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
Don’t worry, Democrat. You’re safe. God knows YOU’VE never been one and never will be. The only thing you love more than homosexual sodomy is murdering babies – and you’ve murdered sixty million so far and counting.
When I was preparing for ministry, I had a vision that one day I would end up in prison for being a Christian.
That day is soon coming as several recent stories prove:
City officials in Coeur d’Alene Idaho have told a married couple who are both ordained ministers that they will go to jail if they refuse to perform wedding ceremonies for gay couples.
The Alliance for Defending Freedom has filed suit against the city and asked for a temporary restraining order to prevent officials from carrying out their threat.
Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.
City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
“The government should not force ordained ministers to act contrary to their faith under threat of jail time and criminal fines,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco. “Many have denied that pastors would ever be forced to perform ceremonies that are completely at odds with their faith, but that’s what is happening here – and it’s happened this quickly. The city is on seriously flawed legal ground, and our lawsuit intends to ensure that this couple’s freedom to adhere to their own faith as pastors is protected just as the First Amendment intended.”
The couple would face 180 days in jail and up to $1000 in fines per day if they dared to adhere to their religious beliefs.
“The city somehow expects ordained pastors to flip a switch and turn off all faithfulness to their God and their vows,” explained ADF Legal Counsel Jonathan Scruggs. “The U.S. Constitution as well as federal and state law clearly stand against that. The city cannot mandate across-the-board conformity to its interpretation of a city ordinance in utter disregard for the guaranteed freedoms Americans treasure in our society.”
How many other towns and cities have statutes like this? No doubt there are other budding fascists out there who would enjoy putting Christian ministers in jail for not violating the sacred tenets of their faith.
This is a law that manifestly violates the Constitution so I wouldn’t expect any court in America to uphold the city statutue. But the fact that it was passed in the first place should raise the alarm that the assault on religious liberty has entered a new phase. The power of government is being used in the contraceptive controversey and now the gay marriage issue to force acceptance of practices totally at odds with the religious faith of millions of people.
Notice that these wicked cowards aren’t going into mosques and imposing homosexuality on them. I mean, where’s the left in forcing Islam to cater to their perversions? Their cowards and provably cowardly. But it’s open season on Christians, though.
Here’s another one, detailing the left’s demand for all records from church pastors as they conduct one of their Stalinist show trials:
Houston is home to one of NASA’s most sophisticated space centers — but even it would have trouble finding signs of intelligence in the local Mayor’s office. The city’s highest official is blowing past the First Amendment at warp speed — and lighting a political powder keg in the process.
After four years of forcing her extreme agenda on the city, Mayor Annise Parker may have finally picked a fight she’s bound to regret. Five months after bullying her way into a Houston-wide “bathroom bill,” Parker is furious that the city’s voters won’t roll over and accept it. Instead, America’s fourth-largest city fought back, gathering three times the number of signatures needed to put the issue on the ballot. Furious with local pastors for leading the pushback, Parker decided to get her revenge by ordering a Soviet-style crackdown on area churches.
In a story that’s spreading like wildfire, the Mayor had the nerve to subpoena pastors for their sermons, text messages, photographs, electronic files, calendars, and emails — “all communications with members of your congregation” on topics like homosexuality and gender identity. If she thought her religious “inquisition” would scare pastors, she’s got another thing coming. Local Christians are more outraged than ever, igniting a firestorm that could awaken a sleeping giant in churches from coast to coast. “We’re not intimidated at all,” said Rev. Dave Welch. “We’re not going to yield our First Amendment rights,” he warned — even if it ends in fines, confinement, or both.
The Mayor reportedly attempted to douse the flames a bit by saying the subpoena was the work of pro-bono lawyers and that she was not aware of it until yesterday. Then, she doubled down with a tweet: “If the 5 pastors used pulpits for politics, their sermons are fair game.”
In a conversation I had this afternoon with a handful of key pastors, it’s obvious that this is a fight they’re ready for. Pastor Steve Riggle, a friend of FRC’s, sees right through the Mayor’s agenda. “This is an attempt to chill pastors from speaking to the cultural issues of the day,” he told Fox News’s Todd Starnes. And if she doesn’t pull her attack dogs off the city’s churches, the joke will be on her. It just might end up being the most ingenious way of getting liberals into the pews yet! “Political and social commentary is not a crime. It is protected by the First Amendment,” Alliance Defending Freedom pointed out.
This is the “wall of separation” Jefferson talked about: protecting churches from the government (not the other way around). The Left is fond of misrepresenting the third President’s famous letter, but Annise Parker’s intrusion is exactly what the Founders were concerned about. But what did we expect in a country where four little letters — LGBT — are trumping the letter of the law? “Even in Houston,” Erick Erickson writes, “you will be made to care.”
Unfortunately, Houston is learning a hard lesson about the importance of elections. As frustrating as it is, this is what happens in a city where only 16 percent turn out to vote in the mayor’s race. For now, though, local churches have a message for the government: go ahead and monitor our sermons. You obviously need the messages more than most.
You can stand with Houston’s pastors by signing FRC’s petition to Mayor Annise Parker, asking her to support free speech for all people.
Another article points out the outrage that the left – pretty much the damned Democrat Party – is demanding:
Tranny tyranny. Strike that. “LGBT” tyranny. Lesbian, gay, bisexual tyranny. That, generally speaking, is what’s on display in Houston right now. But trust me: Unlike Vegas, what happens in Houston will, most definitely, not stay in Houston – not if Democrats continue to have their way.
Houstonians elected themselves, as mayor, an extremist lesbian Democrat (but I repeat myself). She quickly, and quite naturally, took to doing what extremist lesbian Democrats do. Annise Parker is her name, and spreading political Ebola is her game. That and trampling the U.S. Constitution. As you’ve likely heard, Parker’s office has illegally subpoenaed the sermons and privileged communications of a number of Christian pastors who vocally opposed the city’s ironically branded “Equal Rights Ordinance” (aka, the Houston Bathroom Bill).
More on that later. First, let’s scoot north-leftward for context.
Washington state, dateline 2012: Colleen is just like the girl next door. Well, sort of. Colleen has a penis. So, I guess, unless the girl next door has a penis, Coleen really isn’t much like her at all.
But that’s beside the point. In Washington you must, under penalty of law, pretend, along with Colleen and Democrats that, in the face of both reality and sanity, Colleen really is like the girl next door. This includes letting Colleen, who is actually a 47-year-old dude named Clay Scott Francis, lay naked and “sprawled out in a sauna exposing himself” to girls as young as 6 years old. This really happened in the ladies locker room at Evergreen State College.
It’s only fair, you see, because, as Clay, er, “Colleen,” complained, and as police agreed, this sick bastard was “discriminated against” when he was asked to leave on behalf of a terrorized 17-year-old girl. “This is not 1959 Alabama,” cried Francis. “We don’t call police for drinking from the wrong water fountain.”
Get that, my African-American friends? According to this beneficiary of “white privilege,” a man who, incidentally, identifies as a “transgender lesbian” (meaning he’s sexually attracted to females), to be told that you cannot sprawl naked and intentionally expose your manly bits to 6-year-old girls is no different from being relegated to a “colored only” water fountain.
Mayor Annise Parker and the larger Democratic Party agree. Ian Tuttle reports for National Review:
“Earlier this year Parker, a Democrat, spearheaded the passage of an ‘Equal Rights Ordinance’ (ERO) that added ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ to the city’s non-discrimination provision, which includes, among other things, ‘public accommodations’ – for example, restrooms. Citizens, among them church leaders, balked. They launched a referendum petition that, with the requisite 17,269 signatures, would require the city council to repeal the ERO, or to put the measure up for a vote. They obtained 55,000 signatures.
“The city secretary, who has sole responsibility for certifying such petitions, signed off.
“Enter Houston city attorney David Feldman, who, with no legal authority, disqualified 38,000 signatures. Names that were printed, rather than written in cursive, were discarded; names that were written in cursive were considered illegible – just enough names to get the petition below the 17,000-signature requirement, at which point the city council and Mayor Parker rejected it. And several citizens sued.
“But the city’s shenanigans had only just begun. Unsatisfied with violating the rights of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, the City of Houston has subpoenaed privileged communications of five pastors (none of them party to the lawsuit) who helped to organize the petition drive. Among other information, the city is requesting communications between the pastors and their attorneys pertaining to the ERO lawsuit, communications between the pastors and their congregants, and even the pastors’ sermons. …”
This, of course, is typical Democrat corruption, as well as a gross violation of the First Amendment’s free exercise clause – one of the worst we’ve seen to date. It is, unequivocally, “LGBT” tyranny.
And it’s rooted in madness.
Through the secular-“progressive” looking-glass, the term “sexual orientation” has, in a few short years, evolved to accommodate an ever-expanding fruit basket of carnal appetites. First it was “LGB” – liberal shorthand for “lesbian, gay and bisexual.” Then was added a “T” for “transgender.” That’s gender identity disorder – cross-dressing. You know, perverts like Clay Francis. (Today it’s “LGBTOMGWTFBBQ” or some such.)
Anyway, because it’s now illegal to “discriminate based on the basis of gender identity” in Houston, and since it’s the only “tolerant” thing to do, men who sign up for the ever-persecuted “LGBT” class have secured the hard-fought “civil right” to fully expose themselves to, and otherwise ogle, your daughters in the ladies’ room.
Yay “gay rights”!
