Eleanor Duckwall's Spotlight

Video: "Fear the Boom and Bust" a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem

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When government is the enemy

Cuba, the Soviet Union (now Russia), Iran, Venezuela, China, Nazi Germany, Saudi Arabia, the E.U., in my opinion are all examples of governments that are, or were, their citizens' enemy. Adding the United States to that list is something that I never thought would happen, but after the precedent-setting passage of the Obama health-care "reform" bill, reluctantly the U.S. must be added to the list of infamous governments that seriously curtail the rights of citizens through an intrusive government implementing unreasonable rules and regulations that, in this case, imperils citizens through unnecessary, uncontrollable spending and expanded authority over every aspect of their lives.

March 21, 2010 has entered the psyche of many Americans as a "day of infamy," the "day democracy died." In future years we will ask each other what we doing that Sunday as we ask about where we were and what we were doing on 9/11, the day of the Challenger accident, or the day that JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Older Americans can tell you what they were doing on VE Day, the end of WWII in Europe, and VJ day, end of War with Japan. And of course, so far, we still remember Pearl Harbor Day, the 1941 day America entered WWII that actually started in 1939 (or 1937, depending on who's counting).

Eventually health care must be reformed, but creating an instrument that expands the power of the IRS, that mandates that private citizens buy a product whether they want it or not, that includes measures unrelated to health care such as the Student Loan Program makes me very uneasy because of precedent, the word that everyone in field of law understands.

Lawyers and judges all over this land refer to legal precedents in order to craft their arguments and decisions.

Precedent: In common law legal systems, a precedent or authority is a legal case establishing a principle or rule that a court or other judicial body utilizes when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts.

As of January 24, 2010 there were 150 lawyers in the elected Congress, as well hundreds, perhaps thousands in the cadre of lobbyists, Congressional staffers, advisors, and legal representatives, and in the President's Cabinet.

And the President AND his wife are both lawyers as are other political and past-Presidential couples. And Obama was a Constitutional Law professor. Believe me these people know what they are doing, understand the precedents they are setting, and yet they did it anyway.

The citizens of the United States are being set up and sold out. The questions are: to and for whom?

Update: Repeal and Replace - but First Reveal

The Demcare control freaks are partying hard

Rep. Dingell: It's taken a long time to 'control the people'

Where the cliche 'Pyrrhic Victory' comes from

VDH: We've Cross the Rubicon

As a nation we've been dragged kicking and screaming across the Rubicon, the river of no return now a metaphor for "now going back" by our President and his minions who promised "hope and change" as well as "fundamental change." Well we now have the latter rather than the first as a new precedent has been set. Government will now be able to use the format as a blueprint for for other police-state intrusions, so far using the IRS as the enforcers, but even that may change as resistance will surely grow.

The Height of Irony: Maxine on Health Care Bill & Process

Let me get this straight.

We're trying to pass a health care plan
written by a committee whose chairman says
he doesn't understand it,
passed by a Congress that hasn't read it
but exempts themselves from it,
to be signed by a president that
also hasn't read it and who smokes,
with funding administered by a treasury chief
who didn't pay his taxes, all to be overseen
by a surgeon general who is obese,

and financed by a country that's broke.

What the hell could possibly go wrong?

(More Than) Eight Ways Obamacare Grows the U.S. Government

From David Gratzer at National Review:

1. Obamacare creates a new, government-run assisted-care insurance program to compete with existing private plans. CLASS Act, as it’s called, is essentially a new entitlement, and its proponents promise it won’t cost the Treasury a penny. That’s what Washington used to say about Social Security. The CBO, incidentally, predicts CLASS Act will increase the deficit within two decades.
2. Obamacare creates a Medicare panel to cut payments for ineffective procedures and prescriptions. The panel will override the wishes of patients and physicians, just as it has in countries where it’s already been tried, such as Britain. The British government, by the way, is presently reviewing the mandate of its deeply unpopular committee.
3. Obamacare expands Medicaid eligibility by as much as one-third, increasing taxpayer liability for entitlements at the exact moment Washington needs to contain entitlements. It’s like deciding to build a swimming pool and gazebo when your house already has a double mortgage and a cracked foundation.
4. Obamacare gives the federal government the power to specify what every insurance plan must cover, and doesn’t touch the hundreds of state-level benefit mandates that are already in place. And, by the way, it’s a power that Washington will immediately use — both the House and Senate bills contain new mandates.
5. Obamacare creates dozens of new offices, bureaucracies, committees, programs, and authorities — more than 110 in the Senate bill — to implement the law and develop new regulations, including the Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute.
6. Obamacare forces states to set up health-insurance exchanges to foster competition. Massachusetts has already tried this, with no reduction in premiums.
7. Obamacare substitutes more government for patient choice by gutting Medicare Advantage (an option through which seniors can receive their Medicare benefits in the form of private insurance plans) to pay for new entitlements and new services. Let’s be clear: Medicare Advantage is hardly perfect, and Medicare itself is in need of a rethink, but the responsible step would be to seek reforms in order to reduce the deficit, not to shift the money to create and expand other entitlements.
8. Eight, with so many subsidies and program expansions, Obamacare will push the government’s share of national health spending well past the 50 percent level forever. Let’s put that in perspective: In socialized health-care systems such as Canada’s — private insurance is still banned in much of that country — government accounts for about 70 percent of total health-care spending.

And here's number 10, one that Gratzer forgot,as if the IRS doesn't have enough power over Americans: the IRS is to be the government's thuggish enforcer.

