‘Public Option’: Son of Medicaid Lard atop lard that only a politician or bureaucrat could love.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528251402125409.html#mod=rss_Wonder_Land

By DANIEL HENNINGER

In his speech on health care to the American Medical Association, President Obama explained why the U.S. has “failed” (yet again) to provide comprehensive reform that “covers everyone.” He had a list of the failing people, who “simply couldn’t agree” on reform: doctors, insurance companies, businesses, workers, others. And “if we’re honest,” he said (ergo, disagreeing with this is dishonest) we must add to the list “some interest groups and lobbyists” who have used “fear tactics.”

It seems to me, if we’re honest, that one other contributor to the health-care morass should have been on the president’s list: Congress. Indeed a close reading of Mr. Obama’s speech suggests he holds the political class innocent insofar as he blames everyone else but them. Can this be true?

Back before recorded history, in 1965, Congress erected the nation’s first two monuments to health-care “reform,” Medicaid and Medicare. Medicaid was described at the time as a modest solution to the problem of health care for the poor. It would be run by the states and “monitored” by the federal government.

The reform known as Medicaid is worth our attention now because Mr. Obama is more or less demanding that the nation accept another reform, his “optional” federalized health insurance program. He suggested several times before the AMA that opposition to it will consist of “scare tactics” and “fear mongering.”

Whatever Medicaid’s merits, this federal health-care program more than any other factor has put California and New York on the brink of fiscal catastrophe. I’d even call it scary.

Spending on health and welfare, largely under Medicaid, makes up one-third of California’s budget of some $100 billion. In New York Gov. David Paterson’s budget message, he notes that “New York spends more per capital ($2,283) on Medicaid than any other state in the country.”

After 45 years, the health-care reform called Medicaid has crushed state budgets. A study by the National Governors Association said a decade ago that because of “new requirements” imposed by federal law — meaning Congress — “Medicaid has evolved into a program whose size, cost and significance are far beyond the original vision of its creators.”

In his speeches, Mr. Obama makes the original vision of his “public option” insurance plan sound about as simple as driving through toll booths with an electronic pass on your windshield. It’s going to be all about “best practices” with patients “reimbursed in a thoughtful way,” as if the federal government is about to become just another big Google.

Medicaid is a morass. Since the program’s inception, Congress has loaded it up every few years with more notions of what to cover, shifting about 43% of the ever-upward cost onto someone else’s tab, mainly the states. A 1988 congressional mandate requires local schools to pay for schooling and related services for disabled children, but because Congress underfunds its mandates, the states pay the rest through Medicaid.

The list of add-ons is endless, and there’s little about it that is thoughtful. Why shouldn’t one think that, as with Medicare and Medicaid, the Obama Public Option in time will become an impossible fog for patients to navigate? But unto eternity the program’s administrative complexity will provide work for bureaucrats, Members of Congress, their staffs, lobbyist spouses and the “health-care” establishment of foundations and economists.

Oh, and the courts. The fact that this is a public program ensures not just congressional meddling but also makes it vulnerable to litigation. Over time, the Sotomayors of the federal bench will make it bigger. One piece of California’s incredible budget mess flows from a federal judge’s 2006 decision to seize control of the state’s prison-health system and make the state pay billions for new health spending imagined by his appointed federal overseer.

Medicaid alone didn’t put California and New York on the brink. Add in spending on public education and you’ve accounted for about 60% of their budgets. This drives the deficits and gets all the ink, but not least among the casualties of bigness is the idea of governance.

The elected legislatures of California, which holds 36.7 million American citizens, and New York, with 20 million, are essentially falling apart as governing bodies. The whole country has witnessed the spectacle of the comic “coup” in New York’s Senate in Albany the past two weeks.

With collapse comes a truth: The bigger the government, the smaller the politicians. As mandated entitlements grow, the spending “crowds out” the need or obligation to think or to govern. Legislators with nothing very real to do become lazy, slack and corrupt. They become Albany. Or Sacramento. Or Trenton.

Mr. Obama’s plan is intended to “guarantee” health insurance for all. Whatever the truth of that, its outlays — larded atop Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security — guarantee that Congress will become more like the states’ clown shows. But they are expensive clowns.