But slow down there, Dad. According to the law, if you have a problem with Mr. Francis baring all to your baby girl, then you’re the problem. You’re a “transphobe” (“homophobia’s” evil twin sister, er, brother … whatever). Deck this sicko for terrifying your first-grader and you’re off to jail while “Colleen” is off to the “Human Rights Campaign” for a commendation as the latest victim of an “anti-LGBT hate crime.”
Rosa Parks in drag, I guess.
You can call yourself a “Christian,” Democrat. While you’re at it, why don’t you just go lay down in your garage and call yourself a “car”? You would be every bit as much the latter as you are the former.
Romans chapter one declares that you have NOTHING to do with Christ or Christianity or God. You are under the wrath of God. You DEMAND to be under the wrath of God. And you’re going to get yours because the God who told us that the last days were coming and the Antichrist whose mark you will soon be taking was coming and that the hell He created for the devil and his angels was coming and that you’re going to burn in it forever and ever.
The Democrat Party is the Nazi Party in America. “NAZI” stood for “National Socialist German Workers Party.” It is the truly ignorant fool who doesn’t realize that if there were a “National Socialist American Workers Party,” it would be nothing more than a name-change for the Democrat Party. Although God in heaven knows that there are a great many truly ignorant fools walking around in these last days before the coming of the beast whom they will worship.
And what we’re seeing is that Nazism does what Nazism is and vice versa as we look at the fruits of the Democrat Party and the hard-core homosexual fascism that is beginning to take place in an America I am now ashamed of.
It is as much the nature of the Democrat Party to betray as it is the nature of the Democrat Party to do what is vile in God’s sight.
Take, for example, the elderly and Medicare. It is only a matter of time now before the Democrat Party betrays the elderly and abandons them for the young. It’s actually already begun to happen as ObamaCare strips hundreds of billions of dollars out of Medicare to put into their new sacred cow. Yes, it was the Democrat Party that imposed Medicare and made promises to people who are now elderly that the government would take care of them in their old age. But health care is getting extremely expensive. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of health care expenses/costs take place in the last few years of life as the health of the elderly begins to break down and it requires more care and more expensive care to treat them and to keep them healthy.
D. James Kennedy prophetically warned, “Watch out, Grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after YOU!”
Leftist Paul Krugman declared the fact that, yes, Democrats were going to turn on the elderly:
Eventually we do have a problem. That the population is getting older, health care costs are rising…there is this question of how we’re going to pay for the programs. The year 2025, the year 2030, something is going to have to give…. …. We’re going to need more revenue…Surely it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well.. We won’t be able to pay for the kind of government the society will want without some increase in taxes… on the middle class, maybe a value added tax…And we’re also going to have to make decisions about health care, doc pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits . So the snarky version…which I shouldn’t even say because it will get me in trouble is death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.
“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.”
The “Complete Lives” program behind ObamaCare kills old people by medical neglect and funds young people.
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.”
A previous liberal, George Bernard Shaw, put it quite crystal clearly:
“You must all know half a dozen people at least who are no use in this world; who are more trouble than they are worth. Just put them there, and say, now sir or madam, now will you be kind enough to justify your existence? If you can’t justify your existence; if you’re not pulling your weight in the social boat; if you’re not producing as much as you consume or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organisation of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.”
So it’s already a matter of FACT that the Democrat Party is going to betray the elderly after seizing power on their false promises to the previous generation. It’s only a matter of when it is most politically opportune for them to betray that previous generation in favor of dishonest false promises to a younger generation.
The real motto of the Democrat Party is, “We’ll promise you ANYTHING to get your vote. That is, until we stab you in the back so we can promise the voters we want to replace you with anything to get their votes.”
Because the Democrat Party of today is the Party of Lucifer, and neither honesty nor loyalty are the virtues of the devil.
Just like the last Nazis before them.
America is demanding the wrath of God be poured out upon it for its embrace of homosexuality. And we’re getting what we demand and what we deserve.
I rather routinely call Obama the F-word. No, not that F-word (although the ability to resist doing so is dwindling); the other F-word: Fascist. Barack Obama is a fascist.
I have had quite a few liberals fixate on this word, and – while ignoring the rest of my arguments – proceed to give me a lecture about how my extremism undermines my positions and arguments (which they don’t bother to consider).
I’d like to respond to that. At length.
There are many who would argue that if a politician is not as rabid as Adolf Hitler, that one cannot use this label of “fascist” – at least not unless the target is a Republican (see below). Barack Obama is not a “dictator,” these would argue. He hasn’t launched the world into global war and he hasn’t murdered 6 million Jews (at least, he hasn’t yet). So he can’t be a “fascist.” This argument fails on two parts. First of all, by such a metric, Benito Mussolini wouldn’t be a “fascist” either (except for the “dictator” part). One of the reasons it is hard to have an easy definition of “fascist” is because fascism has taken a different character in every country and culture in which it has been embraced. Hitler is not the norm or standard of fascism; he is merely the most extreme example of its virulence and danger. Secondly, even if we were to take a Hitler as our example, let us realize that Adolf Hitler was a very cunning politician who managed to gain power in a Germany that was THE most sophisticated, educated and scientific nation and culture of its day. What I am asserting is that if an Adolf Hitler were to run for the presidency of the United States in 2012, he would run a platform that we could very easily label as “hope and change,” he would demagogue his adversaries as being the cause for the nation’s plight, he would lie both cynically and outrageously to win votes and he would then proceed to push the country as far as he possibly could toward his agenda. And so here, from the outset, I am claiming that the suggestion that either Barack Obama or anyone else does not qualify as a “fascist” simply because he or she can’t be directly compared to Adolf Hitler is nothing but a straw man.
The question thus becomes, what is fascism, and then it is what is Obama steering us toward?
THE WORD “fascism” is used broadly on the left as a term of abuse. Sometimes it is used to refer to any repressive government, whatever its political form. Most commonly on the left in the U.S., it is used to describe any Republican government–in particular, any Republican government or candidate on the eve of a presidential election.
As an experiment, I typed the words “Bush fascist” and then “Obama fascist” sans quotes. I got 3,280,000 Google hits for Bush fascist (and keep in mind an awful lot of hits would have vanished in the last 11 years as domains purged articles or simply ceased to exist) versus only 2,490,000 for Obama. That means liberals were over 45% more likely to call Bush a fascist than conservatives have been to call Obama one.
And when these liberals express their outrage that I would dare call Obama a fascist and thus lower the discourse, I invariably ask them just where the hell they were when their side was teeing off on Bush for eight unrelenting years of Bush derangement syndrome??? It was rare indeed to see a liberal excoriate his fellow liberals for demonizing the president of the United States.
With all due respect, the left started this form of “discourse.” They turned it into an art form. And how dare these hypocrites dare to tell me not to do unto Obama as they did unto Bush???
That might only be a rhetorical argument, as two wrongs clearly don’t make a right. But it remains a powerful one. Liberals have forfeited any moral right to criticize conservatives for using their own tactics against them.
But I don’t simply call Obama a fascist because liberals called Bush one. I call him one because he has exhibited all kinds of fascistic tendencies, which I shall in time describe.
But fascism has a far more precise definition. Historically, fascism is a far-right movementof the middle classes (shopkeepers, professionals, civil servants) who are economically ruined by severe economic crisis and driven to “frenzy.”
In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky, fascism brings “to their feet those classes that are immediately above the working class and that are ever in dread of being forced down into its ranks; it organizes and militarizes them…and it directs them to the extirpation of proletarian organizations, from the most revolutionary to the most conservative.”
I have no doubt that the irony of these words were entirely lost to the “Socialist Worker” who wrote the article. But allow me to illuminate it for you: think of the most infamous fascists of all time, the Nazis. What did the word “Nazi” stand for? It was the “acronym for the ‘National Socialist German Workers Party’.” Let me try that again, just in case you missed these precious little details: “National SOCIALIST German WORKERS Party.”
But ask the “Socialist Workers” and they’ll assure you that the “Socialist Workers Party” had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Socialist Workers. Because that would certainly be awkward, wouldn’t it???
It is rather fascinating that “Socialist Worker” would cite as his authority on fascism and who should be labeled as a “fascist” the Marxist thinker . Allow me to provide one counter statement which is based not on the “brilliant words” of a Marxist, but on the plain simple facts:
“Part of the problem in recognizing fascism is the assumption that it is conservative. [Zeev] Sternhell has observed how study of the ideology has been obscured by “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism.” Marxism defines fascism as its polar opposite. If Marxism is progressive, fascism is conservative. If Marxism is left wing, fascism is right wing. If Marxism champions the proletariat, fascism champions the bourgeoisie. If Marxism is socialist, fascism is capitalist.
The influence of Marxist scholarship has severely distorted our understanding of fascism. Communism and fascism were rival brands of socialism. Whereas Marxist socialism is predicated on an international class struggle, fascist national socialism promoted a socialism centered in national unity. Both communists and fascists opposed the bourgeoisie. Both attacked the conservatives. Both were mass movements, which had special appeal for the intelligentsia, students, and artists, as well as workers. Both favored strong centralized governments and rejected the free economy and the ideals of individual liberty. Fascists saw themselves as being neither of the right nor the left. They believed that they constituted a third force synthesizing the best of both extremes” [Gene Edward Veith, Jr., Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, p. 26].
So depending on Leon Trotsky or any other Marxist-inspired academic who merely parrots “the official Marxist interpretation of fascism” has rather serious intellectual drawbacks. And yet that is largely what we get. Far too many American academics wouldn’t be so obvious as to use the phrase, “In the brilliant words of Leon Trotsky,” but they give his ideas, theories and talking points total credence, nonetheless. The term “useful idiots” was literally coined to describe these Western “intellectuals.” And their being “useful idiots” is every bit as true today as it ever was in the past.
