budbromley

Thanks to Mrs. Dottie Hibbert and Jimmy Carter for contributing great reasons to vote against Obama and Democrats in 2012.  Mr. Carter was praising the ‘Occupy’ movement for focusing on the growth of wealth disparity.  Wealth disparity has grown tremendously under Obama and the Democrats now in Congress.  Perhaps Mr.Carter hoped that we would not notice.

In 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt said: “Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fibre. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”

Obama’s 2012 campaign website claims that Obama is “The only candidate fighting for the middle class,” but his policies have produced a shrinking middle class with less income, far less assets, and out of control debt. (3) (4)

Millions of Americans endured financial calamities in the recession.  But for many in the black community, job loss has knocked them out of the middle class and back into poverty. (5) And some experts warn of a historic reversal of hard-won economic gains that took black people decades to achieve.   “History is going to say the black middle class was decimated” over the past few years, said Maya Wiley, director of the Center for Social Inclusion. “But we’re not done writing history.” Adds Algernon Austin, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy: “The recession is not over for black folks.” Austin thinks more black people than ever before could fall out of the middle class because the unemployment rate for college-educated blacks recently peaked and blacks are overrepresented in state and local government jobs. Those are jobs that are being eliminated because of massive budget shortfalls. (6)

Princeton Professor Cornel West, an African-American, eagerly shook the hand of President Barack Obama in June 2010. Today, West calls Obama “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” Obama and Democrat policies benefit the upper one tenth of one percent of the population, for everyone else a government benefit means economic enslavement.

“This year, more than 46 million (15% of all Americans) will get food stamps…45% higher than when Obama took office, 69 percent increase from 2007, and twice as high as the average for the previous 40 years.” America’s political elite have created a European-style, class-based economy with a voting block of people dependent on their government.  Our situation is becoming as dangerous as Greece. http://news.investors.com/article/598993/201201260805/entitlements-soar-under-president-obama.htm

“According to the Census Bureau 49% now live in homes where at least one person gets a federal benefit – Social Security, workers comp, unemployment, subsidized housing, and the like. …That’s up from 44% the year before Obama took office, and way up from 1983, when fewer than a third were government beneficiaries.”

“The American public’s dependence on the federal government shot up 23% in just two years under President Obama, with 67 million now relying on some federal program, according to a newly released study by the Heritage Foundation.” http://news.investors.com/ArticlePrint/600452/201202080802/government-dependence-jumps-under-president-obama.aspx

Since President Johnson launched the “War on Poverty” in 1964, federal means-tested welfare spending has increased exponentially. Today, the U.S. spends 13 times the amount it spent on welfare in the 1960s—or about four times the amount needed to pull every poor family out of poverty.

However, welfare programs have failed to address the causes of poverty, and the federal poverty rate remains nearly unchanged. (1)  Not only do the poor become addicted and enslaved to welfare payments, middle class working people become enslaved by taxes and ever increasing regulations and ever increasing government debt.  The “War on Poverty” is a means to drive the increase in government jobs, government payrolls and government budgets and thereby the power and control of government over American lives, all paid for by taxpayers, primarily middle class taxpayers and top 10% earners, and their children and grandchildren.

“While the 1996 welfare reforms successfully moved people from welfare into work, it did not, as some believe, “end welfare as we know it.” In fact, these reforms restructured only one of the more than 70 federal means-tested programs. Today, these programs are spread over 13 government agencies and amount to almost $900 billion in spending per year. The growth of welfare spending is unsustainable and will drive the U.S. into bankruptcy if allowed to continue unreformed. Since the 1960s, the U.S. has spent approximately $16 trillion on welfare. Over the next 10 years, welfare spending is projected to cost taxpayers $10.3 trillion. Today, means-tested assistance is the fastest growing part of government, with our nation spending more on welfare than on national defense.”

