The Revolution Starts Now

Frank Salvato, Managing Editor

American Liberty v. Obama’s Social Engineering
December 11, 2009 | www.newmediajournal.us

After the General Election of 2008 I made a conscious effort to give President Obama a chance. I wanted to give him an opportunity to be true to his word; to prove that he was committed to governing from the center. I also wanted to demonstrate that I was not of the same ilk as the Bush-hating, “he stole the election,” fact-ignoring Progressive malcontents that served to divide the country over the eight years of the Bush Administration. But now, a year after the election, and as we approach a full year of the Obama Administration, it has become abundantly clear that Mr. Obama has abandoned almost all of his campaign promises (but for his commitments to the SEIU) and is governing from the far Left. He has instituted a campaign of social engineering that can only be described as a direct threat to liberty.

Liberty
Liberty is defined as, “freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control.” It was the single most motivating factor in the American Revolution and war for independence. Our Founders and Framers risked their lives to free the people of what would become our nation from the elitist tyranny of King George and his court, a tyranny that choked liberty – personal and societal – dead.

In addition to the limitations placed on religious freedom and freedom of speech, taxation was excessive and exploitive and it was imposed without representation. Many of the colonists believed the denial of direct representation in the British Parliament was an illegal denial of their rights, as colonists were considered Englishmen subject to the king’s rule. Thus the credo, “no taxation without representation,” served as the rallying cry for Patriots in each of the thirteen colonies as they coalesced into a movement toward American independence.

Thomas Jefferson is quoted as having said, “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” If Jefferson were alive today to witness the encroachment of government into the private sector being perpetrated by the Obama Administration or the non-representation of constituencies in the House of Representatives under Nancy Pelosi and the US Senate under Harry Reid, he would be validated in his statement.

Intolerable Acts
In the run-up to the American Revolution, the British Parliament imposed five laws that Patriot colonists referred to as “Intolerable Acts.” Four laws were enacted in direct response to the Boston Tea Party:

▪ The Boston Port Act closed the port until such time as the East India Company should be paid for the tea destroyed.

▪ The Massachusetts Government Act gave complete control of seating government officials to the King and Parliament. It also severely limited activities at town hall meetings.

▪ The Administration of Justice Act allowed the king’s appointed governor to move trials of accused royal officials to another colony or even to Great Britain. This made it nearly impossible for witnessed to testify against those charged due to monetary and geographical constraints.

▪ The Quartering Act allowed the king’s appointed governor to house soldiers in non-governmental buildings.

The result of the imposition of these acts was the formation of the First Continental Congress and the eventual Declaration of Independence, which not only stated the colony’s declared independence, but enumerated the Patriot colonists’ grievances with the king.

Intolerable Acts II
Today, we are witnessing another establishment of “Intolerable Acts” by the 111th Congress and the Obama Administration that enable an encroachment into the private sector and onto the personal liberties of every American; an encroachment of liberties that dwarves the Intolerable Acts of 1774.

The Stimulus Bill
The $787 billion stimulus bill that was rushed through Congress by a coalition of liberal Democrats and neo-Marxist Progressives, and signed into law by President Obama, was less a bill that stimulated the growth of the US economy or the creation of jobs and more a pork-laden special interest bill that was timed to be dispersed for the maximum political benefit it could afford the elected Democrats and Progressives. In reality, the almost trillion dollar legislation was a raid on the Treasury by political factions to reward loyal special interest groups and bankroll the intellectual manipulation of voters in 2010 and 2012, just before the elections.

The Healthcare Reform Bill
The trillion dollar healthcare bills proposed by both houses of Congress and championed by the Obama Administration have more to do with a governmental power-grab of one-sixth of the US economy than they do with affording the uninsured in the United States healthcare benefits.

Instead of crafting legislation that would mandate the private sector to cover the uninsured and promote true free-market competition among private health insurance companies (which would lower premiums for all), the Obama Administration and Congress are deceptively marketing a government take-over of the healthcare insurance industry as a protection against the “evil healthcare insurance industry.” An examination of the almost bankrupt federal Medicare program provides a perfect example of government-run healthcare.

