacier disappearing if the temperature of the glacier never comes close to rising above freezing (which is underlined by the fact that the global temperature has been declining since 1998).What is far more likely is that constantly lower amounts of participation over the past century mean that the glaciers are in a natural state of decline, and state they have been in since at least 1912.
What is causing the decline?
Instead, melt on Kilimanjaro is caused by sublimation, which turns ice directly into water vapor at below-freezing temperatures—essentially the glacier gets a giant case of moisture-sapping freezer burn.
Thompson has been beating this drum since 2002, but the fact remains that his claim that man-made global warming in the cause of the glacial retreat is a farce.
Posted by: Confederate Yankee at
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...
Wrong again, Bob.
Check out As part of the social contract of our democratic Republic, we follow the laws set down to us by the House of Representatives and the Senate, deliberative bodies elected from and by the people.
But laws and social contracts are not immutable or ironclad, especially when they invalidate liberty and justice, and infringe upon the inalienable rights of man.
When the elected become corrupt, and instead focus on using their offices to build more power for themselves instead of working for the betterment of the society, then they have violated the sacred trust of population.
There are various articles of legislation currently being manipulated by the Democratic Party in the House of Representatives, Senate, and White House that are an affront to the ideals this nation was founded upon.
It was during such a failure of the social contract between the people and their distant government that these enduring words were authored:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
Such words and such a dissolution of the contract between the government and the governed should never be entered into lightly or in haste; even the best outcome of such a conflict stands to wreck the surviving nation while the echoes of that decision reverberate, and the distinct probability exists that the resulting congress may result in an amalgamation no better than the last, with far too many broken bonds and bodies to show for an enfeebled change.
Nor is there any reason to suspect that the existing social remedy of the ballot box is too far corrupted to cease having power, despite the best attempts at collusion between power brokers, nationalized community organizations, and special interests.
But history has shown us that ever society has a breaking point where the State becomes more powerful than the people it represents, and laws are thereafter written for the benefit of the government instead of the governed. This we call tyranny.
There should be very little doubt at all that the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, represents the essence of that tyrannical impulse. She leads men and women who have never trusted in the resourcefulness of their fellow man, and never understood that a man's dreams and aspirations are a far more powerful and driving force for success than any diktat. They represent law that makes men subservient to the state, and ultimately to themselves.
Likewise, Harry Reid, the present Senate Majority Leader, has little use for true social justice, just a thirst for social control and obedient, docile constituencies. His faction schemes and plots, disemboweling individual liberties and disinterring pogroms that should have long ago been discarded "on the ash heap of history" as one of our most eloquent leaders recounted in a reclaimed phrase.
But perhaps no one has less faith in the promise of America than our current President, Barack Obama.
Whether his vision of what this nation could accomplish and what it should represent was tarnished in a youth spent living in a foreign nation, or was twisted in a transformational experience that saw him aligned with murderous terrorists and race-obsessed radicals is really of little consequence.
He has shown himself to be a friend of radicals and an alien to the core beliefs of our nation, ready to defend our enemies at a moment's notice, propping up dictatorships, and caring more about the welfare of terrorists than pregnant women, but that is his right as an elected official, and our curse for listening to his oratory instead of discerning his lack of substance, character, and decency.
But our obligation to the law and the lawmakers is not a one-way social contract.
If our lawmakers abandon the founding principles of this nation, and use their power to obfuscate, deceive, bully and strip basic rights away from the people, then they are forfeit to the social contract, even if they have managed to "abide" by the laws they've written in support of the state.
Ultimately, laws are only lawful if the govern find them fair and justified. All else is dogma.
And so when power-mad legislatures and executives use direct lies and emotional rhetoric in order to deceive their constituencies in an attempt at tyranny that serves to increase their power while undermining the principles that has enabled this government of the people, for the people and by the people, we owe them no more allegiance.
One may even begin to speculate on whether we owe them civility for their transgressions, which amount to a fundamental betrayal of our social contract as Americans.
