Of the sons of Issachar, men who understood the times, with knowledge of what Israel should do, their chiefs were two hundred; and all their kinsmen were at their command — 1 Chronicles 12:32
Wolf, who is best known for her book “The Beauty Myth” and most recently made headlines when she was arrested in October at an Occupy Wall Street protest, is asking the public to boycott the singer’s video because she claims it’s propaganda for the U.S. Marines Corps.
Perry’s latest video features the singer breaking up with a boyfriend and doing her best “G.I. Jane” impersonation as she cuts her hair and joins the Marines.
“Have you all seen the Katy Perry Marines video?” Wolf posted on her Facebook page on Sunday. “It is a total piece of propaganda for the Marines … I really want to find out if she was paid by them for making it … It is truly shameful.”
The author added, “I would suggest a boycott of this singer whom I really liked — if you are as offended at this glorification of violence as I am.”
It seems fairly obvious that the video is supposed to suggest female empowerment, and joining the Marines is supposed to show that Perry isn’t broken just because heart is. All of Perry’s videos have a theatrical element to them, but “Part of Me” is a considerable departure from past videos such as “California Gurls,” which featured Perry in Candyland with whipped cream canisters shooting out of her bra.
Perry hasn’t said if she was paid by the military to feature them in her video, but she told MTV she deliberately chose them because they best represent the song.
“It’s an affirmation of strength, so I wanted to go the strongest route I ever could,” she explained. “Literally, I was like, ‘I’m gonna join the service. I’m gonna join the Marines.’ We used only Marines. … For three days, I was a wannabe Marine, which was so difficult.”
Here is the video:
It is amazing that liberalism, the Democrat Party, and literally disrespecting and demonizing the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who safeguard our liberty have come to go hand in hand.
There was a time when Republicans and Democrats alike supported their president and their military in time of war. And that is particularly relevant given the fact that World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam – you know, the four biggest and costliest wars in American history – were all waged by Democrat presidents.
Tragically and pathetically, the Democrat Party veered into the real of being “the party of treason” in the 1960s when the virulently leftist faction that today OWNSthe Democrat Party undermined their own president (LBJ) and betrayed America during the Vietnam War. They leaked the Pentagon Papers (for the record, Nixon went down trying to protect national security secrets and embarrassing details that all occurred during the DEMOCRAT LBJ administration); they spat on our troops as they returned home from Vietnam; they undermined our enormous military success in Vietnam such that they literally “fundamentally transformed” North Vietnam’s worst military defeat (the Tet Offensive) into a huge political victory; they gutted and disgraced the American military in the presidency of Jimmy Carter leaving the USA weak and humiliated in the face of a dominating USSR; they elected as president a draft dodger who had expressed his “loathing” of the American military in writing – followed by a Clinton presidency that AGAIN gutted the military and intelligence which invited Osama bin Laden to attack us; and so on.
It is simply a fact that the Democrat Party is fundamentally un-American, and pretty much everyone knows it.
The craziest thing of all is that this seventeen trillion-dollar unfunded spending is actually itself just a small fraction of the money that the most irresponsible political party in the history of the entire human race has spent without being able to even begin to pay for it:
Senate Republican staffers continue to look though the 2010 health care reform law to see what’s in it, and their latest discovery is a massive $17 trillion funding gap.
“The more we learn about the bill, the more we learn it is even more unaffordable than was suspected,” said Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the Republican’s budget chief in the Senate.
“The bill has to be removed from the books because we don’t have the money,” he said.
The hidden shortfall between new spending and new taxes was revealed just after Supreme Court justices grilled the law’s supporters about its compliance with the Constitution’s limits on government activity. If the court doesn’t strike down the law, it will force taxpayers find another $17 trillion to pay for the increased spending.
The $17 trillion in extra promises was revealed by an analysis of the law’s long-term requirements. The additional obligations, when combined with existing Medicare and Medicaid funding shortfalls, leaves taxpayers on the hook for an extra $82 trillion in health care obligations over the next 75 years.
The federal government has an additional $17 trillion unfunded gap in other obligations, including Social Security, bringing the total shortfall to $99 trillion.
The shortfall is different from existing debt. The federal government already owes $15 trillion in debt, including $5 trillion in funds borrowed during Obama’s term.
That $99 trillion in unfunded future expenses is more than five years of wealth generated by the United States, which now produces just over $15 trillion of value per year.
The $99 trillion funding gap is equal to almost 30 years of the current federal budget, which was $3.36 trillion for 2011.
The new $17 trillion funding gap is five times the current federal budget.
Currently, the Social Security system is $7 trillion in debt over the next 75 years, according to the Government Accountability Office.
Also, Medicare will eat up $38 trillion in future taxes, and Medicaid will consume another $2o trillion of the taxpayer’s wealth, according to estimates prepared by the actuarial office at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
The short-term cost of the Obamacare law is $2.6 trillion, almost triple the $900 billion cost promised by Obama and his Democratic allies, said Sessions.
The extra $17 trillion gap was discovered by applying standard federal estimates and models to the law’s spending obligations, Sessions said.
For example, Session’s examination of the health care law’s “premium support” program shows a funding gap $12 billion wider than predicted.
The same review also showed the law added another $5 trillion in unfunded obligations for the Medicaid program.
“President Obama told the American people that his health law would cost $900 billion over ten years and that it would not add ‘one dime’ to the debt… this health law adds an entirely new obligation—one we cannot pay for—and puts the entire financing of the United States government in jeopardy,” Sessions said in a floor speech.
