Democrats Dying to Kill Us With Obama-Care

By Don Feder

The left has always wanted to exercise absolute control over the lives of the American people – mind you, for our own good.

It wants to control what we think, through public education, Hollywood and its trained-poodle news media. It wants to dispose of our property, through confiscatory taxation. It wants to raise our children, run our businesses, and plan our retirement.

But now, with Obama-care, it’s reaching for the gold ring – the power to decide who lives and dies, the power to play God.

If you’re elderly and ailing, if you’re young and disabled, if you require special treatment, if it deems your quality of life low or your social utility wanting, the left is dying to kill you. If Congress and this administration have their way, it will have that power very soon.

I’m talking about the rationing of medical services – the inevitable consequence of Obama-care. It’s not just that the politicians will be driven to it. If our health care system is nationalized, they will welcome it.

I’m not going to raise the specter of death panels, or speak to you about “comparative effectiveness,” or Section 1232 of the House health-care bill, which requires “end-of-life counseling” for Medicare patients every five years – and more often if they’re terminally ill.

I will not describe how socialized medicine has worked in the United Kingdom or Canada. In Britain, beyond a certain age, if you need a hip-replacement or cataract surgery – tough. The Canadians already have what Obama wants for America. So why are they coming here for life-saving operations? Why aren’t we going there?

No one knows the contours of the final abomination the House and Senate will vote on – perhaps in a matter of days. And the Democrats won’t let us see it in advance.

You know what? It doesn’t matter. If you want to see the shape of things to come, listen to the voices emanating from the shriveled heart of the Party of Plunder.

The Democrat Party increasingly resembles a wholly-owned subsidiary of billionaire George Soros, who funneled $25 million into its coffers in the 2003/2004 election cycle alone.

In a 1994 speech, America’s most prominent proponent of doctor-assisted suicide rhetorically asked: “Can we really afford to care for the dying properly? The number of people dying in the United States currently stands at 2.2 million annually. Increases in cancer and AIDS and the aging of the Baby-Boomers will cause this figure to climb faster than the population… (But) aggressive, life-prolonging interventions, which may at times go against the patient’s wishes, are much more expensive than proper care for the dying.” Well, beat me with a euphemism!

What’s “proper care for the dying”? Certainly, nothing that costs much – as far as the architects of Obama-care are concerned. Not a ventilator, not a feeding tube, not CPR – just enough drugs to keep them quiet.

Dr. Ezekiel Emmanuel is health-policy advisor to the Office of Budget and Management, and brother to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, who once disclosed, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Dr. Emmanuel says that in health-care reform (so-called), “Vague promises of savings from cutting waste, enhancing prevention and wellness, installing electronic medical records and improving quality are merely ‘lipstick’ cost control for show and public relations than for true change.” At last, an honest Democrat.

The good doctor believes medical care should not be wasted on those who are “irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens.” As an example, he cites patients with dementia. Well, they could always run for Congress in Massachusetts.

What about patients with terminal cancer or the 66-year-old who’s suffered a massive stroke or a severe heart-attack? On the other end of the life spectrum, what about severely disabled children or those with Downs syndrome? Will they be judged incapable of becoming “participating citizens” and assigned to an institution, there to receive minimal care till they die?

By the way, among the things Dr. Emanuel cites as medical luxuries are private rooms in hospitals, physicians offices “conveniently located” with nearby parking, and “attractive waiting rooms.” What about Band-Aids, aspirin and eye-drops?

Then there’s Robert Reich, Clinton’s Labor Secretary. In a 2007 speech at the University of California at Berkeley, Reich told his audience he would speak to them as if he was an honest candidate who “did not care about becoming president.”

Regarding health care reform, his message would be, “particularly to you young, healthy people…you’re going to have to pay more. And by the way, if you’re very old, we’re not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life…It’s too expensive… so we’re going to let you die.” Here’s a really honest Democrat.

Reich continued: “Also, I’m going to use the bargaining leverage of the federal government… to force drug companies and insurance companies and medical suppliers to reduce their costs. What that means, less innovation and that means less new products and less new drugs on the market which means you are probably not going to live much longer than your parents.” How about as long as your parents – or grandparents?

And now for a word – or two – from a really, really honest Democrat.

Writing in The Huffington Post (The Daily Worker was less dogmatic), on September 24, former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, a senior statesman of the Democratic Party, patiently explained to dolts like you and me: “No modern society can afford to give each of its citizens all the health care that is ‘beneficial.’ The health care system can no more afford to do everything ‘beneficial’ for every patient than the education system (BTW, another government-run disaster) can do everything ‘beneficial’ for every student.... We are delivering and the public is expecting more medicine than we can possibly afford to maintain.”