Unlike other nations and states in times both past and present, we have the possibility of correcting our mistakes and removing the disloyal via the ballot instead of the barrel of a gun.
Let us hope that our elected officials recognize, however, that our patience is not finite, nor our obligation to bear their indecent assault on our liberties unlimited.
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The red boxes are around questions asking for the person's e-mail address and what time of day they plan to vote.So, now yours truly, a perfect stranger from outside of New York's 23rd Congressional District, knows the Name, Phone Number, Age, and Gender of 25 residents of NY-23.
Because the e-mail I received is part of a large orchestrated campaign, an undetermined but far from small number of perfect strangers predominantly from outside of New York's 23rd Congressional District will know this information about hundreds — if not thousands — of residents of NY-23.
Additionally, if I were to carry out the calls (which I of course will not), I would have the cell phone number, e-mail address, and planned voting time of any person in the group of 25 who responds to my request for that information.
It doesn't take much imagination to see what could happen, but I guess I need to draw a picture for old Mitch:
- With a person's e-mail addy and cell number, a spammer can put them on every junk mail and calling list there is.
- Thanks to easily available Internet phone directories, criminals can learn where these people live. By asking a few additional questions, they can learn who lives alone. If they also learn when they won't be home (i.e., out voting) and live reasonably close, they can steal them blind while they're away.
- Even more scary, a violent criminal can use answers to OFA's official questions combined with other information they might learn through probing to commit violent acts when these people ARE home.
Not just organized, but organizing for crime... that's the Chicago Way.
* * *
On a more serious note, I've been following the NY-23 situation, but felt others in the media and blogosphere have covered it in sufficient detail that any additional "me, too" commentary was superfluous.
That said, it seems that the Conservative Party was right to run Doug Hoffman against RINO Dede Scuzafavor (or whatever her name is) and Democrat Bill Owens, which was clearly revealed when Scuzzy threw her support behind the Democratic candidate despite receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars (and perhaps as much a sa cool $1 million) in financial support from the Republican Party. Needless to say, I think she'll find the GOP's purse strings with be cut off in her next local election, and I suspect her official transition to the Democrat party will be coming soon (if not immediately, if rumors that she is doing robo-calls for the Democrat are true).
The effort of the national DNC and associated activist groups in this race is fascinating considering this is a race for a one-year term. Obviously, they are far more concerned about the trendsetting and symbolism of a very conservative candidate besting the squishy GOP moderates they would much rather prefer to face, not to mention the Democratic candidate that they want to win. And besting them handily he is: the most recent polls show the conservative Hoffman dominating the race over Owens 54%-38%.
If Hoffman wins in a dominating fashion as the polls are suggesting, it could potentially ignite a trend of conservative candidates to be fielded against Republican moderates in primaries, not with the expectation that the resulting conservative versus Democrat race would amount to a protest vote, but with the expectation that the conservative candidate may actually stand a far better chance of actually getting elected than the squishy RINO or the Democrat. That has to terrify not just an Obama White House worried that their brand is rapidly becoming an albatross, but status quo-invested moderate Republicans as well.
Such a turn of events would only embolden the grass roots conservative movement, but we'll have to see if the election is a bellwether of a momentum shift, or an endpoint. As Glenn Reynolds notes, it isn't just the election, but what happens afterward that matters.
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An explosion on a Fort Bragg observation point killed a civilian Friday, Fort Bragg spokeswoman Jackie Thomas said Sunday.Two civilians were in the area when the blast went off at 12:15 p.m., Thomas said.
One was killed, the other was not injured. The names of the victims were not released. Thomas said they were not Army employees.
It sounds like these civilians were probably not supposed to be there, but the statement is so antiseptic that we can't be sure exactly what is going on.
I'm going to recall an old NCIS episode and wonder if they might have been hunting scrap metal on a bombing range and set off unexploded ordnance.
Update: When I'm good, I'm good. Score one for Darwin:
Fort Bragg officials say a civilian killed in an explosion at the North Carolina Army post was scavenging for scrap metal when he stepped on a round and it exploded.
Posted by: Confederate Yankee at
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