Consider the REAL “polar opposite”: American conservatives are capitalists, not socialists. They demand a limited national/federal government, not a massive centrally planned state as does socialism, communism and fascism. They prefer the federalist idea of powerful states’ rights against a weakened federal government, not some all-powerful Führer. And to try to force conservatives into some Nazi mold invariably means either creating straw men arguments or citing irrelevant facts (such as that conservatives favor a large military just like the Nazis did, as though virtually every single communist state does not similarly favor a large military “just like the Nazis did”). If you want an all-powerful national government that gets to decide who wins and who loses, if you want to see a system where you have to come to your government for assistance and resources with all manner of strings attached rather than being allowed to depend on yourself, your family and your community, you should embrace the political left, not the right.
By the way, another favorite idiotic red herring for liberals asserting that “Nazism was right wing” was that the Nazis hated the admittedly left wing communists. But consider the fact that Coke hates Pepsi and Barbie Doll makers hate Bratz Doll makers. Are we supposed to believe that Coke is the opposite of Pepsi as opposed to water, milk or orange juice? The fact of the matter is that Nazis and Soviet Communists hated each other because both movements had a global agenda of totalitarian dominion, and both movements were competing for the same rabidly left wing converts.
Pardon me for the following insult, but the only people who believe garbage arguments like these are ignorant fools who live in a world of straw men. Even if they have the title “PhD.” after their names.
It is for that reason that I can state categorically that Marxism and fascism are not “polar opposites” at all. They are merely two potentially complementary species of socialism. That is why China has been able to easily weave blatantly fascistic (national socialist/corporatist) elements into its Maoist communism. It is also why Joseph Stalin was able to go from being an international socialist (i.e. a communist) and then appeal to nationalism (i.e., national socialism or “fascism”) when he needed to fight Hitler, only to switch back to “international socialism” after the war, as a few lines from Wikipedia on “Russian nationalism” point out:
The newborn communist republic under Vladimir Lenin proclaimed internationalism as its official ideology[4]. Russian nationalism was discouraged, as were any remnants of Imperial patriotism, such as wearing military awards received before Civil War….
The 1930s saw the evolution of the new concept of Soviet nationalism under Joseph Stalin, based on both Russian nationalism and communist internationalism. Official communist ideology always stated that Russia was the most progressive state, because it adopted socialism as its basis (which, according to the writings of Karl Marx, is the inevitable future of world socio-economic systems). Under Lenin, the USSR believed its duty to help other nations to arrange socialist revolutions (the concept of World Revolution), and made close ties with labor movements around the world[4].
[…]
The Soviet Union’s war against Nazi Germany became known as the Great Patriotic War, hearkening back to the previous use of the term in the Napoleonic Wars. The Soviet state called for Soviet citizens to defend the ‘Motherland’, a matrilineal term used to describe Russia in the past.
[…]
In 1944, the Soviet Union abandoned its communist anthem, The International, and adopted a new national anthem which citizens of the Soviet Union could identify with.
And then, with the victory secured over fascism, the Stalinist “national socialism” (a.k.a. “fascism”) suddenly became international socialism again. The Nazis’ very name was Nationalsozialistische.
One can be a “Marxist-fascist” and combine and blend elements of both totalitarian socialist systems quite easily, as both the Russian and then the Chinese communists proved. Communism and fascism have far more in common with one another than they have in opposition; especially when you examine the fact that both political systems invariably end up becoming the same big-government totalitarian police state.
So for my first two points – namely that 1) the left has routinely demagogically labeled the right “fascist” even when 2) it is clearly the left that owes far and away the most to fascistic elements – I am going to continue to shout from the rooftops who are the real fascists in America.
That said, it is still not enough to merely point out the FACT that American liberalism has much in common with fascism. And there is a lot more yet to say.
Before I begin spouting particular examples, I therefore need to further approach just what it is that would constitute a “fascist.” And then see who and how the label fits. From The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics:
The best example of a fascist economy is the regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Holding that liberalism (by which he meant freedom and free markets) had “reached the end of its historical function,” Mussolini wrote: “To Fascism the world is not this material world, as it appears on the surface, where Man is an individual separated from all others and left to himself…. Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual.”
This collectivism is captured in the word fascism, which comes from the Latin fasces, meaning a bundle of rods with an axe in it. In economics, fascism was seen as a third way between laissez-faire capitalism and communism. Fascist thought acknowledged the roles of private property and the profit motive as legitimate incentives for productivity—provided that they did not conflict with the interests of the state.
[…]
Mussolini’s fascism took another step at this time with the advent of the Corporative State, a supposedly pragmatic arrangement under which economic decisions were made by councils composed of workers and employers who represented trades and industries. By this device the presumed economic rivalry between employers and employees was to be resolved, preventing the class struggle from undermining the national struggle. In the Corporative State, for example, strikes would be illegal and labor disputes would be mediated by a state agency.
Theoretically, the fascist economy was to be guided by a complex network of employer, worker, and jointly run organizations representing crafts and industries at the local, provincial, and national levels. At the summit of this network was the National Council of Corporations. But although syndicalism and corporativism had a place in fascist ideology and were critical to building a consensus in support of the regime, the council did little to steer the economy. The real decisions were made by state agencies such as the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricosstruzione Industriale, or IRI), mediating among interest groups.
[…]
Mussolini also eliminated the ability of business to make independent decisions: the government controlled all prices and wages, and firms in any industry could be forced into a cartel when the majority voted for it. The well-connected heads of big business had a hand in making policy, but most smaller businessmen were effectively turned into state employees contending with corrupt bureaucracies. They acquiesced, hoping that the restrictions would be temporary. Land being fundamental to the nation, the fascist state regimented agriculture even more fully, dictating crops, breaking up farms, and threatening expropriation to enforce its commands.
Banking also came under extraordinary control. As Italy’s industrial and banking system sank under the weight of depression and regulation, and as unemployment rose, the government set up public works programs and took control over decisions about building and expanding factories. The government created the Istituto Mobiliare in 1931 to control credit, and the IRI later acquired all shares held by banks in industrial, agricultural, and real estate enterprises.
The image of a strong leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt looked to for ideas in 1933…
Fascism is all about the “community,” not the individual. Its message is about the good of the nation, or the people (or the Volk), or the community, rather than the good of a nation’s individual citizens. It is about distributing and then redistributing the wealth and returning it to “its rightful owners” under the guise of an all-powerful state rather than recognizing and rewarding individual achievement. In short, when Hillary Clinton explained that, “It takes a village,” an educated Nazi would have snapped his fingers and excitedly shouted, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!”
For Obama, the collectivism, community or “village” thing is such a profound part of him that he has literally made it an integral part of his very heretical form of “Christianity,” which very much stresses individual salvation and individual responsibility. Obama has on several occasions put it this way:
For example, in 1995, Obama said, “my individual salvation is not going to come about without a collective salvation for the country…” and again in May of 2008, “our individual salvation depends of collective salvation.”
In the Christian faith, there is no such thing as collective salvation. Salvation is an individual choice. It is personal acceptance of Jesus as savior, Son of the living God.
Obama’s is a wildly perverted view of orthodox Christianity. It so distorts true Christianity at such a fundamental level, in fact, that one literally has to go to Hitler to find a suitable similar parallel from a “Christian” national leader. The great Protestant Reformer Martin Luther – the most famous German prior to Hitler – had written the most monumental text of German culture prior to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. It was called “The Bondage of the Will,” which was considered THE manifesto of the Reformation. According to Luther, the human will was in bondage to sin. The fallen will, if left to itself, will choose what is evil. The human will has been perversely set against the righteous will of God. For sinful human beings, the will is not in a state of liberty but is in bondage to its worst impulses. Luther wrote in this work, “When our liberty is lost we are compelled to serve sin: that is, we will sin and evil, we speak sin and evil, we do sin and evil.” Adolf Hitler infamously turned that key doctrine of Christianity on its head in his “The Triumph of the Will,” in which he exalted depraved human will to an altogether different level of human depravity. Which is to say that Hitler was so profoundly wrong that he proved Luther right.
But getting back to Obama’s profoundly anti-Christian concept of “collective salvation,” the Nazis would have been all over that, enthusiastically shouting their agreement, “Ja! JA! Das ist ES!” Recall the encyclopedia entry on fascism stating that, “Fascism affirms the State as the true reality of the individual,” which was then further defined as “collectivism.” And the Nazis repeatedly called upon loyal Germans to make horrendous sacrifices in the name of that collective.
What the Nazis pursued was a form of anti-capitalist anti-conservative communitarianism encapsulated in the concept of Volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community.”
From the Nazi Party Platform:
– The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically. The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all Consequently we demand:
– Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of rent-slavery.
– In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands of the people personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
– We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
– We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
– We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
– We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or municipality.
– We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.
– We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, Schieber and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
– We demand substitution of a German common law in place of the Roman Law serving a materialistic world-order.
– The state is to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program, to enable every capable and industrious German to obtain higher education and subsequently introduction into leading positions. The plans of instruction of all educational institutions are to conform with the experiences of practical life. The comprehension of the concept of the State must be striven for by the school [Staatsbuergerkunde] as early as the beginning of understanding. We demand the education at the expense of the State of outstanding intellectually gifted children of poor parents without consideration of position or profession.