We have a spending problem in America. This short video illustrates the magnitude of just how much we spend in just one year.   http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=JY8LKII_MNA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

“…deficit spending during Obama’s four years in the White House (based on his own figures) will be an estimated $5.170 trillion — or $5,170,000,000,000.00.  To help put that colossal sum of money into perspective, if you take our deficit spending under Obama and divide it evenly among the roughly 300 million American citizens, that works out to just over $17,000 per person — or about $70,000 for a family of four.”…”The previous record for most deficit spending during a presidency was set by President George W. Bush (see table 1.3 in the White House’s Historic Tables). During Bush’s 8-year administration, total deficit spending was $3.402 trillion. That’s a truly extraordinary and reckless sum.  It’s also $1.768 trillion less than deficit spending in just four years under Obama. Per year, deficits under Bush averaged $425 billion. Per year, deficits under Obama (according to his own numbers) will average $1.293 trillion — or more than three times as much.” (2)

“We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” “…after eight years of this Administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . and an enormous debt to boot!”

Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Roosevelt and one of FDR’s closest advisers.

We are all being enslaved economically to our government by taxation, government debt and ever more burdensome regulations. This is not my opinion, it is an empirical fact and a fact that Obama understands.

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies…Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.” – Sen. Barack Obama, Congressional Record, S.2237-8, 3/16/06

Obama said, “Words are important.”  But, as I have illustrated in this posting, citizens would fare better by listening to Obama’s words and then assume he means exactly the opposite.

“I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.” ~ James Madison

“The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.” ~Thomas Jefferson.

(1) Heritage Foundation. Two Americas: One Rich, One Poor? Understanding Income Inequality in the United States

By Rea Hederman, Jr. and Robert Rector, August 24, 2004 http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2004/08/Two-Americas-One-Rich-One-Poor-Understanding-Income-Inequality-in-the-United-States

(2)  http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/painful-cost-obama_629745.html

(3) Despite a massive federal bailout of the housing industry, 10.7 million American mortgages were underwater as of September 2011 – meaning the debt on these properties exceeds their fair market value. Another 2.4 million borrowers had an equity stake of less than 5 percent in their homes. Also, bear in mind that these dismal stats don’t include the nearly four million U.S. homes that have already been foreclosed on since the recession began in December 2007.

(4) According to the Census, 97.3 million Americans are currently classified as low income. Meanwhile an additional 49.1 million Americans are currently living below the poverty line. Add those numbers together and you’ve got 146.4 million people – or 48 percent of the country – who are currently either poor or low income, an increase of 4 million people from 2009. Within that total an estimated 44 million people – or 15 percent of the population – are currently receiving food stamps, a 69 percent increase from 2007.

(5) In 2004, the median net worth of white households was $134,280, compared with $13,450 for black households, according to an analysis of Federal Reserve data by the Economic Policy Institute. By 2009, the median net worth for white households had fallen 24 percent to $97,860; the median net worth for black households had fallen 83 percent to $2,170, according to the institute.

(6) The black unemployment rate has risen from 14.7 to 16.2 percent, according to the Department of Labor.

“While the role that current U.S. bioenergy expansion has played in driving food prices is still debated,39,40 there is no question that at some point reallocation of U.S. croplands will directly impact global food prices.  Consequences of increased global food prices include higher rates of poverty and malnutrition as well as increased global deforestation and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions as forests are cleared to accommodate agricultural expansion.40  These detrimental impacts, associated with global food instability, highlight the importance of minimizing or even reversing current food and feed production displacement due to bioenergy expansion. 40″ (ref link below)

“The U.S. Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) stipulates a total renewable energy target of 136 billion L by 2022, with 57 billion L of starch-derived ethanol and 79 billion L of cellulosic-derived ethanol (Table 3).2   If we consider only current U.S. agricultural harvest, we estimate that roughly 80% of current recovered harvest (HRC) would need to be reallocated for the production of bioenergy to meet the target stipulated in the EISA (Figure 4). Conversely, if only expansion of agricultural land is considered, we estimate over 80% of managed rangeland or nearly 60% of total rangeland productivity would need to be allocated to bioenergy production to satisfy EISA targets (Figure 4).”