“We don’t have the money… We have to reduce the [obligations] that we have.”
That $2.6 trillion ObamaCare figure – again, making it THREE TIMES what Obama promised the American people it would cost – is not some “right-wing talking point”; it comes right out of the CBO:
A Congressional Budget Office report shows that the cost of implementing President Obama’s health care overhaul will reach $2.6 trillion over a ten-year period, a dramatic increase from the White House’s original estimate.
In 2009, Obama stated that the legislation would cost “around $900 billion over ten years.” The CBO’s original ten-year numbers weren’t that far off, but critics of the health care bill noted then that the cost would be much greater once projections accounted for its full implementation.
Democrats pushed the back-loaded bill into law in 2010, although it isn’t scheduled to be fully implemented until 2014.
“The fact that the outlook for the law continues to worsen so rapidly, even before it is implemented, is ominous,” Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions said in a statement.
“And despite massive tax hikes and new penalties to pay for the bill, which CBO estimates have risen by another $99 billion compared to their estimates last March … the president’s health spending law will add at least $700 billion to the deficit over its first 10 years. Sadly, it may prove much worse than that.”
The CBO arrived at its $2.6 trillion figure after measuring the effects of expanding coverage over its first ten years in effect. At its full scope the health care law will result in “4 million fewer Americans [having] employer-based coverage,” the CBO noted.
As insane as that $99 trillion figure is, it is the lowball estimate of the sheer extent of the fatal debt cycle that the Democrat Party is entirely responsible for. A peer-reviewed IMF publication cited the actual unfunded liabilities of the United States at over $200 trillion:
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff says U.S. government debt is not $13.5-trillion (U.S.), which is 60 per cent of current gross domestic product, as global investors and American taxpayers think, but rather 14-fold higher: $200-trillion – 840 per cent of current GDP. “Let’s get real,” Prof. Kotlikoff says. “The U.S. is bankrupt.”
Writing in the September issue of Finance and Development, a journal of the International Monetary Fund, Prof. Kotlikoff says the IMF itself has quietly confirmed that the U.S. is in terrible fiscal trouble – far worse than the Washington-based lender of last resort has previously acknowledged. “The U.S. fiscal gap is huge,” the IMF asserted in a June report. “Closing the fiscal gap requires a permanent annual fiscal adjustment equal to about 14 per cent of U.S. GDP.”
This sum is equal to all current U.S. federal taxes combined. The consequences of the IMF’s fiscal fix, a doubling of federal taxes in perpetuity, would be appalling – and possibly worse than appalling.
Medicare will go bankrupt no later than 2017; and Democrats are demonizing every attempt by Republicans to save this failed system by making modifications that are critically needed to avert complete disaster.
The Democrat Party ought to be called the “Demoncrat Party” – as in “the party of Demonic Bureaucrats.”
The United States of America is guaranteed to die if Democrats – and particuarly if Barack Obama – is allowed to have anything to do with its governance.
I’ve posted this video a number of times to document what Democrats really want: socialism and the government takeover of free enterprise and personal freedom.
But the words of the oil industry executive that led to Maxine Waters’ outburst are now equally interesting.
Listen to what he predicts:
Here is the exchange in transcript form:
Oil Executive: I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress ever-increasing prices unless the demand comes down – and the $5 will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new reserves, new opportunities to increase supplies.
Maxine Waters: And guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be all about socializing … uh, um, [pause] … will be about [another long pause in which she tries not to document that Democrats are communists] … basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.
The executive explains simple reality: “If you don’t allow us to find and extract new oil resources the price is going to go up and up and up you lunatic idiot.”
And the lunatic idiot issues a threat that Democrat Marxist communist dictator thugs don’t need no stinking reality. They can “socialize” the oil companies by exercise of naked government dictatorship and that will somehow magically make all our problems go away.
Larry Kudlow: In a dramatic move yesterday President Bush removed the executive-branch moratorium on offshore drilling. Today, at a news conference, Bush repeated his new position, and slammed the Democratic Congress for not removing the congressional moratorium on the Outer Continental Shelf and elsewhere. Crude-oil futures for August delivery plunged $9.26, or 6.3 percent, almost immediately as Bush was speaking, bringing the barrel price down to $136.
Liberals try to insinuate that the gas prices going down AS BUSH WAS SPEAKING WHEN THEY HAD BEEN GOING UP EVERY SINGLE DAY PRIOR TO BUSH’S SPEAKING was merely the result of the economy stagnating. But that is a lie: our economy didn’t blow up until September of 2008. By the time Lehman Brothers collapse officially triggered the financial collapse on September 14, oil prices were already at $100 a barrel.
It was the hint provided by George W. Bush that ended the speculatory bubble of oil.
After rumors send oil prices falling, Welch renews call on President to tap nation’s oil reserves
BURLINGTON, VT – A day after rumors that the U.S. would tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) spooked Wall Street speculators and sent oil prices falling, Rep. Peter Welch is pointing to that episode as exhibit A of the effect such a move would have on gas prices and is renewing his call on President Obama to take action
Notice that Democrats are demanding that Obama open the strategic reserves, which amounts to a very temporary increase of oil on the market. Democrats are demanding that Saudi Arabia drill more. They are demanding that oil supplies be increased to bring down prices even as they deny that the US – which is idly sitting on reserves of 1.6 trillion barrels of oil – would have any impact on prices.
Democrats want America to be more reliant and more dependent on Arab oil. They absolutely refuse to allow America to become energy-independent. That’s the bottom freaking line.
