Not only is our government incompetent, but now we have law enforcement agencies that are actively working AGAINST our country.
From the Washington Times, ICE gags sheriff (h/t to the great Michelle Malkin)
The spat between controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) surfaced on July 23 and 24 when the sheriff's deputies were ordered by ICE officials to release illegal immigrants who had been caught in a broader criminal sweep. Sheriff Arpaio complained to the media; a federal spokesman claimed the release was the sheriff's fault; and the sheriff then released audiotapes proving that ICE officials, not he, had ordered the release.
Caught looking foolish, ICE officials threatened to withdraw the sheriff's authority to enforce any immigration laws because the sheriff had violated a ban on contacting the media without first obtaining approval from the Department of Homeland Security, which is ICE's parent agency.
Yes, you read that correctly: The sheriff was ordered to shut up. To make it clearer, ICE's principal legal adviser, Peter S. Vincent, wrote to Arpaio attorney Robert Driscoll on July 31 that the sheriff's department, under the terms of its agreement with ICE, must "coordinate with ICE regarding information to be released to the media regarding actions taken under this memorandum of agreement."
To Mr. Driscoll's complaint that the requirement violates the sheriff's First Amendment rights (not to mention the public's right to know), Mr. Vincent replied: "Few courts would consider an obligation to consult with the federal government before releasing information to the media that may involve sensitive law enforcement issues to be an unreasonable burden on the right to free speech." Furthermore, he wrote, government can "lawfully" require "the surrender of a constitutional right ... provided the conditions are reasonable."
Our Dear Leader is happy to compromise your fundamental Constitutional rights, but will make those same rights freely available as ABSOLUTE rights if you are not a citizen and are able to sneak over the border illegally.
If you do not see a big problem here, you are numb. It is time to rise up.
Liberal efforts to get you to believe that current efforts to "reform" health care will not be a government takeover are a lie.
Yes, when they say this they are liars. Representative for Life Barney Frank (Comm - MA) let the cat out of the bag.
And what will Single Payer get you. This is the plan used in Canada and the U.K. Just in case you believe it when supporters of Single Payer tell you that these health system are taking adequate care of their patients, read this;
The Government's drug rationing watchdog says "therapeutic" injections of steroids, such as cortisone, which are used to reduce inflammation, should no longer be offered to patients suffering from persistent lower back pain when the cause is not known.
Instead the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) is ordering doctors to offer patients remedies like acupuncture and osteopathy.
So, they will give up effective therapy and substitute "alternative" junk because it is cheaper - effectiveness be damned. Does the government care at all?
No.
The NICE guidelines admit that evidence was limited for many back pain treatments, including those it recommended. Where scientific proof was lacking, advice was instead taken from its expert group. But specialists are furious that while the group included practitioners of alternative therapies, there was no one with expertise in conventional pain relief medicine to argue against a decision to significantly restrict its use.
Dr Jonathan Richardson, a consultant pain specialist from Bradford Hospitals Trust, is among more than 50 medics who have written to NICE urging the body to reconsider its decision, which was taken in May.
He said: "The consequences of the NICE decision will be devastating for thousands of patients. It will mean more people on opiates, which are addictive, and kill 2,000 a year. It will mean more people having spinal surgery, which is incredibly risky, and has a 50 per cent failure rate."
There are thousands of cases like this in both the U.K. and Canada. This is not an unusual situation.
So, why will we do this to ourselves? Power, that's why.
Democrats and other Liberals™ (socialists, communists, etc.) absolutely do not want people reading the legislation that they are, in their ever so democratic and liberal way, want to jam down our throats. If we were to find out what is in their legislation, they are afraid that we might not like it.
Congress: It didn't take long to run into an "uh-oh" moment when reading the House's "health care for all Americans" bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.
When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.
It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of "Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage," the "Limitation On New Enrollment" section of the bill clearly states:
"Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day" of the year the legislation becomes law.
So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won't be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.
They are lying to us and we are (mostly) still asleep. Our freedoms (to buy what we want with our own money, for instance) are being taken away from us and most of the country is completely unaware.
This is extreme dangerous, we are being led by a government that has no respect for the people that they govern. They want us under their thumb.
Read the whole piece.
The public option won't be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.
Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn't be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans' lives.
It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It's scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we'll come across in the final 1,002.
I am most amused when an organization uses politicians that they have bought and paid for (Mr. Obama bought and paid for by organized labor) to gain an advantage using our unethical and incompetent government go on to injure themselves. But, being blinded by partisan ideology and greed, do not even care (or notice).
"Bailout" is now both a noun and a verb, and FedEx characterizes what Congress might do for UPS as the "Brown Bailout." But properly used, "bailout" denotes a rescue of an economic entity from financial distress. Although UPS is suffering from the recession, so is FedEx. Furthermore, UPS, whose revenue is 36 percent larger than FedEx's, began advocating this injury to FedEx long before this recession.
What UPS is doing is called rent-seeking -- bending public power for private advantage by hindering a competitor. This practice, which expands exponentially as government expands arithmetically, is banal but can have entertaining ricochets:
If Congress makes FedEx's operations more precarious by changing the law to make it easier for local disputes to cripple its operations, Smith says a multibillion-dollar order for 15 Boeing 777s will be automatically canceled. One of the unions lobbying on behalf of UPS and the Teamsters is the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, whose members make 777s.