We can’t afford to give citizens? We are delivering more medicine than we can possibly afford? We’re not going to give you? Reserved for “participating citizens”?

We used to live in a country called “America.” It was a place where politicians and bureaucrats didn’t tell us what we could and couldn’t have when it came to medical care. If we could afford it, we paid for it. If we couldn’t, there was always welfare or charity to help out.

Two hundred and thirty-three years ago, just down the road in Concord, “their flags to April’s breeze unfurled,” once “the embattled farmers stood: And fired the shot heard round the world.” If they were alive today, you can probably guess where they’d be pointing their muskets.

In 1984, Lamm gave an unexpurgated version of his Huffington Post column, when he told the Colorado Health Lawyers Association: “Like leaves falling off a tree forming the humus in which other plants can grow, we’ve got a duty to die and get out of the way with all of our machines and artificial hearts, so that our kids can build a better life” – or, in the words of another Democratic theorist, let them die and “decrease the surplus population” I think Obama has found his first health insurance czar.

Here’s the bottom-line of Obama-care. Take an 85-year-old man who fought for his country in World War II or Korea, who paid taxes and obeyed the law all of his life, who built a home and raised children who in turn grew up to become productive citizens, and who started a business that eventually employed dozens or even thousands of people.

He doesn’t get end-of-life treatment, so those resources can be redirected to illegal aliens and taxpayer-funded abortion. He’s given a few drugs to die on quickly and quietly, so Nancy Pelosi can have her Botox treatments and Rosie O’Donnell will get liposuction.

If you’re a liberal (excuse me, a “progressive”) rationing is the answer to your prayers. Not only will it save money on end-of-life care by letting the elderly die quickly, it will also avert a coming demographic crisis for Social Security and Medicare, with the worker/beneficiary ratio constantly shrinking and the proverbial trust fund a myth.

Do you think that those who are pushing the Freedom of Choice Act – who want to eliminate any restrains on abortion – and who let Terri Schiavo die of dehydration – do you think they will really have any qualms about pulling the plug on Granny?

What then must we do? What is our assignment?

You who have gathered here today are the Minutemen. You are the soldiers of the Continental Army leaving bloody footprints in the snow during Washington’s retreat across New Jersey in December of 1776. You are the 5th Corps of the 20th Maine Infantry charging the Confederate lines at Gettysburg. You are the Doughboys of the Argonne. You are the boys of Easy Company dropping behind enemy lines on D-Day.

But what can we do, you ask? The party of death controls the White House, has super-majorities in Congress and owns the media (news and entertainment).

I’ll tell you what you can do: You can take to heart the words of Winston Churchill to the students of Harrow School in 1941: “Never give in – never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty… . Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

And you can draw strength from the last stanza of The Star-Spangled Banner: “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free (Do you hear that, Mr. Obama, ‘the land of the free’?) and the home of the brave!”

Thank you and God bless you.

Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.

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Taxpayers’ $ 13 Billion in $ 250 Social-Security Payments – The Politics of Accelerating Insolvency

By Marion Edwyn Harrison, Esq.

President Barack Hussein Obama has proposed that the 111th Congress authorize a supposedly one-time $ 250.00 payment to all older folks - the “in” word is seniors - who draw Social Security. The payment would be made in 2010. By sheer coincidence, in 2010 one-third of United States Senate and all House of Representatives seats will be up for election. By more coincidence, most pundits are predicting various measures of Republican gains.

Enough sarcasm. Three additional realities are applicable. They are so simple that, as this writer, one need not be an economist to understand them. The first is that the payment would cost $ 13 billion, at a time when we the taxpayers - and worse, our children and grandchildren - are burdened by the largest national debt in history. The second reality is that pursuant to existing law Social Security automatically increases its benefits, commonly termed a cost-of-living adjustment, when inflation strikes but for 2010 there would be no such increase because there has been no 2009 inflation.

THE WASHINGTON POST is hardly a conservative newspaper but often by print-media criteria is quite detailed and occasionally very balanced. On October 18, 2009 it published a brief story about comments of eight people: the Chief Economist at the Concord Coalition; a Democratic pollster and writer; an Urban Institute Fellow who was Congressional Budget Office (“CBO”) Director 1983 - 1987; the Chief Economist of Moody’s Economy.com; House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH); former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA); the 2003 - 2005 CBO Director, later an economic advisor to the 2008 McCain Presidential Campaign; and Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-NV).