Our strategic petroleum reserve was intended to be stockpiled for time of national emergency or war. Obama wants to use it as a political slush fund to benefit his presidential campaign. The fact is, the US government bought that oil at a lower price and will replace that oil at a shockingly higher price. And since we very obviously can’t keep doing that, it won’t have a measurable effect on gas prices because it clearly isn’t a long-term supply increase.
And all of the above is why during the last three years, gas prices have gone from well under $2 a gallon ($1.84 a gallon on January 20, 2009) to nearly $5 a gallon on Obama’s watch. Bush gave us low gas prices; Obama took them away.
“Since taking office, [Obama] has declared 85% of our offshore areas off limits, decreased oil and gas leases in the Rockies by 70%, rejected the Keystone XL pipeline, and has 10 federal agencies planning more regulation of hydraulic fracturing…. The president’s ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ approach to energy security is hurting consumers.”
[A] study, prepared by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service (CRS), examined oil production on federal and non-federal land between 2007-2011. Approximately 96 percent of the total increase in domestic oil production occurred on non-federal land, CRS found.
Earlier this month, the Energy Information Administration reported that oil and natural gas production on federal land declined 40 percent over the past decade and 14 percent in 2011 alone.
And so you actually wonder why gas prices have “necessarily skyrocketed” under Obama’s watch???
This is nothing more than a continuation of Maxine Waters’ communist war on the means of production of the American economy.
I’ve written about the so-called “tax breaks” for oil companies. Note that what little “tax breaks” there were came on the back of tax increases – and the tax increases outweighed the tax breaks. The bottom line is that if Obama gives the oil industry a middle finger, the oil industry will give the American people who put this fool into office a middle finger.
a March 2011 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service suggesting that the president’s proposals could actually result in higher gas prices and a greater reliance on imports.
The proposed repeal “would increase tax collections from the oil and natural gas industries and may have the effect of decreasing exploration, development and production, while increasing prices and increasing the nation’s foreign oil dependence. These same proposals, from an alternate point of view, might be considered to be the elimination of tax preferences that have favored the oil and natural gas industries over other energy sources and made oil and gas products artificially inexpensive, with consumer costs held below the true cost of consumption, when the external costs associated with environmental costs and energy dependence, among other effects, are included,” the CRS said.
“The Administration estimates that the tax changes outlined in the budget proposal would provide $22.8 billion in revenues over the period 2012 to 2016, and over $43.6 billion from 2012 to 2021. These changes, if enacted by Congress, also would reduce the tax advantage enjoyed by independent oil and natural gas companies over the major oil companies. On what would likely be a small scale, the proposals also would make oil and natural gas more expensive for U.S. consumers and likely increase foreign dependence,” according to the report
There was a funny line I remember from Big Bang Theory to put this into perspective:
Leonard: Well let me see if I can explain your situation using physics. What would you be if you were attached to another object by an incline plane, wrapped helicly around an axis?
Sheldon: Screwed.
Leonard: There you go.
We’re screwed as long as Obama is allowed to continue ruining America.
A picture is worth a thousand words. What’s a video worth?
Someone should tell her about “baby food” that was actually pre-mashed in a NON-disgusting manner. There’s something called “bacteria” in the human mouth, you know.
Only I suppose it could possibly have been viewed as being in “poor taste” to cheerlead for Obama with her mouth full of her son’s next bite.
The fact that Hollywood liberal nutjobs are so completely in the tank for Obama ought to offend the mentally healthy enough to vote for anybody but him.
Thank GOD my parents weren’t liberals…
I suppose the fact that I actually had to learn to chew my own food all by myself was what gave me the independence to think for myself – which clearly precluded my ever becoming a Democrat.
You have to imagine it: the left thought and thought and thought about their ObamaCare date with the Supreme Court. In their little feral minds they had all the witty one-liners that simply stumped the conservative judges. Sadly for them, reality happened. And all of their fabulous arguments turned out to be a giant, stinking load of crap which blew up in their faces the moment the justices started asking questions.
The funny thing is that most of the questions that have them so stumped and panicked were the same questions that conservatives were asking all along. Only the left somehow never bothered to have an honest argument with us about the inherent fascism of ObamaCare. So even though they could have listened to us and maybe actually prepared some kind of response, they were left wildly unprepared.
I’ve found that again and again in my exchanges with liberals on this blog. It’s like I can make the same point five times and even count each time I make that same point and they just pretend I didn’t make it so they can keep living in their freaky little world of circular reasoning.
And I also found this same phenomenon to be the case when I was in seminary. In several of my exegesis courses, students were required to choose commentaries from two separate lists – one basically conservative evangelical, and the other liberal – and write our papers specifically taking into account arguments made by both schools of thought. What I found in every single case was that the conservative evangelicals painstakingly reproduced the arguments of their liberal counterparts and attempted to show why their own argument was the correct one over against the liberals’ arguments; whereas the liberals either entirely ignored (most of the time) or presented a dismissive straw-man of the conservative evangelical commentators.
I took a couple of courses from William Lane Craig – a brilliant scholar who became famous for his debates with top atheists. Dr. Craig was a gracious man who would have his lunch at a table with students so he could share his time and knowledge with students who greatly valued both. I asked Bill Craig about his debates, and he told me that he painstakingly studied up on the works of his opponents, whereas he often had the idea that they simply showed up completely ignorant of his own writings. And he routinely mopped the floor with them.