In his speech, Mr. Obama said the cost of the Public Option won’t add to the deficit: “I’ve set down a rule for my staff, for my team — and I’ve said this to Congress — health-care reform must be, and will be, deficit-neutral in the next decade.” If we’re honest, that means tax increases are inevitable. Sounds scary to me.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A15
Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A Health ‘Reform’ To Regret

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/26/AR2009062603457_pf.html

A Health ‘Reform’ To Regret

By George F. Will
Sunday, June 28, 2009

“In the beginning,” says a character in a Peter De Vries novel, “the earth was without form and void. Why didn’t they leave well enough alone?” When Washington is finished improving health care, Americans may be asking the same thing. Certainly the debate will compel them to think more clearly about this subject.

Most Americans do want different health care: They want 2009 medicine at 1960 prices. Americans spent much less on health care in 1960 (5 percent of gross domestic product as opposed to 18 percent now). They also spent much less — nothing, in fact — on computers, cellphones, and cable and satellite television.

Your next car can cost less if you forgo GPS, satellite radio, antilock brakes, power steering, power windows and air conditioning. You can shop for such a car at your local Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Packard and DeSoto dealers.

The president says that his health plan is responsive “to all those families who now spend more on health care than housing or food.” Well. The Hudson Institute’s Betsy McCaughey, writing in the American Spectator, says that in 1960 the average American household spent 53 percent of its disposable income on food, housing, energy and health care. Today the portion of income consumed by those four has barely changed — 55 percent. But the health-care component has increased while the other three combined have decreased. This is partly because as societies become richer, they spend more on health care — and symphonies, universities, museums, etc.

It is also because health care is increasingly competent. When the first baby boomers, whose aging is driving health-care spending, were born in 1946, many American hospitals’ principal expense was clean linen. This was long before MRIs, CAT scans and the rest of the diagnostic and therapeutic arsenal that modern medicine deploys.

In a survey released in April by National Public Radio, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard, only 6 percent of Americans said that they were willing to spend more than $200 a month on health care, and the price must fall to $100 a month before a majority are willing to pay it. But according to Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, Americans already are paying an average of $400 a month.

Most Americans do not know this because the cost of their care is hidden. Only 9 percent buy health coverage individually, and $84 of every $100 spent on health care is spent by someone (an employer, insurance company or government) other than recipients of the care. Those who get insurance as untaxed compensation from employers have no occasion to compute or confront the size of that benefit. But it is part of the price their employers pay for their work.

The president says that the health-care market “has not worked perfectly.” Indeed. Only God, supposedly, and Wrigley Field, actually, are perfect. Anyway, given the heavy presence of government dollars (46 percent of health-care dollars) and regulations, the market, such as it is, is hardly free to work.

As market enthusiasts, conservatives should stop warning that the president’s reforms will result in health-care “rationing.” Every product, from a jelly doughnut to a jumbo jet, is rationed — by price or by politics. The conservative’s task is to explain why price is preferable. The answer is that prices produce a rational allocation of scarce resources.

Regarding reform, conservatives are accused of being a party of “no.” Fine. That is an indispensable word in politics because most new ideas are false and mischievous. Furthermore, the First Amendment’s lovely first five words (”Congress shall make no law”) set the negative tone of the Bill of Rights, which is a list of government behaviors, from establishing religion to conducting unreasonable searches, to which the Constitution says: No.

The president may have been too clever when he decided, during an economic crisis that was sending federal expenditures soaring and revenue plummeting, to push the entire liberal agenda on the premise that every item on it is essential to combating the crisis.

Now the health-care debate is coming to a boil just as public anxiety about the deficit is, too. As cost estimates pass the $1 trillion mark, the administration is reduced to talking about financing its reforms with mini-measures such as a 3-cent tax on sugary sodas. The public, its attention riveted by the fiscal train wreck of trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future, may be coming to the conclusion that we should leave bad enough alone.

georgewill@washpost.com

View all comments that have been posted about this article.

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

Call The Senate to Prevent the Cap And Trade Fiasco

Please don’t take this laying down. Call the Senators below to oppose this bill, HR 2454.