“Not only could converting rangeland to agriculture result in significant detrimental impacts on biological diversity, but the utilization of remote regions would initially require infrastructure establishment resulting in large-scale fossil fuel energy inputs and a significant initial C debt of bioenergy systems.41 Moreover, even though we excluded permanent pasturelands from our analysis, the majority of rangeland in the U.S. experiences some degree of grazing, indicating that expansion into these areas will likely displace a portion of feed production, which could ultimately drive future deforestation and consequentially, increase GHG emissions. 42,43”

“Unfortunately, next generation technology is still unavailable for large-scale bioenergy production due mainly to difficulties in converting lignocellulose to a useable form. 44 Evaluating the EISA energy targets utilizing only starch-derived ethanol technology resulted in an equivalent primary bioenergy requirement of approximately 6.5 EJ yr−1, a value significantly larger than current total U.S. maize production.22 This suggests that EISA energy targets could not be satisfied under current productivity trends without total displacement of U.S. maize production and significant rangeland expansion (Table 3; Figure 4). Already, delays in up-scaling next generation bioenergy technology have resulted in projections to expand the utilization of the starch derived ethanol pathway, which will likely result in further displacement of food and feed production land with relatively low net bioenergy output. 45”

“Equally concerning, agricultural intensification has resulted in increased emissions of the highly potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O), a trace gas species with a global warming potential roughly 300 times greater than an equal mass of CO2. 55,56 Already, research suggests that fertilizer derived N2O emissions from some bioenergy cropping systems have exceeded their potential CO2 offset, resulting in a net increase in atmospheric GHG warming potential. 55,56 Thus, any positive impact of future increases in fertilization on productivity could be offset by amplification of freshwater degradation and acceleration of climate change. 57”

Bioenergy Potential of the United States Constrained by Satellite Observations of Existing Productivity

W. Kolby Smith,*,† Cory C. Cleveland,‡ Sasha C. Reed,§ Norman L. Miller,∥ and Steven W. Running†

†Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812, United States

‡Department of Ecosystem and Conservation Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana 59812, United States

§U.S. Geological Survey, Southwest Biological Science Center, 2290 S.W. Resource Boulevard, Moab, Utah 84532, United States

∥Department of Geography, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, United States

http://secure.ntsg.umt.edu/publications/2012/SCRMR12/SmithES2012.pdf 

(40)  Naylor, R. L.; et al. The ripple effect: Biofuels, food security, and the environment.  Environment 2007, 49, 30−43.  http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/November%202007/Naylor-Nov07-full.html 

http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911

We (some of us) still hold these truths. Like the frog in a pot of slowly heating water, some of you are unaware of your pending demise.

“William F. Buckley Jr. asked in an essay, “If you lived in a declining society, could you know it?” By the time the Roman Empire died in 476 AD, few noticed, few cared and few stood up to do anything about it. If you look at America today, we can find strikingly similar events that eventually collapsed the Romans. “ (1)

Gandhi and MLK were categorically different from Obama. Obama is an Alinsky-trained community organizer (and a skilled trainer of trainer) – akin to Trotsky and Hitler – whose end goals justify his means; lying and even violence (e.g. Bill Ayers, Black Panthers, Fast & Furious, killing Americans remotely with Predators, Homeland Security contracts for impersonating others to spy on social media users) are permitted to achieve his end goals. Obama does not hold these self-evident truths which are the founding principles of this country; he finds these truths anachronistic and colonial, impediments to his version of progress and he insists on changing them even if his doing so is illegal, and he consistently hypocritically apologizes for the America which enabled him to his position. On the other hand, for Gandhi and MLK the ends did not justify the means; lying and violence were unacceptable. Gandhi and MLK were of course martyred for their peaceful beliefs. It would be a shame if Obama was martyred for his disbelief.

A study conducted at the University of Florida (2) finds that “political polarization in the U.S. has remained largely unchanged over the past four decades. The perception that the country is sharply divided into factions fighting hammer and tong exists only among those with strong party affiliation. The majority of Americans see a far rosier, more benign picture.”  Politicians and community organizers throw red meat at the masses to increase their power.  Citizens have to throw it back at them to keep our values and way of life.