Grazter goes on to imply that the influence of lobbyist can only grow as they "attempt to sway the decisions of the health-benefit super-committee - which is changed with determining the services covered by your insurance -- or the Medicare panel, which is authorized to 'guide' physicians' treatment decisions."

I'm sure glad that I didn't spend tens of thousands of dollars and thousands of hour preparing for a career in medicine, only to have a "new boss" whether want one or not.

And if I were close to retirement age or could afford to do so, I would retire as I am certain will happen as many in profession now are weighing their options and will bow out... unless of course they are forced by a contrived penalty not to take that step... yet another way of increasing the size of government and its insidious intrusion (number 11).

Now where I have heard about that before? I know: in the Soviet Union and Castro's Cuba, among other places.

This bears repeating: if ObamaCare passes, you can kiss liberty and freedom good-bye.

What happens if ObamaCare passes?

So much "blood is shooting out of my eyes" that I can barely see the keyboard, but here is a warning and promise to any legislator that votes for this vampiric legislation that will suck the life out of American liberty by creating a structure that will allow government intrusion into every corner of our lives as well as drive health-care personnel from the profession.

If you think that the Tea Party Movement is bad now, wait until the upcoming election season. You will see hordes of disgruntled Americans moving against those that IGNORED their wishes on this issue.

No one is saying that health care should not be reformed, but this is not the appropriate way that Americans want legislation to be crafted. And what's more, it should never be "deemed" as passed.

If the "deeming" process goes forward, then ALL legislators should be held accountable as all will be splashed with the processes' filth and mud.

Is it clear to you now?

St. Patrick's Day: Why do we wear green? and What is IRISH bacon?

Husna Haq at Christian Science Monitor:

"There are only two kinds of people in the world," an Irish saying goes. "The Irish and those who wish they were."

But for 24 hours this Wednesday, that saying is a pot o'blarney. This St. Patrick's Day, we'll all be Irish. [If we want to be!]

St. Patrick's Day was originally a Roman Catholic feast day for Ireland's patron saint, celebrated only in Ireland since the 1600s. But it evolved into a secular holiday in the 1700s, when Irish immigrants in the US held some of the first St. Patrick's Day parades. More than a show of patriotism, the parades were an opportunity for Irish immigrants to make a political statement about their discontent with the low social status in America.

Today, St. Patrick's Day is a transcontinental celebration of Irish culture, replete with festive food and traditions. Ever wonder why we eat corned beef, wear green, and pinch our friends on St. Patrick's Day? Read below:

"The Truth About Progressives - aka Marxists"

The Health Care debate is NOT over health care, it's all about FREEDOM versus unbridled federal power

Several people I know that identify themselves as progressives become incensed when their ideology is labeled "socialist" or "Marxist." No, they tell me, progressivism has nothing to do with Marxism or Socialism. The problem is that, like Barak Obama, they have been immersed in the ideology, or brainwashed since childhood. Unfortunately the same is happening today in our public schools.

JB Williams at Canada Free Press:

To fully under stand the progressive movement and their current rush to grab one-sixth of the US economy via unconstitutional federal health care mandates, one must follow the trail that leads from the Maoist Movement of the 60s that started in Berkley, California, and the Marxist Movement that has culminated in the joint venture between the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and Socialist Party USA, today's Democratic Socialists of America.

You do not have to believe what I tell you in this column. But if you study the sources linked in this column, no reasonable mind can come to any other conclusion. Information is power. If most Americans were aware of all that is presented in this column, they would know exactly what to do to save their Constitutional Republic, while they still can.

"Mexico drug war: A cancer spreading to U.S."

This blog is often criticized for being "racist," "Islamophobic," "Xenophobic" and "anti-Mexican." It is "racist" or "Islamophobic" to point out how Americans are being forced to change to accommodate Muslims and Islam? Is it "racist" or "xenophobic" to be concerned about the spread of drugs and drug violence from Mexico and Central America? I don't think so!

Here is Chelsea Schilling at WND:

Bodies are piling up along U.S.-Mexico border towns as two formerly allied drug gangs engage in open combat in Mexico's streets within miles of U.S. cities – but the cartels' empires are hardly limited to the south side of the border.

Two drug gangs in the town of Reynosa, across from McAllen, Texas, are fighting to gain control of key drug routes. A 200-mile stretch of border from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo – directly across from Brownsville to Laredo, Texas – is brimming with violence stemming from bloody battles between the long-established Gulf Cartel and a group called Los Zetas, former Mexican special forces soldiers originally recruited as assassins for the Gulf Cartel.

The U.S. government has called Los Zetas "the most technologically advanced, sophisticated and dangerous cartel operating in Mexico."

Ralph Reyes, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency's chief for Mexico and Central America, explained in August, "The Zetas have obviously assumed the role of being the No. 1 organization responsible for the majority of the homicides, the narcotic-related homicides, the beheadings, the kidnappings, the extortions that take place in Mexico."

Shaidle: "No Irish Need Invent Urban Legends About 'No Irish Need Apply' Signs"

Every generation, in order to impress the next, comes up with tall tales about hardship and discrimination. Take for example the parent/grandparent who impresses how difficult life was in their youth: "I had to walk five miles to school, through the snow, carrying my little sister on my shoulders, and hauling our books in my little red wagon."

That is one of the more benign stories.

My mother always told of having to gather breakfast eggs while fending off the rooster, and then the "attack goose" who would chase across the yard as she carried the egg basket in one hand and pulled along the milk cow with another.

Yes, Mom, we all acknowledge that Depression babies had a harder time than those born after World War II.

The stories become more serious when ethnic and religious groups talk about hardships and discrimination. In fact, there is usually a kernel of truth in the tales and legends, even though sometimes the details aren't what they seem.