“Masquerading as an instrument of environmental salvation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill will result in one of the largest seizures of wealth in human history. The legislation will wreak havoc on American manufacturing and industry, and coerce the conformity of an already economically squeezed populace.  The bill is a transparent power grab, based on a fictional crisis-the left’s ever-dependable threat of global warming.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/the_big_con.html

Barbara Boxer, California, Chairwoman (202) 224-3553 / (916) 448-2787
Max Baucus, Montana 202) 224-2651 / (406) 657-6790
Tom Carper, Delaware (202) 224-2441/ (302) 856-7690
Frank Lautenberg, New Jersey (202) 224-3224/ (973) 639-8700
Ben Cardin, Maryland (202) 224-4524/410-962-4436,
Bernie Sanders, Vermont[1] (202) 224-5141/802-862-0697
Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota (202) 224-3244 / 612-727-5220
Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island (202) 224-2921 / 401-453-5294
Tom Udall, New Mexico (202) 224-6621/ (505) 346- 6791
Jeff Merkley, Oregon (202) 224-3753/ (503)-326-3386
Kirsten Gillibrand, New York (202) 224-4451/ (212) 688-6262
Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania (202) 224-4254/ (215) 597-7200

Here’s the abominable bill:   http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d111:H.R.2454:

Cap Taxes, Trade Congress

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/cap_taxes_trade_congress.html

July 07, 2009
Cap Taxes, Trade Congress
By Kyle-Anne Shiver

I’m all for cap ‘n trade; it’s a nifty idea. Simply splendid. Positively stupendous. Brilliant beyond brilliant.

I just have a different take on the whole notion. I prefer very stringent caps on taxes and spending, coupled with a 2010 trade-in of the entire U.S. Congress.

What in holy tarnation do those people think they’re getting paid to do?

While these Roman throwbacks attempt to save the planet, pagan style, so they can set up their Darwinian nirvana on earth, the rest of us have enough sense not to try to make the state our church.

While we, in the other America, use reason to guide our decisions, Nancy Pelosi actually seems to think she’s the reincarnation of some pagan goddess on a mission to save the planet. She’s in the service of a president she says was sent to us at this time by God, a god who she apparently likens to Zeus. If she were referring to the real, one, eternal, all-powerful God, she would know that stealing the liberties of Americans under utterly false pretences are two of the real God’s Big No-nos, and would have enough fear and trembling to stay clear of this pure abomination: Waxman-Markey.

But no, no, no, Imperious Nancy serves the climate gods and their chief priest, Al Gore.

Shortly after she took over as Speaker of the House, Imperious Nancy presided over passage of an energy bill, that was itself pure abomination. Tucked into the fine print was the liberty-stealing tribute to the climate gods, the phasing out of the 125 year-old incandescent light bulb. This little tidbit from the Business and Media Institute’s analysis:

The Financial Post reported in April that a broken CFL bulb cost a Maine woman more than $2,000 to clean when the state Department of Environmental Protection referred her to a cleanup company. At $5 in energy savings per bulb per month (as Davidson reported), one broken bulb could eat up 33 years’ worth of savings!

Why all the fuss over a single broken light bulb? It’s the poisonous mercury inside, a substance all reasonable people — who read their 4th grade science books — know full well is dangerous to people and their pets. But Imperious Nancy, purchaser of at least one too many face lifts, was too busy redecorating her new office, converting the House cafeteria to organic health food, ordering flower bouquets and flying back and forth to San Francisco on government private jets to bother with real science.

Judging from the looks of Henry Waxman, it’s doubtful that plastic surgery has had any ill-effects upon his brain. Waxman’s senses have no doubt fallen victim to 34 straight years in the United States Congress. Having been serially elected by nincompoops from now-broke California, Waxman has been held to the accountability of a slug. But, as all wise Americans know, elections do have consequences and this entire Nation is about to reap the bad seeds sown for 3-1/2 decades by those witless Californians.

As if to underscore his own pagan godhood, Henry Waxman sat in a committee hearing in May and declared to the people of these United States that he didn’t even know what was in his own bill.

“Well, I certainly don’t claim to know everything that’s in this bill. I know that we left it to, that we relied very heavily on the scientists, the IPCC and others, and the consensus that they have that there is a problem of Global Warming, that’s having an impact and that uh that we need to try to reduce it by the amounts that they think we need to achieve in order to avoid some of the consequences. That’s what I know, but I don’t know the details.”

If this guy were a Republican, that admission would have evoked a media frenzy the likes of which haven’t been seen since Butterfield dropped the Nixon-tape bomb in the Watergate Hearings.