I still remember a particular debate between Craig and Oxford chemist Peter Atkins. In one exchange toward the end of the debate, Craig provided a statement of what a now very harried Atkins had said. Atkins arrogantly literally said, “Those aren’t my words. My words are much too sophisticated, much too erudite…” And a frankly appalled Bill Craig said, “I was reading a direct quote.” And Atkins’ jaw slammed shut. You should also understand that Craig’s argument dealt with the numerous scientific and logical facts that demonstrated that the universe was created by an intelligent designer; Atkins’ argument centered on pure metaphysical speculation that there are myriad alternate realities and that the fact that our reality would appear to have been the product of design was merely by sheer random chance. The entire debate was thus a remarkable turnaround in which the philosopher-theologian (Craig) relied on science and facts and the “scientist” (Atkins) relied on purely-faith-based speculation.
Justice Scalia’s point is a commonsense repetition of Justice Kennedy’s basic question: “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” Or, can you force citizens to purchase something just so you can regulate them?
The people most under assault by this law are those who HAVEN’T purchased insurance. The ObamaCare mandate is all about forcing people to purchase insurance just so liberals can then dictate what insurance they must purchase.
The guy who uploaded this to YouTube calls it a “benchslap.” It’s loads of fun, and the point about limited powers will sound familiar. The key part comes early when Scalia jumps in to challenge Verrilli’s citation of Court precedent. Those cases dealt with commerce, he says; in this case, the legislation is aimed at people who aren’t participating in commerce, i.e. people without insurance. That’s a gut-punch to the left since, once you make that move conceptually, the Commerce Clause defense of the statute is hanging by a thread. You can follow his thinking over the rest of the clip from there. If it’s not commerce, then Congress has no power to regulate it, and if Congress has no power to regulate it, then the Tenth Amendment says this is a matter for the states. And to think, a few days ago, Democrats thought they might be able to use Scalia’s Raich opinion to swing him over to their side.
Roberts was a bit more equivocal in today’s arguments but read Philip Klein’s analysis of the rhetoric he used in his comments from the bench. There were an awful lot of phrases in there suggesting he was arguing from belief against the statute, not merely as a devil’s advocate to probe the lawyers’ arguments. Meanwhile, over at SCOTUSblog, Kevin Russell looks at Roberts’s and Alito’s questioning and wonders, “Is Kennedy the only possible fifth vote for the government?” His conclusion: Yep, pretty much. Exit question: C’mon, a Reagan appointee’s not really going to be the fifth vote for the ObamaCare mandate, is he? Good lord.
The Obama regime already appears to be preparing for defeat, given that they are already talking down the Supreme Court as a biased body, which leaves you asking: does that mean if ObamaCare WINSin court the American people should just disregard the verdict as “biased”?
During the Court’s hearing oral arguments I heard over and over again – even from Ruth Bader Ginsburg – that the “conservative” thing to do would be to keep the law. Because only the same liberals who would utterly clueless about the questions they would be getting from conservative justices actualy understand “conservatism,” you see. And so of course liberals have to tell us what we should think to be good conservatives the same way they constantly have to tell their own zombie-followers what to think.
The liberals’ “logic” is actually rather funny: if liberals vote like liberals it’s perfectly fine; but if conservatives vote according to conservative principles it’s “biased.” Nobody would think the four liberals ruling as goose-step-marching liberals is biased, of course.
Let’s take a look at the images the media has fed us:
Let’s meet the victim: a smiling twelve-year-old boy:
And let’s meet the shooter: he clearly just got out of jail from the last time he shot some unarmed little boy:
But here’s the thing: that twelve-year-old boy grew up into a 6’3″ thug the night George Zimmerman first laid eyes on Trayvon Martin:
And George Zimmerman is a man who cleaned up his act and became a professional:
Yes, haters; Fox News was the first to publish the recent photos that ought to be far and away the most relevant. Liberal media refused to do so until long after that cat of truth was let out of the media bag.
It’s blatant manipulation of the truth like this that makes a nice Jewish girl get “mad.”
This butchery – let’s use a favorite activity the left adores – this “abortion” of reality is THEactivity of the mainstream media today. It’s not enough to say that they refuse to provide the “true picture”; they actively seek to put out a FALSE picture of events in order to bias the thinking of people AGAINST the truth.
You can see why the left hates Fox News so much: you’ve got the entire mainstream media beaming lies into our minds; and all that propaganda gets routinely refuted by a news organization that is even willing to consider providing the “other picture” (i.e. the truth).
Fox News has FAR more liberal analysts and commentators on their programs (e.g., Juan Williams, Julian Epstein, Judith Miller, Lis Weihl, Bob Beckel, Kirsten Powers, Tamara Holder, Alan Combs, Mark LaMont Hill, Geraldo Rivera, Mara Liasson, Jane Hall and Neil Gabler are just a FEW of the liberals who are regularly on Fox News offering their opinions) than ANY other network – or even most of the networks combined – has conservatives. So it’s not that Fox News in any way, shape or form suppresses the liberal view; it’s just that they go that one extra step that no other network will allow in which they allow THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PICTURE TO EMERGE.
“Mr. Zimmerman, 28, a white Hispanic, told the police that he shot Trayvon in self-defense after an altercation. The teenager was walking home from a convenience store, where he bought iced tea and Skittles, when he was shot once in the chest.
Show me the number of times the New York Times had used such a modifier to describe Barack Obama (President Obama, a white African-American…).
The mainstream media is so far into the tank for liberalism and for Obama that it rivals Joseph Goebbels being in the tank for Adolf Hitler. Obama wants to demagogue racial tension – just take a look at Rep. Bobby Rush smuggling a “hoodie” onto the House Floor which specifically forbids headgear of any kind for a demonstration of that:
My slightly modified Bobby Rush quote: “Just because somebody dresses like a gangster thug does not make them a hoodlum.”