– The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
– We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
– We demand legal opposition to known lies and their promulgation through the press. In order to enable the provision of a German press, we demand, that: a. All writers and employees of the newspapers appearing in the German language be members of the race: b. Non-German newspapers be required to have the express permission of the State to be published. They may not be printed in the German language: c. Non-Germans are forbidden by law any financial interest in German publications, or any influence on them, and as punishment for violations the closing of such a publication as well as the immediate expulsion from the Reich of the non-German concerned. Publications which are counter to the general good are to be forbidden. We demand legal prosecution of artistic and literary forms which exert a destructive influence on our national life, and the closure of organizations opposing the above made demands.
Ah, yes, the Nazis had their “Fairness Doctrine” long before this current generation of liberals had theirs.
You read that Nazi Party Platform carefully, and you tell me if you see small government conservative Republicans or big government liberal Democrats written all over it.
Now, you read the Nazi Party Platform, and given what American liberals want and what American conservatism opposes, it is so obvious which party is “fascist” that it isn’t even silly. Then you ADD to that the fact that fascism and American progressivism (which is liberalism) were so similar that the great fascists of the age couldn’t tell the damn difference.
Since you point out Nazism was fascist, let’s look at some history as to WHO was recognized as fascist in America.
Fascism sought to eliminate class differences and to destroy/replace capitalism and laissez-faire economics.
H.G. Wells, a great admirer of FDR and an extremely close personal friend of his, was also a great progressive of his day. He summed it up this way in a major speech at Oxford to the YOUNG LIBERALS organization under the banner of “Liberal Fascism”: “I am asking for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.” He said, “And do not let me leave you in the slightest doubt as to the scope and ambition of what I am putting before you” and then said:
These new organizations are not merely organizations for the spread of defined opinions…the days of that sort of amateurism are over – they are organizations to replace the dilatory indecisiveness of democracy. The world is sick of parliamentary politics…The Fascist Party, to the best of its ability, is Italy now. The Communist Party, to the best of its ability, is Russia. Obviously the Fascists of Liberalism must carry out a parallel ambition on still a vaster scale…They must begin as a disciplined sect, but must end as the sustaining organization of a reconstituted mankind.”
H.G. Wells pronounced FDR “the most effective transmitting instrument possible for the coming of the new world order.” And of course, we easily see that the new world order Wells wanted was a fascist one. In 1941, George Orwell concluded, “Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in Nazi Germany.”
It was from the lips of liberal progressive H.G. Wells that Jonah Goldberg got the title of his book, Liberal Fascism. Goldberg didn’t just invent this connection: H.G. Wells flagrantly admitted it and George Orwell called him on it. All Goldberg did was rediscover history that liberals buried and have used every trick imaginable to keep buried.
And as a tie-in to our modern day, who more than Barack Obama has been more associated with said FDR?
But let me move on to some real red meat. In just what specific, concrete ways can I call Obama a fascist?
Well, to begin with, there is the signature achievement of his entire presidency, his national health care system (ObamaCare). For liberals, it is nothing but the most bizarre coincidence that Nazi culture had a national health care system that was quite rightly considered the wonder of its day by socialists in America. It is the most despicable of insults that Sarah Palin excoriated ObamaCare as “death panels” – even though it is more precisely a bureaucratic maze consisting of more like 160 separate death panels:
And the “czar” thing hits a very fascist nerve, too. Obama has appointed 39 czars who are completely outside our Constitutional process. Obama signed a budget bill into law that required him to remove these czars, but why would a fascist trouble himself with outmoded things like “laws”? One of the enraged Republicans responded, “The president knew that the czar amendment was part of the overall budget deal he agreed to, and if he cannot be trusted to keep his word on this, then how can he be trusted as we negotiate on larger issues like federal spending and the economy.” And of course, he’s right.
But why do I say it’s financial fascism in 20/20 hindsight? Because of what we just learned: in spite of all the bogus lying promises and the massive takeover “for our own good,” Obama didn’t fix anything. Instead he made it WORSE:
The financial system poses an even greater risk to taxpayers than before the crisis, according to analysts at Standard & Poor’s. The next rescue could be about a trillion dollars costlier, the credit rating agency warned.
S&P put policymakers on notice, saying there’s “at least a one-in-three” chance that the U.S. government may lose its coveted AAA credit rating. Various risks could lead the agency to downgrade the Treasury’s credit worthiness, including policymakers’ penchant for rescuing bankers and traders from their failures.
“The potential for further extraordinary official assistance to large players in the U.S. financial sector poses a negative risk to the government’s credit rating,” S&P said in its Monday report.
But, the agency’s analysts warned, “we believe the risks from the U.S. financial sector are higher than we considered them to be before 2008.”
Because of the increased risk, S&P forecasts the potential initial cost to taxpayers of the next crisis cleanup to approach 34 percent of the nation’s annual economic output, or gross domestic product. In 2007, the agency’s analysts estimated it could cost 26 percent of GDP.
Last year, U.S. output neared $14.7 trillion, according to the Commerce Department. By S&P’s estimate, that means taxpayers could be hit with $5 trillion in costs in the event of another financial collapse.
Experts said that while the cost estimate seems unusually high, there’s little dispute that when the next crisis hits, it will not be anticipated — and it will likely hurt the economy more than the last financial crisis.
So much for the massive and unprecedented fascist government takeover.
Think last year’s $700 billion Wall Street rescue package was beaucoup bucks to spend bailing out the nation’s floundering financial system? That’s chump change compared to what the overall price tag could be, a government watchdog says.
The inspector general in charge of overseeing the Treasury Department’s bank-bailout program says the massive endeavor could end up costing taxpayers almost $24 trillion in a worst-case scenario. That’s more than six times President Obama’s proposed $3.55 trillion budget for 2010.
Nobody here but us fascists. And we sure aint talking.
Then there are other issues that the left usually uses to attack conservatives, such as racism. Wasn’t Hitler a racist, just like conservatives? The problem is, the liberals are as usual upside-down here. After running as the man to create racial harmony, Barack Obama has instead done more to racially polarize America than any president since other famous progressives such as Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Frankly, if one were to conduct a major study of racial politics, and the setting up in opposition of one racial group against another, just which party has emphasized race and race-baiting more?
Hitler’s Jew-baiting was all about the idea that one race had taken over the culture, had the money and the power, and was using its influence to oppress the people in the banking system and anywhere else that mattered. And Hitler’s constant screed was that Germany needed to confiscate the Jews’ wealth and then redistribute it. With all respect, all the left has done is replace “Jew” with “Caucasian” and making the exact same claims.
And with all this hard-core racist demagoguing, I’m supposed to say that, “Oh, yes, it’s the conservatives who are guilty of demagoguing race”??? Seriously???
Obama has Samantha Powers (the wife of Cass Sunstein, the man who “nudges us”) close to him and advising him on matters of war. According to the very liberal publication The Nation, “She began to see war as an instrument to achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” What if you had an ultra conservative – oh, say a Sarah Palin – openly acknowledged to pursue war and risk American lives to advance her radical values??? What would the left call this if not “fascist”?
But it’s only fascist if Republicans do it, of course.
Also in yesterday’s news is the fact that Obama is the perpetual demagogue– which is a quintessentially fascist tactic. Obama demonized Bush for trying to raise the debt ceiling until he needed to raise it. Now it would be un-American for Republicans to act the same exact way Obama acted. In the same demagogic spirit, Obama personally invited Paul Ryan to a speech just so he could personally demonize him. The same Obama who lectured Republicans that it would be counter-productive to rely on name-calling and accusations in the health care debate launched into a vicious demagogic attack. Ryan correctly said that “What we got yesterday was the opposite of what he said is necessary to fix this problem.” But that is par for the golf course for a fascist. If that wasn’t enough, Obama held a White House conference for “stake holders” in the immigration debate and refused to invite a single governor from a border state.
A Republican equivalent would have had to come out of a deep involvement with some vile racist militia organization to approximate Obama’s background. And liberals would rightly label such a politician a fascist for his past alone.
Here’s a recent Youtube video of Obama’s key union allies on camera saying, “We’re not going to rely on the law,” and, “Forget about the law” as they seek to impose their unions basically whether workers want them or not:
“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.” – The Hussein himself, informing a woman that it’s basically time to let her mother die.
This is nothing compared to what might happen under Democratic health overhaul plans, which would slash Medicare spending by nearly $500 billion over 10 years. As Medicare actuaries recently pointed out in understated fashion, such cuts “may be unrealistic.” But, if Congress actually carried them out, about one in five hospitals, nursing homes and home care agencies could lose money, they warned in their report. As a result, such providers could drop Medicare, leaving seniors with less access.
[…]
Don’t think for a second that this isn’t directly related to the disaster known as ObamaCare. Democrats are gutting Medicare reimbursements and blocking the essential “doctor fix” from their bill to create the contrived and bogus illusion that their boondoggle will provide “deficit neutrality.” They are playing all kinds of games and gimmicks, such as taxing for ten years and only providing benefits for five, to support that illusion. It will fail, and a lot of people will die.
[…]
And so, what do you think will happen when Democrats cut the reimbursement rates? People who have commons sense know: hospitals and doctors will begin to see fewer and fewer Medicare patients, as a matter of simple economic necessity. That isn’t a “reform,” but a disaster.
And, now, without further delay, the article of the day’s latest demonstration that the Democrat Party is the political arm of the devil and Barack Obama is leading America into ruin not seen since the last time socialism devastated Europe when our grandparents were young kids…
It is somehow ironically fitting that this destruction of our health care system would be described in Obama’s hometown.
In Illinois, a pharmacist closes his business because of late Medicaid payments. In Arizona, a young father’s liver transplant is canceled because Medicaid suddenly won’t pay for it. In California, dentists pull teeth that could be saved because Medicaid doesn’t pay for root canals.