The response of our Alinsky-trained community organizer in chief is not to unify but to divide the community, dividing Americans against ourselves and dividing Americans from our usual allies, in order to conquer, to agitate, demagogue, create, embellish and leverage crisis, and pit one part of the community against another and through organized resistance to dismantle America (e.g. ACORN, SEIU, Van Jones and Occupy Wall Street.)

Thomas Sowell is correct in this video on Obama and Bush and the dangerous corrosion of values in America. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5SDLBqIubCs

The decline and fall of America rests in our hands. There is only one way out and we are the ones that must lead us out and reverse the decline. We must eliminate political correctness from our lives and replace it with individual responsibility. We must fear not to speak out against every day injustices, attacks and corruption of our morals, values, principles, and personal responsibility. Unfortunately, the government will try with all their might to erode the values of the public, to make our nation believe what they are pushing is the new norm, the multi-cultural new world order. We defy their disdain for the good in America. As Sowell says so well, “If it’s not stopped now, it won’t be stopped.”

In addition to Sowell’s excellent comments on Obama’s community organization in the video at the link above, this piece by Sowell in National Review is on the same subject.  http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/227962/post-racial-president/thomas-sowell      I read and listen to everything I can find from Sowell.

“What does a community organizer do? What he does not do is organize a community. What he organizes are the resentments and paranoia within a community, directing those feelings against other communities, from whom either benefits or revenge are to be gotten, using whatever rhetoric or tactics will accomplish that purpose. To think that someone who has spent years promoting grievance and polarization was going to bring us all together as president is a triumph of wishful thinking over reality.” ~ Thomas Sowell 

All compromise is based on give and take, but there can be no give and take on fundamentals. Any compromise on mere fundamentals is a surrender. For it is all give and no take.   Mahatma Gandhi

(1) http://sheepleswakeupcall.blogspot.com/2011/03/decline-and-fall-of-america.html

(2) http://www.livescience.com/18177-americans-political-polarization-exaggerated.html

Marketers have ethics which are similar to scientists. Marketing is a science.

Selling solar and wind power to the public is not marketing. It is false advertising and most likely fraud.  A series of class action legal cases or state prosecuted cases are required by those damaged by false claims of public utilities for electricity produced by wind and solar power, and also fraudulent warranties (performance contracts) on wind and solar panel products. Don’t hold your breath.

According to one scientist, “The problem with solar panels, for example, is that the materials that make up the solar panel degrade with heat, and it is the degradation that makes them fail their warranty before the guaranteed lifetime. Diffusion of dopants in the n-doped or p-doped Silicon is enhanced by heat, which causes the transistor n-p-n or p-n-p junctions to fail by leaking electrons the wrong direction.  There are solutions to all of these problems, but they are expensive. So it isn’t that solar energy cannot work at high temperature, but that reliable solar energy is more much expensive than equivalent reliability in, say, coal or gas-driven power plants. This leaves solar in a niche market, say, where it isn’t possible to be on the grid, since you are in a tent on the Teal Mountains of Antarctica or a hut in the Sahel. The [photovoltaic] bankruptcies are driven by promises for performance which can’t be delivered, and there are all sorts of economic reasons for making such promises. Often, paying the warranties is a small penalty compared to acquiring a rapidly improving or high-turnover business. (Tupperware comes to mind.)”

Lawyers employed to defend utility companies and “green” product companies write contracts (warranties) which limit or eliminate their client’s liability for moral hazard, tort damages and indemnification. The probability is very low that such cases will be tried prior to significant political regime change.

A company CEO, board and investors could easily plan that the risk of warranty claims (damages) is trivial and manageable compared to their upside benefits which could be expected to result from federal government loan guarantees or grants (green shoots) for starting a solar panel or wind company, not to mention the federal and state tax rebates and deferrals… all documented in a highly valued SEC registered public stock offering. Minimal long term risk vs manifold short term revenue. Like an investment banker insuring the risk of counterparty default or loaning billions of taxpayer dollars to a sovereign nation, they will take the money and move on.