Never, in all my born days, would I have believed that a bunch of so-called public servants in this grand republic would have the unmitigated gall to pass thousand-page bills, with enormous ramifications for every man, woman and child in America – without even so much as reading them.

These Democrat legislators are the very same folks, who decried with vociferous vengeance, mortgage contracts that were not fully spelled out and easily decipherable by a 2nd grader. Yet, they shamelessly proffer bills, with far more intricacies than any mortgage contract, for instant passage. They might as well declare that a cabal of lobbyists wrote their legislation.

While other western countries are dumping this fraudulent Global Warming scam as fast as they can, in an attempt to undo the grievous economic harm done by their own versions of Cap ‘n Trade, our Congress jumps on the climate-god bandwagon with pious pretense and brains of pure mush. Meanwhile, New England has just reported the coldest June on record, while the Global Warming hoax is revealed as a pile of pure poppycock by more real scientists every single day. This Congress and their pagan-god delusions have got to go.

Has ever a more witless group reigned from on high in such vainglorious fashion?

A simple question for us in this summer of our discontent: Which is the largest special interest group in this whole Country, with absolutely no representation in the United States Congress?

If you answered, “the American taxpayer,” and you are one, then you know what must be done.

That’s right.

All together now:

Throw all the bums out?

Yes, we can!

Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/cap_taxes_trade_congress.html at July 08, 2009 – 06:34:09 PM EDT

Cap and Trade: The Big Con

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/the_big_con.html

July 03, 2009
Cap and Trade: The Big Con
By John Griffing

Masquerading as an instrument of environmental salvation, the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill will result in one of the largest seizures of wealth in human history. The legislation will wreak havoc on American manufacturing and industry, and coerce the conformity of an already economically squeezed populace.  The bill is a transparent power grab, based on a fictional crisis-the left’s ever-dependable threat of global warming.
But global warming is finally coming under the scrutiny it deserves.  Not only are NASA satellites showing a cooling trend, but 700 scientists-to the UN’s 50-have come out in opposition to the patently false claims of the global warming lobby.

Most damning, Harvard meteorologists have been unable to replicate the findings of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) without the use of a technique called “data-padding.”[1]  The IPCC actually admitted to engaging in this deceptive practice.  Without this padding, the infamous warming trend falls by several degrees.  In essence, the IPCC and its primary source manipulated data (dare we say “lied”?) to produce a desired result.
If global warming is a scientific hoax, a fact that now seems incontrovertible, then why have President Obama and Congress advanced such drastic and costly legislation to address this nonexistent crisis?  One might conclude that HR 2454, The American Clean Energy and Security Act, exists for no other purpose than to destroy the American economy as we know it and bring it all under government control.
It’s not like we don’t know any better.  We’ve been through something like this before, narrowly escaping the Kyoto Protocol’s threats to US security.  In its non-partisan report to study the implications of implementing Kyoto, the US Environmental Information Agency predicted a loss of between $100-400 billion in US GDP and skyrocketing energy prices. Moreover, the Kyoto Treaty’s effect on our national security due to reductions in military training and operational tempo would have been staggering.

But Kyoto will seem like a walk in the park compared to the Obama plan, which will result in cumulative losses in GDP of an astounding $9.4 trillion.  To put this in perspective, that’s over half current US GDP.  In other words, half our economy.  By 2035, unemployment losses will average 1.1 million peaking at 2.4 million some years.  Families will see energy prices rise $1,200 per year.  Electricity prices will rise 90 percent.  Gasoline will be up 58 percent.
The new policy would establish a carbon-ceiling and levy a devastating “carbon tax” on businesses.  Any emissions over and above the established ceiling would require businesses of all types to trade a finite number of government emission allowances.  Obama describes his program thus:

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.  I was the first to call for a 100 percent auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.
Ultimately, the costs to business in the form of emissions-purchases will be passed on to the consumer.  Obama knows this, and has said, “If you say to a power plant, you have to produce energy in a different way, and that costs them money, then they want to pass that cost on to consumers, which means everybody’s electricity prices go up — and that is something that is not very popular.”  This from an individual who thinks energy prices can be controlled through better inflation of tires.