As always, read the whole thing for two reasons (or more); 1. Mr. Will is one of the finest writers alive and is both crystal clear and entertaining. 2. He provides valuable legal history and supporting arguments leading to the conclusion that I quoted above.
Liberals are sick with PDS and have been shamelessly lying, smearing, filing false charges against, and seeking to harm in every conceivable way, Sarah Palin. They dishonor and defile themselves in the process (as if they had any honor to begin with).
Not everyone falls for the lies. This gives Governor Palin the opportunity to recover. Roger Stone has the Plan. Palin's Plan
It was 1962. Richard Nixon had had enough. Enough of being called "Tricky Dick, the man no one would buy a used car from." Enough of the elitist derision that had come his way since the Hiss case. He had had enough of the liberal media who consistently held him to a higher standard than his Democratic opponents and poked fun at his lack of sophistication - he being the son of a grocer. So Nixon blew. He announced the end of his career in seeking elective office; "You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." Six years later he was inaugurated as President of the United States.
This moment came last week for Sarah Palin and her husband Todd. Sick of the derision of the media for her unsophisticated country ways, her plain speaking and consistently being held to a higher standard than her critics, Palin had had enough. Palin resigned as Governor and, like Nixon, did not reveal her future plans. A follow-up FACEBOOK posting for her legions of admirers was clearly written in her own hand as it is plain-spoken and blunt.
Watching the Washington chattering class pan the Palin moves shows the moronic level of political analysis in the media today. Switch-hitter Dave Gergen, Ed Rollins who bolted his Party to go destroy the candidacy of Ross Perot and then trashed Perot, and Upper West Side reform Democrat Dick Morris who toiled for Ohio lefty, Howard Metzenbaum and Clinton but is today a born again Christian and right-winger, all panned the Palin move. Fools.
In fact, resignation as Governor was necessary to preserve any prospect that Palin could be nominated and elected in 2012 or beyond.
Read it all and do not believe the Democrat Party and Liberal™ smear merchants. She was and is a more worthy candidate for President than either John McCain or Barack Obama.
Get through the lies and the smears and the false charges and just listen to what she has to say. You will be very surprised.
Back when the news still took the trouble to cover the bloodbath in Iran, the world saw young Iranians holding signs in English. Urgent pleas were coming through computers worldwide begging the leader of the free world to help the Iranian people. Many Americans would be amazed to learn how many Iranians were educated via petrodollars in the United Kingdom or the United States. Some Iranian young people speak far better English than your local high school kids.
The late shah’s son reached out to Obama for support:
“I would like to take this opportunity and tell the President this is a crucial moment - on behalf of my compatriots and millions who have been turning to the outside world, particularly to this President - to say: don’t let us down.”
While Barack Obama was eating ice cream, Neda’s parents were forced from their home by government agents. Public displays of mourning were shut down. Nineteen year old Kaveh Alipour was gunned down by government barbarians. After frantically searching for news about his missing son at hospitals and eventually the morgue, Alipour’s father was told he would be required to pay a $3000 “bullet fee” to reimburse the government for the ammo expended in executing his child.
Barack Obama did eventually deliver the obligatory “we are outraged” statement. He held off as long as he could, until public opinion became too clamorous to overlook. While he gabbled, the violence in Iran escalated. Iranian citizens were being massacred in the streets with axes and machetes. Students were being routed from their beds in their dorm rooms.
Ronald Reagan responded to a similar cry for help from the people of Poland who were then enslaved by the Soviet Union. Reagan minced no words in decrying the Soviet Union as an “Evil Empire”. He never expelled gibberish about how the United States shouldn’t “meddle” as innocent citizens suffer.
Then, as today, pantywaist liberals were caterwauling about toning down the rhetoric so as not to pique oppressive dictators. Thankfully, Reagan ignored such nattering. The Poles were doing what the Iranians are today: insisting on the most basic of human liberties. Ronald Reagan had no intention of sitting on the sidelines waiting to see how this thing played out:
“In a stiff note to Soviet boss Leonid Brezhnev; Reagan said that if the Russians kept up their thuggish response to Poland they ‘could forget any new nuclear arms agreement.’ Gone too would be better trade relations, and in their place would be the ‘harshest possible economic sanctions’ if they even thought of invading Poland as they had done with Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Hungary in 1956.”
As always, read the whole thing. There is a lot more.
Obama's imagined world of "universal" rights would exist if only the expressed principles of the United Nations applied. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which insists (among other things) that everyone has the right to express opinions without interference, the right to take part in government through freely chosen representatives and the right to freedom of religion (including the freedom to change religion). And yes, if you can read all the way to Article 20 without collapsing in tears, you'll find that, as Obama says, "Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."
But of course the Declaration of Human Rights has never been anything more than an exercise in wishful thinking, a set of empty gestures based on pious hopes. Why did the authors (who were led by Eleanor Roosevelt) claim that their wishes for human freedom were in fact the "rights" of all humans? They knew, as much as anyone, that only a fortunate minority possessed such rights. There were no such rights, for example, in the vast empire then being assembled by the Soviet Union.
Read the whole thing - I haven't even said what Obama's lies are - so you'll have to read the article.
Suffice it to say that we made a huge mistake electing this guy and we, and many in the rest of the world, will pay for it.
I am a retired Navy Chief Petty Officer and a freelance performing 'cellist who brews his own beer. I am an Orthodox Christian. I am NOT a professional journalist, therefore nothing prevents me from writing what is true. I am now working as an Engineering Technician at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard.