So long as the DOJ and most judges are politically appointed and influenced, the prospect of winning a court case against a politically-driven project – such as a DOE-funded solar panel company – is not good while the political regime is in power. The prospect is similar to having AG Eric Holder’s DOJ investigate Obama’s fake birth certificate… i.e. approaching zero. Another example: the prospect that Associate Justice Elena Kagen would do the just and fair thing and recuse herself from judging the constitutionality of Obamacare was near zero, even though previously as Obama’s Solicitor General, Kagen helped prepare the legal defense for Obamacare prior to it becoming law. Another example is the practical impossibility of finding a Federal Attorney or Inspector General to investigate the foreign funding of the Obama campaign. Or, the possibility is near zero that Obama or Holder will be held accountable for “Fast and Furious” DOJ-approved gun sales to drug cartels resulting in many deaths including one federal officer. The Party in power has too much power, controls the bully pulpit, mass media and thereby controls public mindshare.

It is not too cynical to state that politics as practiced in America today is massive, institutionalized fraud.  It is worse than that because so few of the population at large realize what is going on.

fraud/frôd/

Noun:

1. Wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain.

2. A person or thing intended to deceive others, typically by unjustifiably claiming or being credited with accomplishments or qualities.

moral hazard

The risk that a party to a transaction has not entered into the contract in good faith, has provided misleading information, or has an incentive to take unusual risks in a desperate attempt to earn a profit before the contract settles.

The gut level issue that should connect with all Americans is that each child born in America today has a $50,000 tax on its head on the day it’s born….and that’s just the federal tax.  Some states, municipalities and some counties also have impossibly large debt.  Borrowing more money, printing more money, for bail out schemes and building more government agencies and regulations only increases the debt each baby will owe.

Obama is playing the class warfare and race war cards; the bankers are all about setting up a European style class-based society … an oligarchy protected by governments.  Romney must dig in his heals and let the people know that in America “We The People” make the law, not the government or the bankers, and that now is the time to change all the people who are in government who do not understand and agree with that concept.  It’s a founding principle of this country, it’s not rhetoric…Mr. Obama.   (Obama and his close supporters and appointees do not agree with that concept; they are dripping arrogance and hubris.)

Only “We the People” can shrink our government and its budget and the taxes and regulations that support it.  Politicians and entrenched career people in government will only increase the size of government.  Each bureaucrat wants to increase his department’s budget and headcount each year, because that increases their payscale.  So they invent more regulations and programs.  More regulations inhibit the economy, and require more people and taxes to fund them.  New laws and regulations say are the method of bureaucratic and political power.

See Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle

The following comments are by the law firm Collins, McDonald and Gann in New York: “In 2010, hearings were held in Washington titled “Reining in Overcriminalization: Assessing the Problems, Proposing Solutions” (the full text of the testimony of the September 28, 2010 hearing is available at http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/hear_100928.html).   A criminal defense lawyer testified that “no one, including the government, can state how many criminal offenses exist in the federal code or in federal regulations.  It is impossible for practitioners who specialize in this area to know all the conduct that is criminalized.”  And if criminal lawyers don’t know, how can the average citizen?  There are around 4,500 criminal offenses in the U.S. Code and tens of thousands in the Code of Federal Regulations – a number that one witness called “beyond reason and comprehension.”  And this massive tangle of federal laws and regulations doesn’t even include the laws and regulations of all the individual states (and 40,000 new laws across the country have just gone into effect as we turned the corner into the New Year on January 1st).”