The EPA, CO2 and Cap & Trade
With the recent announcement by the Environmental Protection Agency that carbon dioxide (CO² – the stuff we exhale and which is required for plant growth) is now considered a pollutant by the federal government, the Obama Administration has enabled itself to not only usurp the legislative process but coerce the electorate and the total of the energy industry into supporting a Cap & Trade Bill. Of course, this designation – as well as any legislation designed to address this issue – is based on the now debunked junk science of anthropological global warming – or what the disingenuous eco-zealots are now calling climate change.

With this designation, FOX News reports that the Obama Administration has positioned itself to force one of two outcomes with regard to energy management in the United States:

“The Obama administration is warning Congress that if it doesn't move to regulate greenhouse gases, the Environmental Protection Agency will take a "command-and-control" role over the process in a way that could hurt business.

“The warning, from a top White House economic official who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity, came on the eve of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's address to the international conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark.

“...while administration officials have long said they prefer Congress take action on climate change, the economic official who spoke with reporters Tuesday night made clear that the EPA will not wait and is prepared to act on its own.”

Taxation Without Representation
The 111th Congress and the Obama Administration have veered violently away from representative government where the citizenry is concerned and moved to execute a government that represents special interest groups, unions, advocacy organizations and the two political parties. They have crafted legislation behind closed doors and in the company of special interest groups and union officials that provides wealth and privilege to the few while mandating a debt that future generations will have to bear if, in fact, we do not collapse the US dollar and watch, helplessly, as our country fades into the pages of the history books as another failed experiment of government and human nature.

A Usurpation of the Established Branches of Government
In seating a plethora of “czars” – overseeing everything thing from broadcast regulation to safe schools, jobs and the economy to environmental issues – President Obama has effectively usurped the congressional oversight used to vet cabinet level appointees and department heads. In essence, Mr. Obama has seated a shadow government with ideological generals who answer to no one but him. This usurps the complete idea of representative government as mandated by the US Constitution.

The Revolution Starts Now
James Madison, the Father of the US Constitution, said in Federalist 10:

“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm. Nor, in many cases, can such an adjustment be made at all without taking into view indirect and remote considerations, which will rarely prevail over the immediate interest which one party may find in disregarding the rights of another or the good of the whole.

“...Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.”

Today, enlightened statesmen are not at the helm. Political opportunists who have their own interests and the interests of the financial benefactors in a position of priority are seated in power. And while there are a scant few in government who still do adhere to the notion of public service and are still dedicated to their oaths of office and the US Constitution, the controlling majority of those in federal government – and in many cases state government – have come to represent everything our Founders and Framers despised in the elitists they waged war against for independence.

Now, the question is this, will those of us who still believe in the sanctity of the Charters of Freedom – The Declaration of independence, The US Constitution and The Bill of Rights – defend them, doing so in a cohesive manner so as to avoid the politics of factionalism – as with the institution of litmus test politics, or will we watch, helplessly, impotent, as Rome burns?

Don't kid yourself, if dems have their way, byebye Private Health Insurance

You Will Lose Your Private Health Insurance

By Robert Tracinski | December 10, 2009 | realclearpolitics.com

Before Thanksgiving, the Senate voted to opening debate on President Obama's health-care bill, and that debate has begun in earnest this week.

Well, if they want a debate, let's let them have it. But let's not get distracted by the sideshows Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has planned for us.

Forget about abortion. Of course the left will accept restrictions on funding for abortion, because they want to keep moderate Democrats on board for the goal they know is really important: giving the government a dominant role in health care. Everything else is just details, and funding for abortions is an issue to which the left can return at leisure later on-once government is firmly in charge of everything.

And don't bother debating the "public option," either, because it's already dead; enough Democratic senators have come out against it. But Harry Reid is all too happy to have a debate over the public option so he can make a show of "compromising" and giving it up. And while we're having that fake debate, he's hoping that we won't be challenging everything else in the bill.

So let's get straight what the real essentials of the bill are-and how disastrous they are.

Three provisions constitute the vicious heart of the Democrats' health-care overhaul.