Costs will also translate into across-the-board layoffs, as more and more money will have to be devoted to purchases of emissions permits.  This is because the Obama policy gradually decreases the allowable emissions annually (”ratcheting down”), in effect dictating allowable production for the year, which will have a residual impact on employment.  But don’t worry-”green jobs” will supposedly replace the energy sector as a source of employment.
Cap-and-trade also achieves the age-old Marxist goal of wealth redistribution through the back door.  It does this by creating two classes: those with carbon permits, and those without.  Companies like GE, which has positioned itself to take advantage of a cap-and-trade system, bidding for billions of dollars in federal contracts, will dominate the new America.  On a side note, evidence has surfaced that GE misused its ownership of NBC to catapult Obama into the Presidency for financial gain.  Is it any coincidence that GE execs went to CNBC headquarters to silence criticism of the President’s economic policies?  What’s good for Obama is good for GE.  Is what’s good for GE still good for America?

Cap-and-trade amounts to an artificial constriction of an abundant resource.  Refineries are especially targeted by this bill, which is significant because it was the sweeping reduction in refinery capacity due to onerous environmental regulations and voracious legal lobbies that caused the spike in energy prices during 2008.  Further strain on refineries will be another nail in the coffin of US energy independence.  We should view with suspicion any legislation that attempts to artificially recreate the circumstances of the 2008 gas crisis.
Besides, many of the bill’s provisions are superfluous, since the Clean Air Act has already put America well on the way to being pollution-free without stealth taxes, mandatory technology shifts, or the apocalyptic deindustrialization of the west.  Power plant nitrogen oxides (NOx) emissions fell 28 percent from 1998 to 2003.  Eastern coal-fired energy plants saw a drop of 25 percent over the same period.  Power plant sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions fell 31 percent between 1990 and 2003.  The Bush-inspired Clean Air Act requires emissions to be reduced an additional 53 percent by 2010 and 70 percent by 2020.  If clean air is really the goal of the Obama team, they would be wise to leave well enough alone.     

But cap-and-trade is about economic control, not about fixing the environment.  President Obama will proudly destroy an American industry if it serves his ends, something that has gone unnoticed in present cap-and-trade discussions: 
So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.
The coal industry employs 80,000 people.  So much for Obama’s reputation for “saving” jobs.
If Obama has his way, manufacturing, refining, chemical, coal, steel, metallurgical, and other energy-driven sectors will come increasingly under government control or be completely replaced by imports.  In the wake of this deindustrialization, people will look to government for provision, an expectation which is at the core of all of Obama’s economic policies.  Obama has “reluctantly” accepted the breathtaking and unprecedented power of managing our nation’s businesses and dictating wages.  Now he wants to control a free nation’s energy consumption.

Cap-and-trade is Marxism clothed in environmental righteousness.  If Obama’s plan goes forward, America will be doomed to economic ruin.  When the President of the United States is appointing czars with impunity and openly bragging about “bankrupting” the coal industry, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate how we got here.  Because of the lightning speed with which Obama is brazenly enacting these destructive policies, he is positioned to do what America’s enemies could only dream of doing.

Americans need to wake up.  If Obama and the Democrats in Congress really want clean air, there already exist laws to achieve it.  But there is one thing that HR 2454 does better than any other piece of legislation: it destroys American economic strength for future generations, capping the American Dream, and trading away prosperity for a scientific hoax. Whatever their real agenda, it is not consistent with the economic well-being of the American people.  Let’s stop treating bald-faced lies like topics for polite discussion.
——————————————————————————–

[1] Willie H. Soon, David R. Legates, and Sallie L. Baliunas, “Estimation and representation of long-term (>40 year) trends of Northern-Hemisphere-gridded surface temperature: A note of caution,” Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 31, 14 February 2004, 2.

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Cap-and-Trade Means Regulate and Subsidize

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/capandtrade_means_regulate_and.html

July 02, 2009
Cap-and-Trade Means Regulate and Subsidize
By Brian Sussman

Last week, prior to voting for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, House Republican Leader John Boehner spent the better part of an hour reading from the 1201-page bill and the associated 300-page addendum, which had been dumped on Congress’ door at 3:09AM. He did so, he told The Hill, because he believed “people need to know what’s in this pile of s-it.”

Congressman Boehner was correct. There may be no better description of what’s in this phony legislation, designed to supposedly halt global warming.

First, a couple quick facts:

Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it’s a fertilizer. It accounts for a feeble .038 percent of the atmosphere. According to the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, a research wing of the Department of Energy, only 3.2 percent of that thin atmospheric component is created by anthropogenic emissions.