Across the country, state lawmakers have taken harsh actions to try to rein in the budget-busting costs of the health care program that serves 58 million poor and disabled Americans. Some states have cut payments to doctors, paid bills late and trimmed benefits such as insulin pumps, obesity surgery and hospice care.
Lawmakers are bracing for more work when they reconvene in January. Some states face multibillion-dollar deficits. Federal stimulus money for Medicaid is soon to evaporate. And Medicaid enrollment has never been higher because of job losses.
In the view of some lawmakers, Medicaid has become a monster, and it’s eating the budget. In Illinois, Medicaid sucks up more money than elementary, secondary and higher education combined.
“Medicaid is such a large, complicated part of our budget problem, that to get our hands around it is very difficult. It’s that big. It’s that bad,” said Illinois Sen. Dale Righter, a Republican and co-chairman of a bipartisan panel to reform Medicaid in Illinois, where nearly 30 percent of total spending goes to the program.
Medicaid costs are shared by the federal and state governments. It’s not just the poor and disabled who benefit. Wealthier people do, too, such as when middle-class families with elderly parents in nursing homes are relieved of financial pressure after Medicaid starts picking up the bills.
Contrary to stereotype, it’s the elderly and disabled who cost nearly 70 cents of every Medicaid dollar, not the single mother and her children.
In California, Medicaid no longer pays for many adult dental services. But it still pays for extractions, that is, tooth-pulling. The unintended consequence: Medicaid patients tell dentists to pull teeth that could be saved.
“The roots are fine. The tooth could be saved with a root canal,” said Dr. Nagaraj Murthy, who practices in Compton, Calif. “I had a patient yesterday. I said we could do a root canal. He said, ‘No, it’s hurting. Go ahead and pull it. I don’t have the money.”’
Murthy recently pulled an elderly woman’s last tooth, but Medicaid no longer pays for dentures.
“Elderly patients suffer the most,” Murthy said. “They’re walking around with no teeth.”
States can decide which optional services Medicaid covers, and dental care is among cutbacks in some places. Last year’s economic stimulus package increased the federal share of Medicaid money temporarily. But that money runs out at the end of June, when the federal government will go back to paying half the costs rather than 60 to 70 percent. So more cuts could be ahead.
During the Great Recession, millions of people relied on the Medicaid safety net. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of uninsured Americans grew by more than 5 million as workers lost jobs with employer-based insurance. Another 7 million signed up for Medicaid.
Just when caseloads hit their highest point, the nation’s new health care law required states not to change the rules on who’s eligible for Medicaid. That means states can’t roll up the welcome mat by tightening Medicaid’s income requirements.
So states have resorted to a variety of painful options.
In Arizona, lawmakers stopped paying for some kinds of transplants, including livers for people with hepatitis C. When the cuts took effect Oct. 1, Medicaid patient Francisco Felix, who needs a liver, suddenly had to raise $500,000 to get a transplant.
The 32-year-old’s case took a dramatic turn in November when a friend’s wife died, and her liver became available. Felix was prepped for surgery in hopes financial donations would come in. When the money didn’t materialize, the liver went to someone else, and Felix went home. His doctor told him he has a year before he’ll be too sick for a transplant.
“They are taking away his opportunity to live,” said his wife, Flor Felix. “It’s impossible for us or any family to get that much money.” The family is collecting donations through a website and plans a yard sale this weekend, she said.
The choices are difficult for states that have already cut payments to doctors and hospitals to the bone.
“If we don’t see an economic recovery where state revenues rebound, they’re really going to be very strained on how they can make ends meet,” said Diane Rowland, executive director of the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.
States may consider lowering payment rates to nursing homes or home health agencies or further reducing payments to doctors, Rowland said.
“The problem here is the program is pretty lean, and payment rates are pretty low,” she said. Patients can’t find care because fewer doctors accept the low payments.
Prescription drug coverage in states is an optional benefit, another possible place to cut, Rowland said. “But if you cut back on people’s psychotropic drugs, is that penny-wise and pound-foolish? Do they end up in institutions where Medicaid pays more for their care?”
In Illinois, late payments became the rule.
Tom Miller closed his pharmacy in rural southern Illinois this summer and is going through bankruptcy, largely because the state was chronically late making Medicaid payments to him. Most of his former customers are in the program.
With the state sometimes months behind in payments, he couldn’t pay his suppliers. Five workers lost their jobs when his business closed.
“You can only fight it for so long,” said Miller, 54. He now works as a pharmacist in a hospital. He misses his old clients, the families he grew to know.
“I was in my third generation. I’ve had moms who had kids. I saw the kids raised, and they had their own children,” he said. As a neighborhood pharmacist, “you’re their friend. You’re family.”
The death panels are right around the corner. To the extent that they’re not already here right now, as with the case of Francisco Felix, who is being denied life by being denied a liver by Medicaid.
Francisco Felix never stood in front of a death panel; but bureaucrats don’t need you wasting their time with bothersome questions when they decide to let you die a slow and agonizing death due to medical neglect (or maybe you’re fortunate enough to get that pain pill from Obama?).
We told you so. We told you so. We told you so. WE TOLD YOU SO.
As one speaking from the lofty vantage point of one having a one-thousand percent batting average, let me forewarn you Democrats yet again: Someday, when you’re burning in hell for all eternity for your direct participation in the murder of 52 million innocent human beings in America alone through abortion, realize that God is going to turn up the fires a few billion extra degrees for the coming horror that is going to come to this country as a result of your ObamaCare disaster.
D. James Kennedy prophetically said years back, “Watch out, Grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after you!”
And coming they are. And coming after Grandma, too, of course.
One of the morally depraved assumptions of abortion is that the baby has a duty to die for the convenience of his or her mother.
And guess what, Grandma and Grandpa? It’s getting to be YOUR turn to quit burdening us with your useless lives. It’s getting to be time that you shoved off and “died with dignity.”
There was a time when some desperately poor societies had to abandon the elderly to their fate, but is that where we are today?
One of the many fashionable notions that have caught on among some of the intelligentsia is that old people have “a duty to die” rather than become a burden to others.
This is more than just an idea discussed around a seminar table. Already the government-run medical system in Britain is restricting what medications or treatments it will authorize for the elderly. Moreover, it seems almost certain that similar attempts to contain runaway costs will lead to similar policies when American medical care is taken over by the government.
Make no mistake about it, letting old people die is a lot cheaper than spending the kind of money required to keep them alive and well. If a government-run medical system is going to save any serious amount of money, it is almost certain to do so by sacrificing the elderly.
There was a time — fortunately, now long past — when some desperately poor societies had to abandon old people to their fate, because there was just not enough margin for everyone to survive. Sometimes the elderly themselves would simply go off from their families and communities to face their fate alone.
But is that where we are today?
Talk about “a duty to die” made me think back to my early childhood in the South, during the Great Depression of the 1930s. One day, I was told that an older lady — a relative of ours — was going to come and stay with us for a while, and I was told how to be polite and considerate towards her.
She was called “Aunt Nance Ann,” but I don’t know what her official name was or what her actual biological relationship to us was. Aunt Nance Ann had no home of her own. But she moved around from relative to relative, not spending enough time in any one home to be a real burden.
At that time, we didn’t have things like electricity or central heating or hot running water. But we had a roof over our heads and food on the table — and Aunt Nance Ann was welcome to both.
Poor as we were, I never heard anybody say, or even intimate, that Aunt Nance Ann had “a duty to die.”
I only began to hear that kind of talk decades later, from highly educated people in an affluent age, when even most families living below the official poverty level owned a car or truck and had air conditioning.
It is today, in an age when homes have flat-paneled TVs and most families eat in restaurants regularly or have pizzas and other meals delivered to their homes, that the elites — rather than the masses — have begun talking about “a duty to die.”
Back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann, nobody in our family had ever gone to college. Indeed, none had gone beyond elementary school. Apparently, you need a lot of expensive education, sometimes including courses on ethics, before you can start talking about “a duty to die.”
Many years later, while going through a divorce, I told a friend that I was considering contesting child custody. She immediately urged me not to do it. Why? Because raising a child would interfere with my career.
But my son didn’t have a career. He was just a child who needed someone who understood him. I ended up with custody of my son and, although he was not a demanding child, raising him could not help impeding my career a little. But do you just abandon a child when it is inconvenient to raise him?
The lady who gave me this advice had a degree from Harvard Law School. She had more years of education than my whole family had, back in the days of Aunt Nance Ann.
Much of what is taught in our schools and colleges today seeks to break down traditional values and replace them with more fancy and fashionable notions, of which “a duty to die” is just one.
These efforts at changing values used to be called “values clarification,” though the name has had to be changed repeatedly over the years, as more and more parents caught on to what was going on and objected. The values that supposedly needed “clarification” had been clear enough to last for generations, and nobody asked the schools and colleges for this “clarification.”
“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.”
That’s right, young folk. You get to pay more to have the privilege of one day being euthanized like an unwanted dog at the county animal shelter. I know I’D certainly happily pay more for a privilege like that. Pay more for my health care? And then get to die a slow, painful death of medical neglect because I’ve been considered to be a useless burden like all those millions of babies Democrats have murdered? Where can I sign?
Robert “Third” Reich isn’t the only one pointing out this actually quite obvious central tenet of the Democrats’ health plan. Obama has appointed at least two other “experts” to advise him on medical issues. Here’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, whom Obama appointed as OMB health policy adviser in addition to being picked to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research:
“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”
“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.” Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care. Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel included a chart with his work (available here), which shows how he wants to allocate medical resources under a government plan:
When you’re very young, or when you start reaching your 50s and 60s, you start receiving less and less priority.