The Democratic pollster and author candidly noted the political value to the President of the “relatively inexpensive [sic] $ 13 billion proposal . . .” The Moody’s economist favored the proposal, somewhat characterizing it as the equivalent of the lesser of two evils (to use my phrase). Senator Reid, as would be expected, supported the proposal and characterized potential opposition as “partisan bickering . . .” The other five objected.

Meanwhile, as our population ages and benefits increase with inflation, the third, and dangerously underlying, reality continues to be that Social Security is on the road to disaster. The attached commentaries delve into some detail and history: July 9 and April 21, 2009; December 16, 2004. Who seriously, nonpolitically and convincingly could contend that a single-shot election-year $ 13 billion aggregate of $ 250.00 payments would be other than a further step to accelerate Social-Security insolvency?

Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation.

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Muslim Democrat Representative Keith Ellison Blames "Islamist Attacks On Civilization" On "Western Colonialism" (What an Idiot!)

by Andrea Lafferty

Representative Keith Ellison (D-MN) who was first elected to Congress in 2006, recently gave the keynote speech at a forum in Washington, D.C. The forum, "Engaging The Muslim World – Challenges and Opportunities" was sponsored by the U.S. Institute Of Peace (USIP).

In his speech, Ellison claimed that "violent extremism with a Muslim veneer is essentially a post-colonial reaction" and the result of a "political environment rooted in grievance."

Ellison claims that the Jihadists are engaging in worldwide terrorism because they're angry about Western colonialism in the past. This is wrong. Ellison clearly hasn't studied the violent history of Islam.

Ellison is portraying a false view of why the Jihadists hate Western Civilization. The Jihadists are killing "infidels" (all non-Muslims) because the Quran (supposedly the revelation of Allah to Muhammad) demands that faithful Muslims kill or enslave anyone who refuses to acknowledge Allah or submit to Islam.

The Jihadists are killing "infidels" (all non-Muslims) because the Quran (supposedly the revelation of Allah to Muhammad) demands that faithful Muslims kill or enslave anyone who refuses to acknowledge Allah or submit to Islam.

The Jihadists have waged relentless warfare against the West since the 7th Century when Muhammad sent his armies to conquer, kill and enslave. They have never needed "colonialism" as an excuse to kill infidels. They kill because they're told to kill as part of their religious duty. Killing non-believers in Islamic theology is a sacrament – like taking communion or being baptized in the Christian faith.

In the past centuries, there were two great waves of Islamic imperialism. The first wave of Islamic invasions began in 622 with Muhammad leading his armies to slaughter infidels. The second wave began in 1071 and lasted until 1683 when an Islamic army was destroyed at the Battle of Vienna (Austria) by a coalition of Polish, Prussian and Austrian forces. The Christian victory at the Battle of Vienna saved Europe from Islamic slaughter and enslavement.

The Quran tells faithful Muslims that they must kill non-Muslims or enslave them. In addition, Islamic Shariah law is to be imposed on the whole world. Thus, Islam has always been an aggressive, merciless political system that seeks to dominate the world through the sword.

According to Ellison, "… the United States has more Muslims than many countries that are considered Muslim countries … the United States is part of the Muslim world." What does this mean? In Islamic theology, the entire world is to be forcibly brought under the domination Islam so the world will be at "peace." Is this Ellison's hope for the future?

Last year, Ellison took a Hajj to Mecca. His trip was paid for by the Muslim American Society, which is a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in America. The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that has declared war on the United States and Western Civilization. In fact, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohamed Akram, wrote a memo describing how his group was determined to destroy the West.

The Quran tells faithful Muslims that they must kill non-Muslims or enslave them. In addition, Islamic Shariah law is to be imposed on the whole world.

According to Akram, Muslims in America "must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and 'sabotaging' its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim's destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack."

Is Rep. Ellison aware of this memo by Mohamed Akram? If so, does he care? Is he helping to sabotage the West as a Member of Congress? Is he loyal to the U.S. Constitution or loyal to Shariah law, which demands absolute submission to the demands of the Quran?

It is instructive to know that Ellison was sworn into office by putting his hand on the Quran, not on the Bible. He is the first U.S. Representative in history to do so.

The Quran he used was Thomas Jefferson's copy. According to Ellison: "The very foundation of our nation, the authors of our Constitution impressed, is religious freedom, and the use of Jefferson's Quran shows that the founders not only knew of the Quran but also used it."