“When it comes to federal criminal laws, has America gone off the deep end?  The answer is yes!  We have too many federal laws … too many arrests…too many convictions — and too many prisoners. And, if we continue on this path, it will only get worse.  Much worse.”   http://cmgesqblog.com/?p=434

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. Examples in education would be teachers who work and sacrifice to teach children, versus the union representative in the school department who works to protect any teacher including the most incompetent. The Iron Law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Also see The Iron Law of Oligarchy at this link:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

Well, it’s time that “We the People” cleaned out those bureaucrats.  Whether they are in Congress, the courts, the Executive branch, the states and the cities…they all work for us.  But very few of them believe that.  Americans don’t want a $50,000 tax on the head of every unborn American child to pay for the lifestyles and privileges of hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats (bureaucrats who are already making more money on average than the average taxpayer). But $50,000 is the amount of that every child born today in America will owe in taxes to pay off the Federal government debt.  The debt is increasing daily.  “We the People” must stop it.

Mr. Romney must deliver the sobering message that cuts in welfare and all forms of government will be necessary.  The other path, the path of Obama and Democrats, will lead to crisis and violence similar to that already seen in Greece and other countries.  This short video clearly explains the dire problem Americans and our elected respresentatives have created for ourselves.

Delivering this truth is a political opportunity for Mitt Romney.

Romney is no Reagan or Obama on the oratory side, but he has to do better.  He can do better.  He has demonstrated connecting with an audience a few times… his speech at the CPAC meeting prior to the 2008 elections comes to mind. In addition, his camp needs to retell repeatedly on the campaign trail the story of Romney the executive stopping his company and directing all to help find a fellow employee’s lost child.  Very powerful stuff.  Part of charisma is getting people to want to connect.  That’s what story telling is all about.

Personally, I think Romney needs to change his strategist (Gillespie) NOW.  Just my humble opinion.  Also, Romney would be well served by befriending and seeking the advice and counsel in international relations of Vaclav Klaus.  Read this piece by Klaus which at the Hillsdale link below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A1clav_Klaus

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2011&month=07

P.S. The Imprimis newsletter of Hillsdale College is short and it’s free and very good.  They will send it to you by mail or you can read it online.

In upholding Virginia’s challenge to the constitutionality of the mandate on December 13, 2010, U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson wrote:

“A thorough survey of pertinent Constitutional case law has yielded no reported decisions from any appellate courts extending the Commerce Clause or the General Welfare Clause to encompass regulation of a person’s decision not to purchase a product, notwithstanding its effect on interstate commerce or role in a global regulatory scheme. The unchecked expansion of Congressional power to the limits suggested by the Minimum Essential Coverage provision would invite unbridled exercise of federal police power. At its core, this dispute is not simply about regulating the business of insurance—or crafting a scheme of universal health insurance coverage. It’s about an individual’s right to choose to participate.”   Judge Henry E. Hudson, Memorandum Opinion, Commonwealth of Virginia v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, 10CV188-HEH, December 13, 2010, p. 33.

“The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”   The Congressional Budget Office, “The Budgetary Treatment of an Individual Mandate to Buy Health Insurance,” CBO Memorandum, August 1994, p. 1.    http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/48xx/doc4816/doc38.pdf

Seventy percent of Americans oppose the individual mandate. See Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Kaiser Health Tracking Poll—August 2010,” August 30, 2010, athttp://www.kff.org/kaiserpolls/8093.cfm (January 12, 2011). Other polling has shown persistent public opposition.

Thus far over half of all the states, plus the 350,000-member National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB), have filed suit challenging the constitutionality of the mandate, while legislation opposing it has been introduced in 42 states. The NFIB claims that the mandate deprives its members of their liberty and property interests without due process of law in direct violation of the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution.  (~Heritage Foundation)

Congress, in this instance, is invading the traditional authority of the states in regulating health insurance within their own borders. As George Washington University Law Professor Jonathan Turley has written, “There is a legitimate concern for many that this mandate constitutes the greatest (and perhaps the most lethal) challenge to states’ rights in U.S. history. With this legislation, Congress has effectively defined an uninsured 18-year-old-man in Richmond as an interstate problem like a polluting factory. It is an assertion of federal power that is inherently at odds with the original vision of the Framers.”  Jonathan Turley, “Is the Health Care Mandate Constitutional?” USA Today, March 31, 2010, athttp://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2010-03-31-column31_ST_N.htm (January 12, 2011)

May I remind you: presidential candidate Obama opposed an individual mandate because he did not believe it was enforceable.  He and his administration have flip-flopped.    Michael Cooper, “It Was Clinton Versus Obama on Healthcare,” The New York Times, November 16, 2007,  http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/16/us/politics/16facts.html (January 12, 2011).