Then there’s Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar, who wrote in the Columbia Law Review in January 2004:
“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.”
Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar explains:
“If a program would prevent fifty deaths of people who are twenty, should it be treated the same way as a program that would prevent fifty deaths of people who are seventy? Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”
There’s a great deal more about Obama’s own advisers’ plans here.
“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”
We can sum it up quite nicely with the words of Obama’s former senior economic adviser: “So we’re going to let you die.”
Die with dignity. Or die without it. It doesn’t matter. What matters in the brave new world of ObamaCare is that liberals have finally succeeded in turning health care into a socialist boondoggle. And it will one day be your duty to die in order to sustain that boondoggle.
Those of us who see Obamacare as a distinct step backwards are often branded as alarmist and out of touch. When we point to the regular horrors of government run systems, especially the UK, we’re shouted down with healthy dollops of “it-can’t-happen-here-because-the president-said-it-won’t.”
Read on.
But before you do, look at this photo from London’s MailOnline:
Not pretty.
It’s a photo taken in a UK (government run) hospital of 84-year-old Clara Stokes. The photo was taken by her outraged daughter who discovered that her mom was living a nightmare – starved, dehydrated, and lying in her own feces.
Apparently, the ward was very short-staffed, to the point that Clara’s family members were not only forced helped her, but also other patients who were in similar circumstances.
Here’s a partial list of horrors. If this isn’t clear, cold abuse of a person with a severe medical disability, I don’t know what is:
Maltreatment 1:
Doctors and nurses who misplaced health notes even thought Mrs Stokes was a man for the first two days, after she was admitted on December 16.
Maltreatment 2:
A temporary nurse misread Mrs Stokes’ notes and forced uncrushed tablets down her throat, almost causing her to choke to death.
Maltreatment 3:
She [Clara’s daughter] added: ‘We finally walked in and my daughter said what is that under her arm? We lifted it up and she was covered in her own diarrhoea.
Maltreatment 4:
Helpless and confused after suffering a stroke, the 84-year-old was left dehydrated, hungry and lying in her own faeces in a hospital bed for six hours. . . . ‘She was paralysed and couldn’t call for help. This was after 3pm in the afternoon and the last time she had been checked was at 9am.’
Maltreatment 5:
Just 24 hours later the family found a stricken Mrs Stokes’ foot trapped between bed posts caused by a faulty bed pump. It was not known how long she was trapped and had to be freed by the matron.
The hospital, of course, denies, denies, denies. Here’s part of the snippy statement issued by the hospital spokesperson:
‘We regret that Mrs Stokes’ family have felt the need to complain about her care while she was on ward 17 and ward 15 and the hospital has apologised for any distressing circumstances recognising how upsetting some aspects of personal care can be for relatives.
Stay tuned, because I’ll bet my last dollar that the pro-death crowd will spin the horrible photo above as a case of people dying “without dignity,” and use it as a propaganda tool, captioning Clara’s abuse with: This is not dying with dignity: Support legalized assisted suicide and euthanasia.
If anything, the Daily Mail article referenced reveals that the story of this poor woman who was abandoned to die in her own filth by the government health care system is even worse.
And what the author of this article points out in the last paragraph is exactly right. The federal government took over a massive chunk of the health care system with Medicare and Medicaid. They broke it, and then they used the fact that the system was broken (thanks to them) to call for ObamaCare so they could finish the job of socializing the system. You don’t think that the same people who did that will ultimately point to the fact that the people who are dying in their own filth (thanks to the left) should instead be humanly euthanized?
I think D. James Kennedy put it best when he said:
“Watch out, Grandma and Grandpa! Because the generation that survived abortion will one day come after you!”
It’s happening.
Sarah Palin desribed her fear of her Down Syndrome son Trig being forced to one day stand before an ObamaCare death panel. There are 111 death panels under ObamaCare in a byzantine bureaucratic maze that looks like this:
Amazing. First [New York Times columnist Paul] Krugman and now Obama’s own OMB Director confirm what Governor Palin has been saying all along: the advisory panel within ObamaCare responsible for rationing health care will effectively be a death panel for those deemed unworthy of the cost of the care. More on Orszag’s vindication of Governor Palin from Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey here and Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft here.
The Democrats’ have flat-out stated it: “We’re going to let you die.” And Obama’s own handpicked czars already have a policy (“the Complete Lives System”) to carry that policy out.
The horror that ObamaCare will quickly become will be biblical. So it takes the Bible to put it into proper perspective:
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools – Romans 1:22
For God’s wrath is being revealed from heaven against all the ungodliness and wickedness of those who in their wickedness suppress the truth – Romans 1:18
You love evil more than good, Falsehood more than speaking what is right. — Psalm 52:3
But he who sins against Me injures himself; all those who hate Me love death — Proverbs 8:36
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! — Isaiah 5:20
You who hate good and love evil, Who tear off their skin from them And their flesh from their bones — Micah 3:2
In their case, the god of this world has blinded the minds of those who do not believe to keep them from seeing the light of the glorious gospel of the Messiah, who is the image of God. — 2 Corinthians 4:4
U.S. purposefully mismanaged by President Andy Stern
The 2008 election was aimed, as Barack Obama said, “to fundamentally change America.” The American people did not do their homework. They thought he believed in the original paradigm. They were intentionally misled, but this could have been prevented.
Ask the leaders of the Democratic party who Saul Alinsky is and you will likely get obfuscation. They will tell you Barack Obama spent three years teaching Alinsky’s philosophy and methods but he likely will not answer questions about Alinsky. Hillary Clinton wrote her college dissertation on Alinsky but you won’t likely get a peep out of her.
Bluntly put, Alinsky is opposed to freedom. He is an elitist. He believed in communism and atheism. The fundamental values, as stated at the beginning of this column, are seen by Alinsky as horrors that have created mass inequities and careless behavior. What makes Alinsky dangerous is that he is insidious.
Alinsky’s primary approach to politics is deceit. The ends justify the means. He would create a communist Utopia dominated by his friends but not through open and honest debate. Therefore, they disguise themselves as believers in the republic and democracy. Gaining control is objective No. 1. This was the beginning of their revolution. The goal, then, for Alinsky was “to take from the haves and give to the have-nots.”
Obama taught this. He “community organized” under this philosophy. He has surrounded himself with people of like mind. John Holdren, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Valerie Jarrett, and Van Jones are just a few of the core conspirators.
Alinsky knew the core beliefs of the American people. He knew they had to be deceived and manipulated. His opinion was they were too selfish to give up the America that was constructed by the founding fathers. His followers have taken over the Democratic Party although many Republicans also are participating in the movement under the guise of progressivism.
The change they want will fundamentally eliminate freedom, representative government, democracy, free enterprise, private ownership, individual responsibility and religious faith. I have no problem with them telling you that and putting it up for debate but they will not because they would be thrown out of office.
This strategy has been known since the late 1960s. Since they cannot challenge those positions successfully, the next best thing is to get into the current system through deceit. Tell people you are something you are not. Then destroy people’s belief in the system by destroying it from within. This is the strategy employed by the disciples of Alinsky.
Alinsky said, “Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, nonchallenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution.”
One of the fundamental “disappointments” that independents – who have massively abandoned Obama and his agenda – have is that Obama misrepresented himself (i.e., he lied) about who he was and what he would be about if he were elected president.
Too many people did not see Obama’s anti-free market agenda (Obama’s demagoguery of banks, of car companies, of insurance companies, of the Chamber of Commerce, of Fox News, etc.) coming. They should have seen it, and they would have had they paid better attention, or had the mainstream media attempted to do its constitutionally-appointed duty. But now they are left fearful. Now they and the businesses they work for are being inundated with fundamentally hostile attacks against business. And as a result we are forced to live through a period in which fully 77% of investors view their president as “anti-business.”
An American Thinker piece ties Obama’s relationship with the pedophile communist Frank Marshall Davis to an early indoctrination in the philosophy of Saul Alinsky.
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets.”
To cite Dr. Raymond Stantz from Ghostbusters, I wouldn’t have touched these people with a ten meter cattle prod. And few Americans would have.
Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money, ’cause they’re convinced that there is a free lunch.
We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults only no limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.”
Unions – whether public or private sector – are breaking the back of this country. They are breaking down our society. They are fundamentally destroying our American way of life.
And they now have someone who is helping them do it in the White House.
You start throwing out radical names of dangerous people that Obama has been associated with and a pattern emerges: the aforementioned Davis, Jeremiah Wright (see also here and here and here), Khalid al-Mansour (more here), Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers. And you realize that Obama has been steeped in a profoundly Marxist worldview. Obama isn’t stupid; he knows that the American people don’t want that ideology. But no one can conceal his worldview completely. Critical observers saw it clearly.
And they accurately understood what it would portend if he was elected president.
Obama underscores the self-concealment of his worldview in his book which bears its title in inspiration of a Jeremiah Wright sermon that described his view that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need” (The Audacity of Hope):
We can sing the below story to Nancy Pelosi’s famous tune, “Are you serious? Are you serious?” regarding whether she should give the faintest of consideration to the Constitution while she tries to regulate one-sixth of the US economy and force citizens to purchase insurance.
(CNSNews.com) – Senator Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) said that Congress has the authority to mandate that people buy health insurance and that there is no constitutional limit on Congress’ power to enact such mandates, adding that this unlimited authority stemmed from the Commerce clause of the Constitution.