The first is "guaranteed issue" and "community rating." This is the requirement that insurance companies have to offer coverage to people who are already sick, and that they be limited in their ability to charge higher rates for customer who pose a higher risk. The extra expense to the insurance companies of covering people with pre-existing conditions will get passed on to existing customers in the form of higher premiums. But why spend years paying these inflated premiums for insurance you're not using, when you can get exactly the same benefits by waiting until you actually fall ill? The obvious result is that million of people, especially healthy young people, will quickly realize that there is no reason to buy health insurance until they get sick.

Rather than increasing the number of insured by making health insurance more affordable, this bill makes health insurance more expensive and increases the incentive to simply drop your insurance until you need someone to pay for your medical bills. It is an attempt to turn health insurance into what the left really wants: another welfare program in which everyone is entitled to free benefits, mandated by the government. But this would wreck private health insurance, making the whole industrial financially unsustainable.

Following the usual pattern of government intervention, the health-care bill offers anotherintervention as the solution for the problem created by the first. The "individual mandate" requires everyone to buy health insurance and subjects us to a tax if we fail to do so. But this is an especially onerous new tax, the first tax not tied to any kind of income or activity. It's not a tax on stock-market profits, say, or a tax on buying cigarettes. It's just a tax for existing.

So fearing a public backlash, Congress didn't have the guts to make this new tax very large-only $750. Yet actual insurance can cost more than $3,000 per year-and as we shall see, this legislation goes out of its way to drive up those rates by mandating more lavish coverage. So we end up getting the worst of both worlds. This provision won't actually drive anyone to buy health insurance and prop up the risk pools for those who are insured. All it will accomplish is to create a brand new form of tax.

But the biggest power-grab in the bill is the government takeover of the entire market for health insurance. The bill requires all new policies to be sold on a government-controlled exchange run by a commissioner who is empowered to dictate what kinds of insurance policies can be offered, what they must cover, and what they can charge.

Right now, your best option for reducing the cost of your health insurance is to buy a policy with a high deductible, which leaves you to pay for routine checkups and minor injuries (preferably from savings held in a tax-free Health Savings Account) but which covers your needs in catastrophic circumstances-a bad car accident, say, or expensive treatment for cancer. This is the kind of coverage I have.

But the health-insurance exchange is intended to eliminate precisely this kind of low-cost catastrophic coverage. Its purpose is to force health-insurance companies to offer comprehensive coverage that pays for all of your routine bills-which in turn comes at a higher price. So under the guise of making health insurance more affordable, this bill will restrict your menu of choices to include only the most expensive options.

So there we have the real essence of this bill. It restricts our choice of which insurance to buy and pushes us into more expensive plans. At the same time, it destroys the economic incentive to purchase insurance in the first place and replaces insurance with a free-floating tax on one's very existence.

By all means, let's debate some of that in the Senate.

When you understand what this bill does, you can see why the Democrats would be happy to compromise and drop the public option-for now. This bill so comprehensively wrecks private health insurance that pretty soon a "public option" will seem like the only alternative, and they will already have put into place one of the new taxes needed to pay for it. If the left's goal is to impose socialized medicine in America, this bill does it in the most callous and destructive way possible. It smashes private health care-then leaves us stranded in the rubble, at which point we will be expected to come crawling back to the same people who caused the disaster and ask them to save us.

That is the final and perhaps most compelling reason to kill this bill: the sheer arrogance of the whole enterprise. It is the arrogance of stampeding an unwilling public toward a monstrous 2,000-page piece of legislation while admitting that it still has huge problems, but promising that it will all somehow be fixed later on. It's the arrogance of selling us a bill that expands government spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while telling us that it will reduce the deficit. It is the sheer unmitigated gall of appointing a bureaucrat to run a government-controlled insurance market that takes away all of our health choices-and then calling this bureaucrat the Health Choices Commissioner.

That's the kind of government arrogance that has to be smacked down hard, and that alone is reason to demand that your senator reject this vicious bill in its entirety.