Jefferson read the Quran to understand the kind of merciless Muslims the new United States was going to be dealing with. He and John Adams were dealing with the Muslim Barbary pirates who were seizing ships and enslaving the ship crews in the Strait of Gibraltar. Jefferson was studying his enemy's war manual!

Wrong. Jefferson read the Quran to understand the kind of merciless Muslims the new United States was going to be dealing with in the future. He and John Adams were dealing with the Muslim Barbary pirates who were seizing ships and enslaving the ship crews in the Strait of Gibraltar. Jefferson was studying his enemy's war manual.

Doesn't Ellison know this? A simple Google search on the history of Thomas Jefferson's Quran would have told him.

Given Congressman Ellison's association with radical Islamic groups, it is hard to believe that he knows so little about the radical goals of the Jihadists.

A good first step in separating "good" non-violent Muslims from the terrorist variety would be for people like Mr. Ellison to step forward and condemn the violent ones by name.  If a Congressman is too frightened or too corrupted by Saudi money to do this -- how can we expect mere citizens to stand up to the Jihadists?

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The Keystone of the Constitution

By Tim Dunkin

If there is one thing upon which the stability and order of our society rests, it is the rule of law. Without law, you have no order and you have no boundaries. Instead, you have chaos. You have the “state of nature” envisioned by Locke and other Anglo-Enlightenment political theorist, where each man is a law unto himself, and is at constant war with each other man. Indeed, it was in a commonwealth specifically united by law that Locke thought it best for mankind to live peacefully and prosperously. Cicero anticipated Locke when he asked in his work De Re Publica,

"What, indeed, is a state, if it is not an association of citizens united by law?"

All of this, knowingly or not, rests upon the fundamental truth of God's act of creation, as recounted in Genesis. Creation involved the process of bringing order from chaos, of establishing boundaries for both the physical realm and the creatures whom God made and placed within it. In a sense, God's character as Lawgiver and Judge were indicated from the very beginning in His first recorded act. It is a fundamental principle of human society – as we are made in God's image – that we are to be governed by laws, both from God and made by man, and some of the worst things we see in the Bible occur in places and at times where “every man did that which was right in his own eyes.”

Indeed, the modern day philosophies that together comprise minarchist libertarianism are foreign to both our Judeo-Christian heritage and to the classical republicanism and liberalism that is our Western birthright.

This principle of the rule of law is enshrined in our American system via the constitutionalism that theoretically lies at the heart of our government. Unlike many nations that are ruled by despotic strongmen or socialistic oligarchies, our government is predicated upon the idea that the apparatus of rulership conforms to the Constitution, which superseded the whims of any individual politician or party. Law, not bureaucracy or personal whim, is supposed to be the determiner of what is proper or improper in our political system.

It is a truism among conservatives – and not without reason – that our government is essentially lawless. Not that the government makes no laws – for surely it makes too many as it is – but that this plethora of laws, more often than not, are unconstitutional, and therefore transgress our fundamental law. The Constitution defines the limits of our politics and our legislation – if only the politicians would pay attention!

The transgressions against our foundational law are legion. But out of all of these, perhaps the single most abused and forgotten part of our Constitution is that which can nevertheless be considered the keystone of our system, for it defines the federalism inherent in our system, set up by our Founders – the Tenth Amendment.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Under our system, part of the respect for the rule of law involves a respect for the division of powers between the federal and state governments. Our Founders intended for the states to carry the primary role of governance, as it pertains to the daily lives of the citizenry. The Constitution sets very strict limits on the powers of the federal government, most of those granted are federative in nature – they involve powers which either standardize the interaction of the states together in the union, or govern the foreign affairs of the union with other nations.

Beyond these, however, power rests with the states. The states were intended to be semiautonomous. Indeed, this is why they are called “states” instead of “provinces.” The Founders didn't intend the states to be mere political subdivisions of a centralized national government. The states were to be the center and object of the citizens' primary affections.

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the 20th century. Our federal government, starting with Abraham Lincoln and his decision to treat the Constitution as optional in the face of national emergency, began to upset the balance of power between the state and federal governments. Because of its psychological association with slavery, “states' rights” became a dirty word, and America underwent a rather rapid centralization of power to Washington, DC.