The health care bills in both the House and Senate require that every American purchase a health insurance policy. At the Capitol on Tuesday, CNSNews.com asked Sen. Feinstein: “Where in the Constitution does Congress get the authority for an individual health insurance mandate?”
Feinstein said: “Well, I would assume it would be in the Commerce clause of the Constitution. That’s how Congress legislates all kinds of various programs.”
CNSNews.com followed up by asking Sen. Feinstein whether this broad power had any limits: “If there’s a health insurance mandate, is there a limit to that authority? Is there something that can’t be mandated?”
Feinstein responded: “My own view is that there is not, within health insurance.”
The Commerce clause is found in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. It states the numerous powers authorized to Congress, including the power “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among several States, and with the Indian tribes.”
The Senate version of health reform imposes an historic mandate on all Americans, requiring them to have government-approved health insurance, either through an employer or individually. The mandate also can penalize people with a surtax ranging from $500 to nearly $1,500 per year if they do not have a health insurance policy.
The bill, which looks certain to pass the Senate sometime on Christmas Eve, is unpopular with the public, garnering the support of barely 40 percent of Americans, according to recent national polls. Those numbers led Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele to accuse Congress of “flipping the bird” to the American people.
“This is a bad bill, it is bad, certainly for individuals and enough is enough,” Steele said in a conference call on Monday. “I am tired of Congress thumbing its nose and flipping a bird to the American people. I’m tired of this Congress thinking it knows better than me and my family how to provide for our health care now and in the future. I’m tired of this Congress not listening to me and to the American people – to all of us.”
In 1994, when the Clinton administration attempted to push a health care reform plan through a Democratic Congress that also mandated every American buy health insurance, the Congressional Budget Office determined that the government had never ordered Americans to buy anything.
“The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States,” the CBO analysis said. “An individual mandate would have two features that, in combination, would make it unique. First, it would impose a duty on individuals as members of society. Second, it would require people to purchase a specific service that would be heavily regulated by the federal government.”
My own view is that California should elect a Senator who actually understands or even cares about the US Constitution.
If Feinstein’s “view” were true, then the congress has no constitutional limits whatsoever. On anything. If they can regulate private citizens’ behavior or purchases as “interstate commerce,” then they can “regulate” anything and anyone on anything they want. And this gives them the precedent to do more and more. The Democrats’ vision of health care “reform” makes the entire idea of constitutional limits null and void.
Let’s call this what it is: a naked power grab.
Fascism, Marxism, take your pick. We’re getting a hybrid of both (they’re both quintessentially leftist and socialist and totalitarian systems, you know) shoved right down our throats.
The Commerce clause regulates commerce between states. It has NEVER been used even ONCE in our history to regulated the behavior of individual citizens.
This is almost as appalling as liberal activist judges reading “penumbras and emanations” into the Constitution so they could pull abortion out of thin air.
Democrats aren’t focused in transforming either the quality or the costs of health care coverage. Their bill does nothing to improve either. Rather, it lays the architecture for a future socialistic system which they believe that they will ultimately be able to control and use to their own political advantage. They want power and control. They want to be able to wield the levers of government and “take care” of everyone and everything – or punish everyone and everything that get in their way. And when big government has the power to shape things, it shapes them in a way that always favors big government, and favors more and more accumulation of big government. And Democrats are nothing if not the party of big government.
Tragically, a look back at history should tell you that the system the Democrats want will hardly be a success. The fact of the matter is that Democrats are making the same arguments (that health care is a right) and the same promises (that every American will be guaranteed health care) that the Soviets made.
To summarize, this is a flagrantly unconstitutional power grab, packaged on lies, which can’t even in theory fulfill the pantheon of bogus promises it was sold on.
Some of the names and acronyms of the dozens and dozens of bureaucracies are undoubtedly different under the new iteration of socialized medicine, but here’s a snapshot of your new health care system if Democrats get their way:
The Senate version is 2,075 pages of fun, I hear. Nobody understands it. And nobody is going to end up getting a chance to read it by the time it gets voted on.
If you thought that there was going to be any kind of transparency or accountability – or even honesty – from the Obama administration – you need to stop smoking your crack pipe.
This latest event in the march toward socialized medicine reminds me of the case of Barbara Wagner. In Oregon, which has “universal coverage” through the state, she was abandoned to die by a system that would not pay for her cancer treatment, but offered to pay for her euthanasia.
Only this time, the government wants to deny treatment on the other side of the cancer diagnosis.
Health Care:A government task force has decided that women need fewer mammograms and later in life. Shouldn’t that be between patient and physician? We have seen the future of health care, and it doesn’t work.
We have warned repeatedly that the net results of health care bills before Congress will be higher demand, fewer doctors, more cost control, all leading to rationing. New recommendations issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) regarding breast cancer and the necessity for early and frequent mammograms do not convince us otherwise.
Just six months ago, the panel, which works under the Health and Human Services Department as a “best practices” study group, was shouting its concern about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study showing a 1% drop in the number of women regularly undergoing such screening and prevention.
The task force was saying that women older than 40 should get a mammogram every one to two years. It found that frequent screening lowered death rates from breast cancer mostly for women ages 50 to 69. But that was then, and this is now.
“We’re not saying women shouldn’t get screened. Screening does save lives,” Diana Petiti, task force vice chairman, said of the recommendations published Tuesday in Annals of Internal Medicine. “But we are recommending against routine screening.”
Now the panel recommends that women in their 40s stop having routine annual mammograms and that older women should cut back to every two years. The concern allegedly is that too frequent testing can result in increased anxiety, false positives, unneeded follow-up tests and possibly disfiguring biopsies. Preventing breast cancer and saving lives almost get lost in the new analysis.
“I have a particular concern in this case about who was involved in this task force,” says Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., who was a heart surgeon in private life. “There are no surgeons or oncologists who deal directly with breast cancer or even radiologists. … I’ve seen far too many young women develop late-stage breast cancer because they didn’t have adequate screening.”
Little, if anything, has happened medically in the last six months to cause such a shift. A lot, however, has happened politically as a health care overhaul has limped forwardon life support. The Congressional Budget Office has been busy pricing these various bills, a process that includes screening and prevention.
As we have warned, the growing emphasis seems to be on cost containment rather than quality of care. About 39 million women undergo mammograms each year in America, costing the health care system more than $5 billion.
“The American Cancer Society continues to recommend annual screening using mammography and clinical breast examination for all women beginning at age 40,” says Otis Brawley, its chief medical officer. “Our experts make this recommendation having reviewed virtually all the same data reviewed by the USPSTF, but also additional data that the USPSTF did not consider.”
Daniel Kopans, a radiology professor at Harvard Medical School, says: “Tens of thousands of lives are being saved by mammography screening, and those idiots want to do away with it. It’s crazy — unethical, really.”
This, sadly, appears to be the future of medicine under government-run health care. Aside from taxes on insurers, providers and device manufacturers, we’ll be up to our eyeballs in cost-effectiveness boards that will decide who gets what tests and treatments, when and if. These are only recommendations for now, but they are the shape of things to come.
The Obama administration is preparing the health delivery system to implement the philosophy of Obama advisers such as Robert Reich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Cass Sunstein, which can be easily summarized with the quote:
Robert Reich’s words in context only make the hateful idea sound even more hateful:
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.”
Then there are the words of Obama’s Regulatory Czar, Cass Sunstein, who wrote:
“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.”
And Rahm Emanuel’s brother Ezekiel, whom Obama appointed as his OMB health policy adviser in addition to selecting him to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research wrote:
“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”
“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.” Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care. Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”
And Obama himself told a woman who wanted to keep her aging mother alive:
“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”
YOU take the painkiller rather than have that lifesaving surgery, Barry Hussein. And why don’t you insist that Michelle and your two daughters take the pill rather than have that lifesaving surgery, too? Just to be like all the “little people” out there.
But of course that’s not going to happen. Rather, Democrats have now exempted themselves from 11 separate amendments that would have required them to have the same ObamaCare that they want to force everyone else to have.
You can understand why they would do so, given the promises that the system will be worse than terrible, and due to the fact that even a complete idiot who looks around and sees how horribly the administration has managed the H1N1 vaccine situation can recognize that taking on 1/6th of the economy would be beyond catastrophic. I mean, heck, if I were a Democrat, I’d be sure to exempt myself from this monstrosity too, lest MY family members fall under the coming steamroller.
This “recommendation” of reducing mammographies isn’t mandatory now, but that’s because the government hasn’t usurped the health care system yet. You just wait a decade from now, when the government runs everything, and soaring deficits force them to start cutting costs.
Verum Serum sets up the hypocrisy of the Democrats:
Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor under Clinton and more recently an Obama economic adviser, has been all over the media lately shilling for ObamaCare. The public option is no more dangerous than a box of puppies according to this professionally produced video featuring Reich. (I won’t embed it but it’s worth a quick watch.) The real injustice, according to Reich, is that political operatives like us are trying to “confuse and scare” people about change.
So perhaps he can explain for us his comments in the video below. Reich is speaking at a Colloquium on Political Science at UC Berkeley on Sept. 26, 2007. No other set-up is necessary – watch:
Here’s a transcript of the most relevant remarks of Robert “Third” Reich:
I’ll actually give you a speech made up entirely, almost on the spur of the moment, of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what a candidate should say if we were in the kind of democracy where citizens were honored in terms of their practice of citizenship and they were educated in terms of what the issues were and they could separate myth from reality in terms of what candidates would tell them:
“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.”
Pay more, old people die. Check, and check. Sounds like exactly what any big government fascist would want.