Robert Tracinski writes daily commentary at TIADaily.com. He is the editor of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily.com.

it's "a farce" says James Hansen... Copenhagen Climate Change Summit

Climate claims fail science test

• Michael Asten
• From:The Australian
• December 09, 2009 12:00AM

THE UN Climate Change Summit started this week in Copenhagen with far more dissent than its organisers hoped for from two extremes of the climate change debate

We had the "grandfather of climate change", James Hansen, describing the proceedings as counter-productive and "a farce", while the chief Saudi Arabian negotiator to the summit, Mohammed al-Sabban, doubts the current science and suggests there is no longer any point in seeking agreement to reduce emissions.

It is therefore certain that the global political debate on managing carbon emissions and climate change will continue well beyond the Copenhagen summit. It is to be hoped that the scientific debate is also permitted to continue.

Results released this year suggest that the degree of scientific certainty falls short of that desirable before we set binding targets and dollar values on carbon emissions. Indeed, Tim Flannery, chairman of the Copenhagen Climate Council admitted that: "We can't pretend we have perfect knowledge: we don't."

This is a refreshingly honest comment when contrasted with some of the statements in the hacked emails of the Climatic Research Unit, UK, made by leading British and US climate scientists, who were caught with their fingers on the "delete button" when faced with climate data that failed to agree with their computer models.

Meanwhile two recent results published by top scientists cast doubt on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's theory about the link between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming. These are of of significance because whereas the climate models used by the IPCC rely on software to represent a large number of highly complex Earth processes, these results are equivalent to experimental observations on the Earth itself.

Paul Pearson of Cardiff University and his international team achieved a breakthrough recently, published four weeks ago in arguably the world's top scientific journal, Nature.

They unravelled records of atmosphere, temperature and ice-cap formation 33.6 million years ago, when the Earth cooled from a greenhouse without ice caps, into something quite similar to our present day.

These results from "Laboratory Earth" have a particular advantage: we can see what happened after the event for two million years.

With today's records we see changes in atmospheric CO2 and temperature over 50 years and seek to project what will happen in the future.

Pearson's work contains a couple of remarkable results.

First the greenhouse atmosphere pre-cooling contained a CO2 concentration of 900 parts per million by volume, or more than three times that of the Earth in pre-industrial days.

We can't be sure what triggered the Earth to cool despite, or because of, its changing green-house atmospheric blanket, but once it did, cycles of ice cap formation and glaciation commenced, apparently governed by the same variations in the Earth's orbit that govern the ice ages of the past million years.

Second, while the cooling of the Earth took place over a time-span of around 200,000 years, the atmospheric CO2 first dropped in association with the cooling, then rose to around 1100ppmv and remained high for 200,000 years while the Earth cooled further and remained in its new ice ages cycle.

We can compare these huge swings (both up and down) in atmospheric CO2 with current computer-modelled estimates of climate sensitivity by the IPCC which suggest that a doubling of CO2 relative to pre-industrial

times will produce a temperature increase of 2.5C to 4C.

If the Earth started a cycle of ice ages 33.6 million years ago while having its very carbon-rich atmosphere, and if the Earth showed cycles of ice-age activity when atmospheric CO2 was four times the level that it was in humankind's pre-industrial times, what new information must we incorporate into our present climate models?

Another key parameter in climate modelling is the warming amplification associated with increasing CO2 in our atmosphere.

This amplification factor is generally believed to be greater than one, giving rise to an understanding that increases in atmospheric CO2 amplify warming (a positive feedback in the physical process), and the IPCC has quantified this to deliver the finding that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in man-made greenhouse gas concentrations.

However since the IPCC's fourth report, our Laboratory Earth has also delivered new data on this CO2-induced amplification factor.

The tool for the study in this instance is recent satellite-based temperature data now extending over 30 years.

Building on a methodology published 15 years ago in Nature, climatologist and NASA medallist John Christy and colleague David Douglass studied global temperature impacts of volcanic activity and ocean-atmospheric oscillations (the "El Nino" effect) and separated these from global temperature trends over the past 28 years.

The result of their analysis is a CO2-induced amplification factor close to one, which has implications clearly at odds with the earlier IPCC position.