Moreover, the structure of fines and penalties in the bill was based on President’s Obama’s 2010 proposal. During their consideration of the bill, Senators stripped administration-proposed criminal sanctions, including jail terms, against recalcitrant citizens.  The coercion that remains in the law is a penalty or tax.  The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the penalty/ tax for failure to comply with the individual mandate would yield $17 billion in revenue to the IRS over the period 2010–2019. (Douglas W. Elmendorf, Director, Congressional Budget Office, letter to Nancy Pelosi, Speaker, U.S. House of Representatives, March 20, 2010.)  Remember that candidate and President Obama and his acolytes and media have repeatedly said there would be no new taxes on families making less than $250,000 (which they later revised to $200,000), yet they argued before the Supreme Court that this was a tax.

Obamacare has already produced the unintended consequence of raising health insurance premiums.

“Here’s why: A key feature of the House and Senate health bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with preexisting conditions. The new coverage would start immediately, and the premium could not reflect the individual’s health condition. Consider: 27 million people are covered by health insurance purchased directly, i.e. outside employer-based plans. The average cost of an insurance policy with family coverage in 2009 is $13,375. A married couple with a median family income of $75,000 who choose not to insure would be subject to a fine of 2.5 percent of that $75,000, or $1,875. So the family would save a net $11,500 by not insuring. If a serious illness occurs — a chronic condition or a condition that requires surgery — they could then buy insurance. Since fewer than one family in four has annual health-care costs that exceed $10,000, the decision to drop coverage looks like a good bet. For a lower-income family, the fine is smaller, and the incentive to be uninsured is even greater.  The story is similar for single people. The average cost of an individual policy is $4,800. An individual with earnings of $50,000 would face a fine of $1,250 and would therefore save $3,550 by not insuring.”  ~ Martin Feldstein, professor of economics at Harvard University and president emeritus of the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984. He is an independent outside director of the pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly. http://www.nber.org/feldstein/washingtonpost_110909.html

Next, but by no means less important, the process used by Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama to pass the legislation was unconstitutional and unprecedented.  Director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and former-federal judge Michael McConnell explains, “No bill can become law unless the exact same text is approved by a majority of both houses of Congress.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704416904575121532877077328.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

The Constitution requires that a single version of legislation be passed by both houses of Congress and sent to the President for signature.  That did not happened with Obamacare.  The House and Senate initially were working on two separate, different versions over 2000 pages each.  Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) endorsed the so-called Slaughter Rule to send the Senate-passed Obamacare bill to the President without a direct up-or-down vote in the House.  Under this procedure, the House voted on a rule setting up debate.  The House then skipped a vote on the Senate-passed version of Obamacare and moved directly to a vote on reconciliation amendments to that Senate-passed bill.  Then the House deems the Senate bill to have passed the House without a direct vote.  As Pelosi infamously proclaimed, “We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it.”  The Senate version was sent to Obama and he signed that version.  Then the legislation went back to Congress to consolidate the differences between the House and Senate versions.  Such a process, the so-called Slaughter Rule, has been used before with budget bills at the committee level, but the outrageously arrogant Pelosi, Reid and Obama used this unconstitutional trick on legislation affecting one fifth of the economy, and opposed by a majority of the public.

The consolidation and amendment process on this questioned “law” is on-going in Congress and the HHS federal agency that is designated to implement it.  HHS Secretary Sibelius has already unilaterally decided that some portions of the law will not be implemented, and the administration has decided to exempt certain large groups from provisions of the law, and the estimates on the cost of the law continue to climb into trillions of dollars, this for a law that was proposed to “Improve the quality and reduce the cost of healthcare.”