The earth’s temperature has only risen 1 degree Fahrenheit over the past 150 years, and most of that occurred prior to the 1940s. The Thirties was the hottest decade on record, with 22 of the current 50 states having established their all-time high temperatures during that sizzling ten years. There has been no warming of the earth’s climate since 1998, and in the past 18-24 months there has been a slight cooling.

Anthropogenic global warming is a myth, and therefore there is no need for the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009. Climate change is simply an excuse for another massive government attempt at control and giveaways.

For example, buried on pages 1014-1016 of the bill is the “Monthly Energy Refund.” According to this plan, for those with a gross income that “does not exceed 150 percent of the poverty line…a direct deposit,” of an undisclosed amount of money, will be sent “into the eligible household’s designated bank account…”

On pages 502-503 we find the “Low Income Community Energy Efficiency Program,” whereby grants will be issued “to increase the flow of capital and benefits to low income communities, minority-owned and woman-owned businesses and entrepreneurs…”

Further proving this is actually a welfare scheme, on page 973 we discover that for workers who lose their manufacturing jobs because the caps on their companies are too repressive, and their employer either has to shut down, or move operations to the Third World to avoid regulation, the “adversely affected worker” shall receive 70 percent of their prior weekly wage, “payable for a period not longer than 156 weeks.” In addition, on pages 986-987 we read the unemployed worker can submit up to $1,500 in job search reimbursements, and get another $1,500 to cover his moving expenses.

And then there are the new federally mandated building codes, which will supersede local rules and regulations. The new codes will be enforced by a green goon squad. On pages 319-324 we read the Secretary of Energy “shall enhance compliance by conducting training and education of builders and other professionals in the jurisdiction concerning the national energy efficiency building code.” These EPA badge-wearing G-Men will be funded both through global warming revenues procured through the cap and trade scheme, as well as by $25 million designated annually from the Department of Energy “to provide necessary enforcement of a national energy efficiency building code…”

Oh, but there’s more of the stinky stuff Mr. Boehner was referring to. A new office will be created at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the government’s primary weather body. If this bill becomes law, NOAA will have a “Climate Service Office,” as described on pages 1083-1087 of the document. This new office will “ensure a continuous level of high-quality data collected through a national observation and monitoring infrastructure…”

Question: shouldn’t NOAA already be doing this? If not, perhaps the idiotic forecasts of gloom and doom from the government’s chief global warming forecaster James Hansen, who supposedly relies on NOAA products for his scare tactics, have been incorrect after all, due to corrupt data?

Anyone can see through this charade — the Climate Service Office will ensure that skeptics and deniers are silenced, and that all research will be controlled and monitored to ensure that global warming is the lie of the land.

In a further effort to perpetrate this fraud, on page 1102 we discover the “Summer Institutes Program and the Regional Climate Center.” According to the bill: “The purpose of the program is to provide training and professional enrichment by providing opportunities for interaction between participants and climate scientists in a research and operational setting to-enable middle school and high school teachers to integrate weather and climate sciences into their curricula: and encourage undergraduate students to pursue further study and careers in weather and climate sciences.”

This is nothing but government sponsored brainwashing, folks.

Thank you Mr. Boehner, for saying it like it is. You, sir, are a great American. Now let’s place pressure on the Senate to keep this sucker bill from passing its stinky gas.

Brian Sussman is a former television meteorologist, turned conservative radio talk host. He is heard nightly on KSFO-560AM in San Francisco (streaming live at KSFO.com) between 6 and 8PM Pacific. His upcoming book, “Global Whining: confidence to confront the biggest scam in history” will be published by WND Books.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/capandtrade_means_regulate_and.html at July 02, 2009 – 08:07:06 PM EDT

America’s Socialist Past

http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/americas_socialist_past.html
June 28, 2009
America’s Socialist Past
By Ryan Siefert

There seems to be a need in American society to have to relearn the same hard lessons over and over again, regardless of whether the results were seen on the other side of the planet or suffered through by our own people.

We’re living in a country that elected a President that believes in redistributing wealth. He’s mentioned this himself, from the “Joe the Plumber” incident[i] to his critique[ii] of the failures of the civil rights movement. Whether you call it Socialism, Communism, Marxism, or by its simpler name, theft, they are all part of the same economic system that destroys private property and puts everything in central control of the state.