New Black Panther leader Mikhail Muhammad announced the reward during a protest in Sanford Saturday. And when asked whether he was inciting violence, Muhammad replied defiantly: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”
And Obama worshiper Spike Lee tried to finger George Zimmerman’s house so leftist vigilantes could murder him, only he fingered an elderly couple who have nothing to do with Zimmerman instead:
MARCH 27–With Twitter and Facebook continuing to explode with posts purporting to contain the address of George Zimmerman, property records and interviews reveal that the home is actually the longtime residence of a married Florida couple, both in their 70s, who have no connection to the man who killed Trayvon Martin and are now living in fear due to erroneous reports about their connection to the shooter.
The mass dissemination of the address on Edgewater Circle in Sanford–the Florida city where Martin was shot to death last month–took flight last Friday when director Spike Lee retweeted a tweet containing Zimmerman’s purported address to his 240,000 followers.
The original tweet was sent to Lee (and numerous other celebrities like Will Smith, 50 Cent, and LeBron James) last Friday afternoon by Marcus Davonne Higgins, a 33-year-old Los Angeles man who uses the online handle “maccapone.” Higgins included the direction, “EVERYBODY REPOST THIS.”
“It means that this is a whole new world. I think…I’ve been saying this before. You can divide history. BB Before Barack. AB After Barack.”
And history records that “AB” is a racist and race-baiting age of demagoguery and slander and lies and naked thug intimidation.
Barack Obama is unlikely to call this couple and apologize to them for the result of his racial exploitation of this case. He is unlikely to call George Zimmerman and apologize that his words incited the Black Panthers to put a “dead or alive” bounty on Zimmerman’s head. And the meainstream media has the same capacity for a guilty conscience that a killer shark has.
Such a darling little 6’3″ boy. You can almost see that twelve-year-old boy emerge from the picture if you squint your eyes and try really hard to tune out the real world.
We know that the media deliberately decieved us on just about every detail possible as to what happened that night. We know that eyewitness accounts have Trayvon Martin attacking George Zimmerman prior to Zimmerman drawing his weapon. We know that George Zimmerman had clearly been beaten the night in question and ended up with a broken nose and an injury to the back of his head. We know that George Zimmerman’s account has been substantiated by ALL of the direct evidence that has since emerged. And we know that the mainstream media did everything it could to suppress that real picture and insert its own propaganda instead.
One verse from the Bible sums up the mainstream media:
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness — Romans 1:18
The left is dishonest and depraved. One day they will gladly take the mark of the beast and one day they will burn in hell forever and ever. And at the lowest, hottest part of that hell will be the “journalists,” whose unending parade of lies paved the way to deception.
RUSH: Grab sound bite two before we get to sound bites 23 and 24. This is last night. We’ll do a little timeline here involving Jeff Toobin. Last night on Charlie Rose, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin — who, by the way, for those of you old enough to remember, is the son of former NBC News reporter Marlene Sanders. He wrote a big book after the O.J. trial, and he’s been at CNN for quite a while. And Charlie Rose said, Jeffrey Toobin, “How big a deal is this Obamacare case at the Supreme Court?”
TOOBIN: Epic! Awesome! Enormous! Huge!
ROSE: (guffawing)
TOOBIN: This is the biggest case involving the power of the federal government since the New Deal. And if this law is struck down, the federal government is gonna look very different the next day. And lots of plans and lots existing programs are in jeopardy. So, I mean, as big as you think this case is, it’s actually bigger.
RUSH: Last night, Jeffrey Toobin accurately describes the size and scope of Obamacare. Today, it’s Politico “breaking news,” but we’ve got sound bites from CNN. Toobin, quote: “This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong… [I]f I had to bet today, Wolf, I would bet that this court is going to strike down the individual mandate.” Tom Goldstein, attorney and cofounder, center-left SCOTUS blog: “The individual mandate is in trouble, significant trouble.” Los Angeles Times’ Noam Levey: “Tuesday’s arguments may signal trouble for the mandate, widely seen as a cornerstone of the law’s program for achieving universal health care coverage for the first time in the nation’s history.”
Politico breaking news: “The conservative justices and potential swing vote Anthony Kennedy raised concerns Tuesday that forcing Americans to buy health insurance would open the door to other intrusive requirements from the federal government…” What was so hard to predict about this? This goes right to my point. What’s so hard to predict that this thing is unconstitutional? It is unconstitutional. And a Civics 101 student in junior high, after having the Constitution explained to them, would know this. And here come these legal experts: “There’s no way that justices are gonna strike this down! There ain’t no way,” and then after one day of oral arguments, these same experts (probably just as qualified as the economic experts at the Associated Press) say: My God, these justices, they don’t like the individual mandate! We’re in big trouble.
Here’s Jeff Toobin. He’s on CNN this afternoon. The coanchor, Ashleigh Banfield, said, “Tell me everything, Jeff. What happened today?”
TOOBIN: This was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it’s gonna be struck down. Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, was enormously skeptical. Every comment Kennedy made — uh, at least that I heard — was skeptical of the law. The wild card in this argument was, uh, Chief Justice Roberts. Chief Justice Roberts actually asked a lot of hard questions. Roberts seemed like a much more likely vote to uphold the law than Kennedy was.