If Obamacare survives the case currently under consideration by the Supreme Court, it is guaranteed to face other serious constitutional challenges on enumerated powers, 5th Amendment, racial discrimination, and unequal state treatment and possibly hearings demanding recusal of Associate Justice Elena Kagen.

The Supreme Court of The United States (SCOTUS) struck down key parts of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law and the changes are impacting the 2102 election cycle.  Among other things, the law (http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-107publ155/content-detail.html )  barred union paid and corporate paid ads in  election campaigns.  It was an issue of First Amendment rights: freedom of speech and freedom to peacefully assemble.  The repeal also affects campaign laws in 24 states.  McCain-Feingold was nothing more and nothing less than a way to protect incumbents and preferred issues during elections.  Members of Congress, Presidents, bureaucrats and entrenched lobbyists are forever inventing clever ways to protect their hold on power.

Because of this ruling, in a major error of decorum, the poorly mannered and arrogant President Obama mocked the Supreme Court Justices while they sat  in attendance along with both houses of Congress for his State of the Union Address.  Like many of the lies he has fabricated about his past, Obama imagines himself a constitutional lawyer and presumed to lecture the Justices.  He is wielding and abusing the power of his office broadly through Executive Orders to changes to the legislative and treaty processes, to supporting rampant bureaucratic abuse of power by non-ratified czars and the rapidily expanding branches of his  executive office, such as the EPA, Department of Interior and Health and Human Services.  The stage is set for a full-on dictatorship.  Disabled by a Democrat majority in the Senate and its equally malfeasant leader, Congress seems unable to stop the abuse of power until the 2012 election.

The First Amendment is abundantly clear: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.”  SCOTUS holds in this ruling, not for the first time, that the First Amendment applies to individuals as well as free assembly of individuals know as corporations.  The SCOTUS holding says,“Premised on mistrust of governmental power, the First Amendment stands against attempts to disfavor certain subjects or viewpoints or to distinguish among different speakers, which may be a means to control content.”  The court’s opinion is here: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, which reads in part that there is “no basis for allowing the government to limit corporate independent expenditures.”  “There is no basis for the proposition that, in the political speech context, the government may impose restrictions on certain disfavored speakers,” he wrote. “The government may regulate corporate speech through disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but it may not suppress that speech altogether.” He described campaign finance legislation over the last two decades as  “censorship . . . vast in its reach.”  Justice Kennedy is not known as a conservative Justice.  All of this peeves the hubris of so-called liberals and progressives.

McCain-Feingold was heavily supported by George Soros and his plethora of political tax-free corporations, such as MoveOn.org.  Soros gave $20 million to MoveOn.org, in his words, to defeat George W. Bush.  McCain-Feingold made it a criminal offense for small groups of citizens or corporations to raise money and buy political ads; parts of the law – now repealed – required a large special purpose tax free corporation with offices in each state, which Soros et al could easily afford and did do, but for example, Wisconsin Right To Life or a local Tea Party could not afford.

John McCain and Russ Feingold have been and are wrong on many issues, frequently spun in the name of bi-partisanship or unity, or aisle crossing.  The founders of this country consciously arranged our Constitution for a highly competitive government, so that the various branches of government and the parties were competitive and counter-balanced, and the press and We the People were the counterbalance opposing the entire government.  Americans would be wize to ignore bi-partisan rhetoric and carefully analyze and fear legislation promoted by both Parties.  In 2007, SCOTUS also struck down other parts of the same campaign finace reform law.  It is sad that this latest SCOTUS decision was a close 5-4 decision, and even sadder that George W. Bush did not veto the bill.

“The punishment of wise men who refuse to take part in the government is to live under the government of worse men.” —Plato

Obama’s strategy has a name; it is called “The Big Lie,” and it depends in part on a fundamental truth of human nature: fatigue.”

Read more:http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/05/deception_fatigue.html#ixzz1uz1oo0QKhttp://obamalies.net/list-of-lies

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