The lesson we, and the rest of the world, seems to fail to learn is how socially and economically destructive this sort of system is. The problem is, these lessons don’t have to be learned from studying the histories of far off lands, for we have numerous examples of collectivist/socialist experiments here at home.

In Jamestown, there was no welfare state. Originally meant to be a trading colony, too many of the original inhabitants were adventurers or people seeking to gain wealth through the export of things they could find in the new world. Preoccupied with their own ideas of fortune, they found that in the wilderness of what was North America their habit of avoiding physical labor meant life or death. It was here that John Smith proclaimed, “He who will not work will not eat.”[iii] It worked…sort of. While success still eluded the colony, the mortality rate did go from 60 percent to 15 percent.

Imagine a politician on any level making Smith’s proclamation today. Cities would burn. Of course, when Sir Thomas Dale arrived there in 1611, he saw “where the most company were, and the daily and usual workers, bowling in the streets.”[iv] Apparently Smith’s proclamation had only motivated the people enough to do the minimum. Sir Dale had to motivate the people to fix up their houses, plant corn, and secure the defenses of the fort.

Lord De La Warr, the first official governor of Jamestown, continued with the communal storehouse practice. This meant that no matter how hard one worked; everyone was entitled to food so nobody would (in theory) starve. It only prolonged the hardship. Seeking a way around this, the administrators began using the incentive approach (as opposed to Smith’s harsh approach) and privatized land ownership. With tobacco finding a market back in Europe, the private property incentives mixed with trading allowed Jamestown to finally get over the hump and begin to prosper.[v]

The Pilgrims sought to live in a society that promoted “just and equal laws.” Their first year saw the death of half of their population through disease, starvation, and malnutrition (again, thanks to communal farming). In a story that’s getting more and more circulation in today’s internet age (and thanks to Rush’s yearly reading of the story of Thanksgiving), we learn that only when William Bradford instituted private property that people began to work harder and innovate more.[vi] Even women and children went out to the fields with their husbands, which meant more crops were planted and ultimately harvested. This led to more trade with the local tribes, earlier repayment of debt to the English sponsors, and overall prosperity of the colony.

Let’s fast forward a bit.

The date is January 1, 1816, and a man named Robert Owen proposed a new type of model society. In his plans, each of these communities of 2,500 individuals would “be self-governing and hold its property in the common.”[vii] So popular was Owen that when he reached America from Britain, President John Quincy Adams displayed one of Owen’s architectural models for this ideal community. He established his community in Indiana, christening it New Haven in 1825. In New Haven, “not only work, but also recreation and meditation were communal and regimented.”[viii] Everything was collectivized, including “cooking, child care, and other domestic work.”[ix] Ironically, at least by today’s “Liberal” standards, it was women that were relegated to these chores. The community lasted two years.

The term “socialism” was actually coined by Owen’s followers around the time New Haven failed.

Eighteen other communities were established on the Owen collectivized model across the United States. Modern Times, the name of the community established on Long Island, was the last to fail. This was in 1863.

Charles Fourier, a French social theorist, came up with the solution to the problems associated with collectivized living: It should be done on a smaller scale. He calculated that 1,620 was the ideal population and that they should live on 6,000 acres. These were called phalanxes. In the 1840’s, a man named Charles Brisbane decided to implement this idea, ultimately establishing 28 of them. All failed within 12 years.[x]

In 1804, George Rapp and six hundred of his followers came to America. They set up a community in Pennsylvania called Harmony where communal farming was practiced, but they were expecting the second coming and left for Indiana in 1814 before it could be deemed a success or failure. While in Indiana, they established another community and named it (again) Harmony, but sold it ten years later to Robert Owen (who set up New Harmony there) and moved back to Pennsylvania. These people began the petroleum industry in Pennsylvania (a move to capitalism), but eventually died out due to their celibacy and lack of recruits.[xi]

In 1841, Humphrey Noyes started the “Perfectionists”, and wrote a book on his theories titled Bible Communism in 1848. Noyes took collectivism to the next level; not only was all property communal, but so were spouses. The term for this was “complex marriage” and in practice it meant, “all the men in the Perfectionist community considered themselves husbands to all the women, and each woman the wife of every man.”[xii] Before coitus, and even conception, people had to have consent granted by the whole community. Economically, and with a hint of irony, they flourished by building and marketing animal traps. However, this particular communist experiment ended when they established a joint-stock company called Oneida Community, Ltd.