RUSH: See, he had to find something positive after saying today “was a train wreck for the Obama administration.” And again he said, “I’m telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong… this court is going to strike down the individual mandate.” Wolf Blitzer then weighed in…
BLITZER: This is really huge! Uh, uh, uh, what you’re saying — and you’re an authority on the US Supreme Court. You’ve written the major book on the current Supreme Court — uh, The Nine. So you fully understand. But just because a justice is asking tough questions, let’s say of the government lawyer — Mr. Verrilli in this case — that doesn’t necessarily mean that that justice is gonna come down on the other side. Isn’t that right?
TOOBIN: It’s true, but it’s not very true, Wolf. Yes, it is true that sometimes we’re surprised by the justices’ votes after hearing their comments at oral argument. Most of the time — and it’s not all the time, but most of the time — the questions that the justices ask at oral argument are very good predictors of how they’re gonna vote.
RUSH: So the left is in panic! Wolf Blitzer is in panic, looking for a life preserver from Jeff Toobin, who didn’t give him one. And they’re shocked! This is what’s funny. They are shocked. We aren’t. Well, we might be because we’re surprised that the Constitution is actually being adhered to here, or appears to be.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to temper your expectations on this. This is just oral argument, and we’re nowhere near the vote on this thing and we really don’t know how this is gonna go. All we have right now is palpable fear on the left. … This fascinates me, all of this shock and surprise on the left. The media, court watchers, leftist legal beagles. They are in a state of shock, a legitimate state of shock, folks. They really believed this was gonna sail through. And we have to always keep in mind how relatively young most of these people are, and thus how they’ve been educated. They didn’t get Constitution 101 like I did. They have been taught that the Constitution’s a flawed document that needs to be changed whenever it can be.
And this represents the greatest opportunity to do that that they have all ever had. The very fact that Obamacare became law against the objection of a majority of the American people — and the way it became law, basically under cover of darkness with every legislative trick under the sun being tried — didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that it might be illegal. It didn’t matter that it might be unconstitutional, because that’s precisely what this was about: Making it constitutional by virtue of changing the Constitution and using this law to do it. Then all of a sudden the oral arguments come up today, and the four conservative justices and the so-called swing vote, Anthony Kennedy, all have problems with the mandate.
And they’re literally shocked, A, that everybody doesn’t have the same worldview of this that they do; and, B, that there is any objection to it at all. Remember for these people the government is the end. It’s the be-all, end-all. Government is the final authority. Government is where everything important happens and every important decision happens for everybody. But it didn’t go that way today in the case of oral arguments and so now they’re scratching their heads and they’re genuinely surprised. Jeffrey Toobin is genuinely surprised. The CNN legal guy predicted this would sail through, and they probably were looking at this court’s actions on campaign finance law, McCain-Feingold. “Well, if that sailed through, this will.”
So where we are with this is the left now blogging incessantly their fears and their hopes at the same time. There is a left-wing blog called SCOTUSblog, Supreme Court of the United States. And this is a very relevant post on that blog: “Towards the end of the argument the most important question was Justice Kennedy’s. After pressing the government with great questions, Kennedy raised the possibility that the plaintiffs [i.e., the government] were right that the mandate was a unique effort to force people into commerce to subsidize health insurance, but the insurance market may be unique enough to justify that unusual treatment.”
So they take all of Kennedy’s questioning here, which indicated to Toobin: This thing’s dead, this thing is a “train wreck.” One question by Kennedy at the end is now given them hope that he might see this as so unique that he would vote for the mandate. A reporter at the Huffing and Puffington Post is saying that it’s, quote, “almost entirely unequivocal that a majority of the court thinks Obamacare is unconstitutional.” They are scared to death. Lyle Denniston used to be the court reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He posts this:
“If Justice Anthony M. Kennedy can locate a limiting principle in the federal government’s defense of the new individual health insurance mandate, or can think of one on his own, the mandate may well survive. If he does, he may take Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and a majority along with him,” and therefore give us a huge winning majority. “But if [Kennedy] does not, the mandate is gone. That is where Tuesday’s argument wound up — with Kennedy, after first displaying a very deep skepticism, leaving the impression that he might yet be the mandate’s savior.” A lot of these blogs are being critical of the solicitor general, the government’s lawyer, Mr. “Virility.”
One blog is saying: “I can’t believe how poorly prepared this guy was on the mandate! I can’t believe they sent him up there and he had no idea how to answer these very obvious questions on the mandate.” So apparently the government’s lawyer didn’t do a good job. The left can’t believe he wasn’t prepared any better. Well, how do you defend the indefensible? What is this guy gonna say? When that burial analogy comes up, he’s dead. When the broccoli analogy comes up, he’s dead. If you’re up arguing before the Supreme Court that the government has the right to require us to buy health insurance, then why not burial insurance? Why not broccoli?
This guy had no answer for that other than a bunch of gobbledygook. And all of his supporters watching this know what a poor job he did, and so now they’re worried, and they’ve just go on a little carrot. Anthony Kennedy gave ’em a little carrot dangling there at the far end of the mine. It’s right down there next to the canary. He might find a way. This situation is so unique and we’re talking about health care, so maybe this could be okay. That’s what they’re desperately hoping. But their instincts tell them that it was a “train wreck” today. And I must tell you, I still find it… I don’t know, I guess I shouldn’t, ’cause I know how they were educated (which was poorly). I’m still struck by the fact that they’re surprised, that they’re shocked.
What world do they live in?