“Third” Reich isn’t the only one pointing out this actually quite obvious central tenet of the Democrats’ health plan. Obama has appointed at least two other “experts” to advise him on medical issues. Here’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel’s brother, Ezekiel Emanuel, whom Obama appointed as OMB health policy adviser in addition to being picked to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Research:
“When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.”
“Attenuated” means, “to make thin; to weaken or reduce in force, intensity, effect, quantity, or value.” Attenuated care would be reduced or lessened care. Dare I say it, in this context it clearly means, “rationed care.”
Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel included a chart with his work (available here), which shows how he wants to allocate medical resources under a government plan:
When you’re very young, or when you start reaching your 50s and 60s, you start receiving less and less priority.
Then there’s Cass Sunstein, Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar, who wrote in the Columbia Law Review in January 2004:
“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.”
Barack Obama’s Regulatory Czar explains:
“If a program would prevent fifty deaths of people who are twenty, should it be treated the same way as a program that would prevent fifty deaths of people who are seventy? Other things being equal, a program that protects young people seems far better than one that protects old people, because it delivers greater benefits.”
There’s a great deal more about Obama’s own advisers’ plans here.
“At least we can let doctors know — and your mom know — that you know what, maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off, uhh, not having the surgery, but, uhh, taking the painkiller.”
We can sum it up quite nicely with the words of Obama’s former senior economic adviser: “So we’re going to let you die.”
The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.
And for all the hell that the servants of hell have unleashed on her for her comment, she was 100% correct.
The entire plan is evil:
And, yeah, there really are things that can very legitimately be called “death panels.” Take “The Death Book for Veterans” – which George Bush banned and Barack Obama demanded be reinstated – that required veterans to consider life and death from a bleak perspective and consider euthanasia to avoid being a burden. My article on that discovered some dishonest federal government shenanigans when that story was exposed as the VA sought to cover up the role of the Hemlock Society.
We’re seeing the genesis of a genuine holocaust beginning to emerge. The Democrats’ plan will force health insurers to cover everyone regardless of whether they have a pre-existing condition, regardless of whether they honestly represented themselves when they obtained their insurance, and regardless of whether they can even pay for their coverage. And the system the Democrats are creating completely depends on young, healthy people who have historically not bought medical coverage. You can’t add massively to the costs of providing care if you don’t have at least an equally massive inflow of dollars coming in. If young people who have never bought medical coverage before don’t buy coverage in huge numbers, we will very quickly face critical shortages, and massive rationing of care – particularly to the elderly who have less value under the Democrats’ plan – will ensue.
And I don’t mean just pay the “individual mandate” fines – which have been watered down significantly to make the Democrats’ plan more palatable – because they don’t create enough revenue. I mean if they don’t purchase health care in huge numbers, we will see serious shortages, rationing, and death by medical neglect.
Harry Reid made a staggering admission while trying to prevent Democrat-special-interest anathema tort reform. He said:
HARRY REID: “He talked about CBO saying that there would be $54 billion saved each year if we put caps on medical malpractice and put some restrictions — tort reform — $54 billion. Sounds like a lot of money, doesnt it, Mr. President? The answer is yes. But remember, were talking about $2 trillion, $54 billion compared to $2 trillion. You can do the math. We can all do the math. Its a very small percent.”
The Democrats’ health plan will be FAR more costly than any estimates yet offered. The government ALWAYS underestimates its cost for its programs. Medicare cost nine times more than was estimated, for example.
And let me point out that figures such as Robert Reich, Ezekiel Emanuel, and Cass Sunstein are proponents of the Democrats’ system and believe it will go well – AND THEY ARE STILL TELLING US THAT A CENTRAL PART OF THE SYSTEM WILL BE TO ALLOW ELDERLY PEOPLE TO DIE.
Democrat Rep. Alan Grayson “warned” Americans that “Republicans want you to die quickly” during a floor speech in the House of Representatives. But he is a liar. It is not Republicans who are literally out talking about letting people die, but Democrats.
Please come to your senses and start denouncing the Deathocrats’ Death Panel bill.
He surrounded himself with Van Jones – a communist; a supporter of cop murderers; a man who took the terrorists’ side on 9/11; a man who signed a “truther” statement demonizing President Bush for secretly attacking the World Trade Center Twin Towers on September 11; a racist who accused even white liberals of being murderers who deliberately poisoned people of color; etc. etc. etc.
– “When implemented, the Complete Lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated… The Complete Lives system justifies preference to younger people because of priority to the worst-off rather than instrumental value.” – Ezekiel Emanuel, Obama’s handpicked health policy adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, and appointed by Obama to serve on the Federal Council on Comparative Effectiveness Resarch
– “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.” – Cass Sunstein, Obama’s Regulatory Czar.
– Indeed, it has been concluded that compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing Constitution if the population crisis became sufficiently severe to endanger the society.
– It would even be possible to require pregnant single women to marry or have abortions, perhaps as an alternative to placement for adoption, depending on the society.
– Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.
And now we are learning that he has surrounded himself with a teacher who refused to protect a child under his counseling from being sodomized by a pedophile.
Kevin Jennings, appointed as the Director of the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools, is another Obama buddy out of ultra-corrupt Chicago.
In 1997, according to a transcript put together by Brian J. Burt, managing editor of the student-run Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Jennings said he hoped that promoting homosexuality in schools would be considered fine in the future.
“One of our board members” was called to testify before Congress when they had hearings on the promotion of homosexuality in schools,” Jennings said. “And we were busy putting out press releases, and saying, “We’re not promoting homosexuality, that’s not what our program’s about. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah…. ‘
“Being finished might someday mean that most straight people, when they would hear that someone was promoting homosexuality, would say ‘Yeah, who cares?’ because they wouldn’t necessarily equate homosexuality with something bad that you would not want to promote.”
The group Jennings founded has also been accused of promoting homosexuality in schools. At a GLSEN conference in 2000, co-sponsored with the Massachusetts Department of Education, the group landed in hot water when it was revealed that it had included an educational seminar for kids that graphically described some unorthodox sex techniques.
A state official who spoke to teens at the conference said:
“Fisting (forcing one’s entire hand into another person’s rectum or vagina) often gets a bad rap….[It’s] an experience of letting somebody into your body that you want to be that close and intimate with…[and] to put you into an exploratory mode.”
You see, I think most parents would rather teachers and public schools teach their kids to be in “exploratory mode” of damn near anything else than their children’s rectums. Am I wrong?
And then we have Kevin Jennings sharing how he provided advice to a fifteen year-old sophomore:
Another controversy from Jennings’ past concerns an account in his 1994 book, “One Teacher In 10,” about how, as a teacher, he knew a high school sophomore named Brewster who was “involved” with an “older man”:
“Out spilled a story about his involvement with an older man he had met in Boston. I listened, sympathized, and offered advice. He left my office with a smile on his face that I would see every time I saw him on the campus for the next two years, until he graduated.”
The account led Diane Lenning, head of the National Education Association’s Republican Educators Caucus, to criticize Jennings in 2004 for not alerting school and state authorities about the boy’s situation, calling Jennings’ failure to do so an “unethical practice.”
Jennings threatened to sue Lenning for libel, saying she had no evidence that he knew the student in question was sexually active, or that he failed to report the situation.
But a professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania, Warren Throckmorton, has produced an audio recording of a speech Jennings gave in 2000 at a GLSEN rally in Iowa, in which Jennings made it clear that he believed the student was sexually active:
“I said, ‘What were you doing in Boston on a school night, Brewster?’ He got very quiet, and he finally looked at me and said, ‘Well I met someone in the bus station bathroom and I went home with him.’ High school sophomore, 15 years old’ I looked at Brewster and said, ‘You know, I hope you knew to use a condom.’” [Audio is available here via Youtube, and the professor’s website contains a transcript of Jenning’s account with Brewster].
The Washington Times reported in 2004 that “state authorities said Mr. Jennings filed no report in 1988.”A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Department for Children and Families, the department to which Jennings — as a Massachusetts teacher — would have been legally obliged to report the situation, did not return calls from FOXNews.com.
Kevin Jennings is an advocate for homosexual pedophilia. He has in his past openly supported the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) by way of praising Harry Hay. Jennings wrote the forward to a book entitled, The Queering of American Education. For what it’s worth, fellow Chicago Obama buddy and terrorist Bill Ayers wrote a note endorsing the book on its cover jacket.
This is the man that Obama “entrusted” with ultimate care over your children. But he is a demon in masquerade.
The despicable personal conduct, followed by the threat of a lawsuit when it was revealed, reminds me of another organization that Obama chose to surround himself with — ACORN.
Two kids who were sick of the lefts’ corruption, hypocrisy, and vileness decided to see if ACORN would fall for the most horrendous scenario they could imagine: a prostitute and her pimp seeking to commit federal income tax fraud so they could purchase a house with the intent of importing child sex slaves from El Salvador so they could start a brothel.
And Obama’s ACORN fell for it – on film – on at least five separate occasions in five separate ACORN offices.
Let us judge Obama by the people with whom he has surrounded himself. Because he has surrounded himself with the devil – and demons are doing his bidding.
And let us finally begin to think about how God will judge these demons – and the president who surrounded himself with them. And, yes, the nation that elected that president.
Galatians 6:7 makes it clear, “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, this he will also reap.” And it is not just individuals who fall under God’s judgment, but nations. As Psalm 110:6 says, “He will judge the nations, heaping up the dead and crushing the rulers of the whole earth.”
“No, no, no! Not God bless America! God damn America!”
Start Thinking Right 