In showing what a great social and economic model Communism is, Harrison Berry likened it to slavery by stating in a that “a Southern farm is the beau ideal of Communism; it is a joint concern, in which the slave consumes more than the master…and is far happier, because although the concern may fail, he is always sure of support.”[xiii]

George Fitzhugh, an influence on Berry, actually argued that slave labor was preferable because the slaves were ultimately free. It was property owners and free laborers that were the slaves. He advocated that taking decision-making out of the hands of individuals made the African slaves better off than free whites and claimed that not only all blacks, but most whites too, should be slaves.[xiv] His theory was ultimately squashed with the support and ratification of the 13th and 14th Amendments, which not only freed the slaves but also established they had constitutionally protected private property rights.

These few examples, and there are more out there, show how American culture even before the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on your location) tried communal living and centrally planned economic models. Despite the good intentions of the people involved, they always fail because of the inherent flaws in Socialism. Unfortunately, given the reach of the federal government and current make-up of the executive and legislative branches, we are set to learn this lesson the hard way. Again.

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[i] Francis, David R., How Obama’s tax plans would ‘spread the wealth around.’ Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 27, 2008.

[ii] Calabresi, Steven G., Obama’s ‘Redistribution’ Constitution. Wall Street Journal, Oct. 28, 2008.

[iii] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 17.

[iv] Ed Southern. The Jamestown Adventure (John F. Blair, 2004), 202.

[v] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 18.

[vi] See William Bradford. Of Plymouth Plantation: Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Settlement 1608-1650 (San Antonio: The Vision Forum, 1998, 2002), 115-117,125-126.

[vii] See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought? The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 293.

[viii] Ibid. 294

[ix] Ibid. 294

[x] Ibid. 296

[xi] Ibid. 298-299.

[xii] Ibid. 302.

[xiii] Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. A Patriot’s History of the United States (New York: Penguin Group, 2004), 261.

[xiv] Ibid. 261.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/americas_socialist_past.html at June 29, 2009 – 11:41:33 AM EDT

Recruitment of Muslim children to terrorism

http://www.investigativeproject.org/1072/birds-of-paradise-martyrdom-recruitment-as

“When We Seek Martyrdom” is the latest hit from a production house called Birds of Paradise. It is racking up millions of hits on Arabic and worldwide websites. Birds of Paradise, which appears to be based in Jordan, is quickly becoming one of the most popular children’s groups in the Arab world.

Witness to murder: Iranian doctor who tried to save Neda speaks

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8119658.stm

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8113552.stm

Her fiance, Caspian Makan, told BBC Persian TV about the circumstances of Neda’s death.

She was near the area, a few streets away, from where the main protests were taking place, near the Amir-Abad area. She was with her music teacher, sitting in a car and stuck in traffic.

She was feeling very tired and very hot. She got out of the car for just for a few minutes.

Grave spaces have reportedly been set aside for those killed in Tehran clashes

And that’s when it all happened.

That’s when she was shot dead. Eyewitnesses and video footage of the shooting clearly show that probably Basij paramilitaries in civilian clothing deliberately targeted her. Eyewitnesses said they clearly targeted her and she was shot in the chest.

She passed away within a few minutes. People tried to take her to the nearest hospital, the Shariati hospital. But it was too late.

We worked so hard to get the authorities to release her body. She was taken to a morgue outside Tehran. The officials from the morgue asked if they could use parts of her corpse for body transplants for medical patients.

They didn’t specify what exactly they intended to do. Her family agreed because they wanted to bury her as soon as possible.

We buried her in the Behesht-e-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran. They asked us to bury her in this section where it seemed the authorities had set aside spaces for graves for those killed during the violent clashes in Tehran last week.

On Monday afternoon, we had planned to hold a memorial service at the mosque.

But the authorities there and the paramilitary group, the Basij, wouldn’t allow it because they were worried it would attract unwanted attention and they didn’t want anymore trouble.

The authorities are aware that everybody in Iran and throughout the whole world knows about her story. So that’s why they didn’t want a memorial service. They were afraid that lots people could turn up at the event.

So as things stand now, we are not allowed to hold any gatherings to remember Neda.

When did the lowbrows take over the culture?

From: http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/06/when_did_the_lowbrows_take_ove.html