This could not have been the first day in their lives that they’ve heard these objections to the mandate. But what if it is? What if they live in such a close-knit circle and they hang around only with each other? What if it actually was the first time they’ve heard these objections? That can’t be! These objections, these arguments, against the mandate have been made throughout the media everywhere. So I guess they just locked in on the idea that it doesn’t have a prayer of losing. But like so much of liberalism, and like so many liberals, they live in their cloistered world of the faculty lounge. They sit around and they talk theory all day. They don’t understand dynamism. Everything is static to them.
And then they get confronted with reality one day and it’s like a cold shower or a slap upside the head and they are bewildered. And it still amazes me that people who are reputed to be so intelligent and so smart can be so surprised when they hear arguments — logical arguments — that make it obvious this is unconstitutional. But, again, I fall back on something we must never forget, and that is: This is not about health care and it’s not about the mandate per se. It’s about changing the Constitution. Not piecemeal with this one. This is huge. If you have it codified as the law of the land that the government can make you buy something? Then, my friends, the Constitution has finally been defeated — and that’s what they can taste. In fact, it’s in their grasp, but it’s a little slippery and they can’t hold onto it.
But it’s right there.
Right there.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Wolf Blitzer was in hysterics moment ago on CNN. He had the congressional correspondent Kate Bolduan on. They had this exchange. We already heard Toobin. Blitzer is beside himself with what happened today on oral arguments.
BLITZER: Kate, you were inside the courtroom! The solicitor general, uh, Donald Verrilli, uh, was he sort of stumbling? Did he not have the right answers? Uh, did he seem unprepared and overly nervous in responding to the conservative justices’ tough questioning?
BOLDUAN: It’s hard to get into his mind. But I can say, if you compare it to yesterday, he did appear to stumble more; almost seem apologetic for some of the answers that he was giving.
RUSH: Yeah. Yeah. So now it’s time to dump on “Virility” here, the government lawyer. Blitzer: “[W]as he sort of stumbling? Did he not have the right answers? Did he seen unprepared…?” Wolf, you go defend this law up there and see how you do. There isn’t anybody who can! Obama’s not even trying to defend it. Pelosi’s only defense is, “What do you mean ‘unconstitutional’? Don’t be silly!” Nobody can defend this. Nobody. It isn’t constitutional.
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I just wish I was as confident about the outcome that is so panicking Jeffrey Toobin. But I can imagine Justice Kennedy giving his ruling in agreement with the liberals and – borrowing a phrase from Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper – saying “BAZINGA!”
Because that’s just how the law often works due to the fact that it is pretty much dominated by outrageous nerds.
But at least it’s fun to watch liberals squirm with the fear that maybe they won’t get their Big Brother takeover of society that they’ve been dreaming about.
“And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.” — Justice Kennedy
Justice Kennedy also pointed out that there’s a “heavy burden” on Congress to show that it is authorized to do so under the Constitution, inquiring whether there are “any limits under the Commerce Clause” if the mandate is allowed to stand.
And Justice Kennedy asked, “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?”
Which are all things that conservatives have recognized all along.
Mark Levin pointed out in his great book Ameritopia:
“I also endeavor to show how insidiously contemporary utopians or statists have poisoned modern society by changing the paradigms under which governmental action is both contemplated and executed” (p. xii)
It’s like he knew exactly what Justice Kennedy was going to say about the “change” in the relationship of the federal government to the individual inherent in ObamaCare.
Levin wrote:
“Utopianism substitutes glorious predictions and unachievable promises for knowledge, science and reason, while laying claim to them all” (p. 5).
And ObamaCare was all of that – glorious predictions, unachievable promises, based on pseudo-knowledge, psuedo-science and psuedo-reason, all carefully packaged into one candy-coated load of bovine feces.
“For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future…. [T]hey must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap.”
Abraham Lincoln described the danger to our Republic in 1838:
“At what point … is the approach of danger to be expected. I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we ust ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
Ronald Reagan said:
“Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”
Of course, with the clear and present danger to the elderly inherent to ObamaCare, we won’t have to worry about explaining why things went so profoundly wrong. ObamaCare will kill us off before we have to face our grandchildren.
But let’s dispense with the great thinkers and think of the tiny little dictator statist thug thinkers of the Democrat Party:
Rep. Stark: “I think that there are very few constitutional limits that would prevent the federal government from rules that could affect your private life. The basis for that would be how does that affect other people.”
[…]
“The federal government, yes, can do almost anything in this country.”
There is Rep. John Dingell:
“The harsh fact of the matter is when you’re passing legislation that will cover 300 million American people in different ways, it takes a long time to do the necessary administrative steps that have to be taken to put the legislation together to control the people.”
There’s Rep. Jan Schakowsky mocking her opponents who value freedom and liberty:
“Actually, I think really what it was was an effort to get the Tea Partiers to think that they really have some sort of revolutionary plan, because at the beginning they quote a lot from the Constitution, the idea that free people can govern themselves, that the government powers are derived from the consent of the governed.”
Here are some of the things that the left can use to “control the people” if ObamaCare becomes valid legal principle:
Food
Clothing
Household furnishings
Housing
Transportation
Communications
Education
Media
Public safety
The Obama administration asserts that health care is unique because there are “free riders” who do not purchase healthcare and therefore when they get sick or injured they pass the costs of treatment on to the rest of society. Therefore, it is irrelevant that there is no limiting principle because health care by its very nature is unique and therefore the underlying principles of statist government control are irrelevant.