The result was published this year in the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment and the paper has not yet been challenged in the scientific literature.

What this means is that the IPCC model for climate sensitivity is not supported by experimental observation on ancient ice ages and recent satellite data.

So are we justified in concluding that the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not the only or major driver of current climate change? And if so, how should we re-shape our ETS legislation?

I don't know the answer to these questions, but as Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman observed: "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong."

Michael Asten is a professorial fellow in the school of geosciences at Monash University, Melbourne.

Obama = Faith in Big Government

My Big Fat Government Takeover

Rule by the best and the brightest.

• OPINION: MAIN STREET
• DECEMBER 7, 2009, 7:18 P.M. ET | WSJ

Some mistakes are so big that only smart people are tempted to make them. One is the faith in Big Government.

We'll see that in full force today, when Barack Obama gives another major address on the economy. On the generalities, there won't be much real disagreement. But at a time when many claim to see no difference between the two political parties, President Obama and his Democratic allies are making one distinction paramount: their operating assumption that bigger government is better government.

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Associated Press

Many of the people in the Obama administration, the president included, enjoy all the credentials we associate with the best and the brightest: the right schools, the good grades, the successful careers. Alas, whether it be allocating health care or defining the kind of jobs the economy ought to create, the policies they favor suggest a strong belief that they know what's best not just for themselves, but for everyone else too.

Of course, the kind of people who are apt to push for government-imposed solutions are those who are also apt to believe they will be the ones imposing decisions, not the ones who have to live with decisions imposed by others. Sometimes that's because they enjoy the wealth that gives them escape hatches unavailable to the less affluent, such as their ability to ensure that their own children never have to set foot in a public school. Mostly, however, their trust in government reflects their confidence that they have all the answers and that it's government's job to enforce them.

What about conservatives? Don't we have confidence in our judgment and abilities? Of course we do. The difference is that we trust free citizens to make decisions about themselves—and are skeptical about government. As someone who worked inside a White House, I say you really believe government should be small when you see your friends running it.

Now, I know there are people who believe that George W. Bush was a Big Government Republican. And you can make arguments about spending and so forth. Even so, however, there's simply no comparison with the Obama administration.

That's because conservatives believe that even our smartest friend is no match for the collective wisdom of the marketplace. If we were to wake up and find that someone we knew well had been given control over some important part of the economy, the conservative would not likely think, "Everything will be fine now that Harry's in charge." Far more likely we'd be saying to ourselves, "If it weren't for his wife, Harry would be wearing red and purple socks every day—and we're giving him that kind of power?"

Mr. Obama and his team appear to be unburdened by such modesty.

Detroit is in decline because its automotive giants no longer build the kind of cars Americans want to buy? Let's have the president sack the CEO of General Motors, and then use the bailout money as leverage to appoint a car czar and get GM and Chrysler to build the kind of cars that Washington wants.

Wall Street execs are getting sweet bonuses at a time when millions of other Americans are unemployed? Well, instead of encouraging these financial concerns to pay back the Troubled Asset Relief Program monies and get the taxpayers off the hook, send in Ken Feinberg to set their salaries.

Health-care spending is inefficient? The answer is obvious: Expand the Department of Health and Human Services and give its secretary more power. Under the bill now before the Senate, for example, Kathleen Sebelius would have the authority to decide what care insurance companies could offer, who could get an abortion under a government-run plan, what prices were fair, and so on.

Of course we shouldn't draw any conclusions from an advisory task force that recently created a stir when it suggested women get fewer mammograms—and Ms. Sebelius's disavowal in the face of public heat. She pointed out that the task force does not set government policy. But at some point some government task force will—and there will be fewer ways around it.

That's government by the smart. The good news is that it doesn't seem to be selling. According to a recent poll, 57% of Americans believe government is doing things that should be left to business and individuals. Not only do most Americans object, Gallup says the opposition is the "highest such reading in more than a decade."

Today Mr. Obama is going to give us more details about the wonderful things all those smart people in Washington are going to do to help us on the economy. Maybe he would do well to take another look at all those bright lights around him. For the more he proposes government will do, the more skeptical Americans seem to be.