The fruit of this upset in the 20th century was the gradual socialization of our nation, and one of the primary means used by the courts and the federal government to usurp the rights of the states was the expansive application of the Interstate Commerce Clause. Misuse of this clause became, and continues to be, rampant. Originally intended to serve as a federative regulation of legal questions involving commerce between individual states or between states and foreign powers, this clause has been construed to encompass pretty much anything and everything Congress wants to do, regardless of whether it involves “commerce between states,” or even involves commerce period. This clause is twisted to give the federal government a blank check for overrunning any and all state powers. Instead of the states being able to enjoy their constitutional, federal powers to make laws in all areas where they are not specifically forbidden by that document, state laws exist only at the sufferance of a Congress who just hasn't decided to legislate on a particular area yet.

All of this has served both to undermine the respectability of the Constitution as a restraining force on the federal government, and to decrease the amount of actual liberty enjoyed by the citizens of the several states.

When the federal government can simply and blatantly misuse one piece of the Constitution to undermine a fundamental principle enshrined in the Bill of Rights, what does the Constitution become, other than a tattered piece of waste paper? The Founders would surely disapprove of the way the Commerce Clause has become an excuse (and a poor one at that, I don't care what the Supreme Court says on the matter) to grant practically unlimited expansion to the federal powers. The end result is what we see in Congress and the Executive today – a complete disregard for both the spirit and letter of the Constitution. Why does our government act like the Constitution doesn't even exist when it wants to enact things like the Fairness Doctrine, gun control laws, the property forfeiture laws associated with the “War on Drugs” that don't even require a conviction, and the like? It's because the restraint on federal power represented by the Tenth Amendment is non-existent these days.

Likewise, the liberty of the citizen suffers because of this destruction of true federalism. One of the virtues of a politically decentralized system is that if one part of the group goes rogue, its citizens can always escape and go to another. Unfortunately, if bad laws in every area of life are applied from the top down by a rogue federal government, then it doesn't matter which state you live in, unless you want to move overseas (to what will probably be an even less free foreign country), you're stuck with it. When one cannot escape oppression because it is equally prevalent everywhere, then one's liberty is assaulted.

Conservatives in this country are terribly concerned about our lost liberty, and rightly so. We face a usurping federal government that is fast on its way to becoming Leviathan in fact, as well as name. So what can we do? Well, we can get serious about states' rights. We can toss aside all of the Civil War- and Civil Rights-era propaganda hogwash about states' rights being instruments of oppression. Reclaim states' rights as a good and noble expression of the principle of liberty through weakened central government. In short – we need to reassert the Tenth Amendment.

More properly, our states need to reassert the Tenth Amendment. I, for one, hold to a very low view of judicial precedent. If judicial precedent conflicts with the plain, common sense reading of the Constitution, then judicial review needs to find its way into the garbage can. There surely is a mountain of precedence from the courts in favor of the grossly expansive application of the Commerce Clause into every nook and cranny of governmental competency. So what? Let the states start demanding their rights again, let them start ignoring unconstitutional rulings from the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court. What? You think court rulings are automatically “constitutional?” That sort of attitude needs to go by the wayside. Our states need to wean themselves off the various gimmicks the federal government uses to induce compliance with unconstitutional imbalance of power, like funding for highways or education.

Happily, there are incipient signs that just this sort of thing might be happening. We saw the principled stand of a few Republican governors who rejected unconstitutional “stimulus” money from Obama's swagbag. More importantly are the bills before statehouses in nearly 25 states which, to some degree or another, demand a restoration of states' rights under the Tenth Amendment. Conservatives need to contact their state representatives and find out if such a bill is before the legislature. If one is, then ask them to support it. If one isn't, then ask them to craft one and submit it.

We need to get serious about this. Our constitutional crisis is at a critical juncture. It may be just the time to see if Obama and the Democrats would have the nerve to try to militarily coerce, say, Texas or Wyoming or South Carolina into acceding to some unconstitutional application of the Commerce Clause or some federal gun control law which the states refuse to enforce on constitutional grounds. Given the disdain that the military has for Obama, it's highly unlikely that they would gun down or arrest fellow American citizens, especially when those citizens are upholding the very Constitution that our soldiers themselves are sworn to protect and defend.

Ultimately, states' rights and a reassertion of the proper division of powers as stipulated by the Tenth Amendment aren't just about letting states make their own laws on any number of issues – they're about restoring liberty and the true rule of law. If we want our federal government to really respect its constitutional boundaries, then it needs to respect this keystone. The Tenth Amendment exists so that we ultimately won't have to use the Second. If we really want our Constitution and our free system of government restored, then we need to start by rebuilding on the keystone.

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