Let’s just take the first item on the list – food – to demonstrate how the liberal rationale is wrong. Millions of Americans do not eat healthy diets, either because they like junk food, do not like healthy food, or even simply cannot afford to pay the higher financial cost of a healthy diet. So they are eating in an unhealthy way, eating unhealthy food instead of healthy food. And because they are eating unhealthy food rather than healthy food they develop all sorts of costly health ailments and diseases, such as obesity and diabetes and heart disease and cancer. And the costs of their treatment then become passed on to the rest of us even though we are eating healthy diets and are not having these food-abuse-related diseases. And so therefore it is the duty of the government to begin mandating that the American people must begin purchasing certain foods that are deemed to be healthy and forbidden from purchasing certain other foods that are deemed to be unhealthy. Furthermore, since overeating is a health crisis in and of itself that cost the American economy billions, the government will commence mandating a caloric restriction requirement, such that a household only be allowed to purchase so many calories’ of food per week.
We can go down the list and do the same thing and “mandate” government control citing the commerce clause. And the government can literally take over our lives by assuming the “duty” of making all of the decisions that affect “commerce.”
Conservatives could use this “mandate” to force every American to purchase guns, because crime is clearly a detrimental part of society, and crime is increasing at a dramatic pace in America while at the same time the cost of law enforcement and prisons is spiralling out of control beyond society’s ability to fund. And so therefore in order to reduce the impact of crime and the burden on and the cost of the justice system, government can mandate that every American purchase the means of self-protection. The result would be – according to the conservative defenders of the mandate – less crime, the need for fewer police officers and judges and prison guards, etc. So you must buy a Smith & Wesson firearm for protection or pay a penalty. You must also pay for training, for licensing and for all required background checks or pay a penalty.
Scratch that, because just like what happened with ObamaCare, it turns out that Colt gave the Republican president a large campaign donation. So you must now buy a Colt firearm.
Here’s one that liberals will love that isn’t even on my list: religious faith. It turns out that numerous studies have documented (at LEAST as well as ObamaCare was ever “documented”) that there are numerous health benefits related to being religious and praying. And since liberals say that health care is an economic activity that can be regulated due to rising costs, it should be pointed out that we have numerous “free riders” who do not adequately partake in religious devotion which studies document would make them healthier and therefore reduce their cost burden to society. Ergo sum we will be mandating that all liberals henceforth go to church every Sunday and pray to Jesus. Or of course pay a penalty. And please do make your checks payable to Pat Robertson. That whole 1st Amendment thing used to get in the way, but ObamaCare wiped that “limit” out, didn’t it?
Just what services or devices can either ideological side impose on their enemies and force them to purchase whether they like it or not?
Or, to quote Klingon General Chang from Star Trek’s The Undiscovered Country: “You do prefer it this way, don’t you? As it was meant to be. … No peace in our time. ‘Once more unto the breach, dear friends.'” Let’s just have it out forever – well, until we completely collapse only a few years from now – until which time both sides seek to stab the heart of the other. It’ll be fun.
ObamaCare is the most dangerous takeover of not only our health care system, but of our very democracy and American way of life, that this nation has ever been confronted with.
Democrats put out an incredibly hateful and deceitful ad demagoguing Republican budget chairman Paul Ryan by having a lookalike push grandma off a cliff.
Turnabout is the fairest play of all. Especially given the fact that the ONLY party that is pushing grandma off a cliff is the DEMOCRAT PARTY and Barack Obama:
Interestingly, in the Democrat ad, grandma dies, underscoring that Democrats really DON’T give a flying damn about grandma and are willing to kill her if they can just score rhetorical points demagoguing Republicans as a benefit for her death.
Republicans refuse to let grandma die in their ad. Because unlike Democrats, they aren’t genuinely evil.
“ObamaCare created a commission — the Independent Payment Advisory Board — tasked with limiting spending on Medicare. Its recommendations will be binding, unless Congress can come up with equivalent cost-savings of its own. For the first time, an unelected group will be empowered to limit health spending for the vulnerable elderly.”
That’s your “death panel.” And it’s only ONE of 160 bureaucracies that will act as death panels if BigBrotherCare becomes law:
I’ve written about the horror of ObamaCare at length. Here’s the heart of that ObamaCare horror for the elderly: the Complete Lives System:
In a nutshell, as you get older, you start having more health problems requiring more trips to the doctor and more medical care. But ObamaCare understands that you’re probably retired and you’re a useless eater and it’s time for you to shove off and die with dignity. So fascist Democrats want to cut off spending on the elderly and apply it to younger proletariats who are working for the sake of Dear Leader and are therefore eligible to continue to live.
“I urge that the government should indeed focus on life-years rather than lives. A program that saves young people produces more welfare than one that saves old people.”
He wrote:
“Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”
That’s why liberal intellectual and Obama advisor Robert Reich had this to say:
“Thank you so much for coming this afternoon. I’m so glad to see you and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on health care. Look, we have the only health care system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. And that’s true and what I’m going to do is that I am going try to reorganize it to be more amenable to treating sick people but that means you, particularly you young people, particularly you young healthy people…you’re going to have to pay more.
“Thank you. And by the way, we’re going to have to, 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 to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It’s too expensive…so we’re going to let you die.”
One major event that is upcoming is this one: Medicare WILL go bankrupt by no later than 2017. And the Democrat Party is steadfastly refusing to do a damn thing about it or allow the Republicans to do a damn thing about it. When Paul Ryan courageously tried to save Medicare in his last budget, Democrats lied about him and demonized him personally.
So here’s to hoping that the US Supreme Court throws out a law that is literally intended to let millions of Americans die.
You have one last chance to vote to make the morally evil Democrat Party extinct this year. You’d better take it while you still can.
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