The Depths of Demcare Demagoguery – by Michelle Malkin

The Depths of Demcare Demagoguery – by Michelle Malkin

Posted By Michelle Malkin On December 11, 2009 @ 12:04 am In FrontPage | 15 Comments

How low can they go?

The desperate Democratic peddlers of a government health care takeover have proclaimed an insurance “holocaust in America” (Fla. Democratic Rep. Alan Grayson), lambasted conservative health care town hall protesters as “political terrorists” (Indiana Democratic Rep. Baron Hill), sent SEIU thugs to demonstrate outside Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman’s private residence, and derided senior citizens questioning President Obama’s fuzzy math savings claims (California Democratic Rep. Pete Stark: “I wouldn’t dignify you by peeing on your leg. It wouldn’t be worth wasting the urine.”) Now, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is leading them deeper into demagogic mire.

This week, Reid pummeled opponents with the worn-out race card. Following in the mucky footsteps of former President Jimmy Carter (who blamed GOP Rep. Joe Wilson’s objections to Obama’s policy deceptions on a “racism inclination”) and Jesse Jackson (”You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man”), Reid likened Republicans who object to socialized medicine to slave masters, enemies of women’s suffrage and Bull Connor.

Reid’s rhetorical aim was worse than the unhinged Minnesota protester who threw tomatoes at Sarah Palin during a book signing and hit a police officer instead. Splat.

Mustering up as much indignation as his taut face could exhibit, Reid lectured those standing in the way of Demcare: “When this country belatedly recognized the wrongs of slavery, there were those who dug in their heels and said, ‘Slow down. It’s too early. Things aren’t bad enough.’

“When women spoke up for the right to speak up, they wanted to vote, some insisted, ‘Slow down. There will be a better day to do that. Today isn’t quite right.’

“When this body was on the verge of guaranteeing equal civil rights to everyone regardless of the color of their skin, some senators resorted to the same filibuster threats that we hear today.”

It was the GOP that fought slavery and the Democratic Party that battled to preserve it. It was then-Democrat Strom Thurmond who led the civil rights filibuster that Reid tried to lay on Republicans. And it’s the Democratic Party, not the GOP, that boasts ex-Klansman Sen. Robert Byrd among its senior leaders. But don’t confuse Reid with history while he’s chasing Republicans around with his “RAAAACISM!” stamp.

The more the American public learns about the choice-limiting, debt-exploding, bureaucracy-multiplying health care takeover, the more opposition increases. And the more unhinged the Democratic majority and its supporters get.

There is now a $200,000 “bounty” on the head of U.S Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue.

Left-wing activist website “Velvet Revolution” published a want ad this week with Donohue’s picture on it, soliciting information leading to “the arrest and conviction” of the business leader for “opposing progressive initiatives.” The witch-hunt is targeting Donohue for his outspoken criticism of the costs and impact of the Dems’ health care legislation on small businesses across the country.

Such reckless propaganda accusing opponents of “criminality” isn’t limited to nutroots publications. In the august pages of The New York Times last week, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof titled his universal care manifesto, “Are We Going To Let John Die?” Kristof elevated unemployed Oregon sawmill worker John Brodniak, 23, as the Demcare poster child. Reportedly diagnosed as having a cavernous hemangioma, a neurological condition, Kristof bemoaned: “Without insurance, John has been unable to get surgery or even help managing the pain.”

An emergency room asked Brodniak not to return without insurance, Kristof claims (a practice that is prohibited by federal law). No doctor would treat him, Kristof reported (get your grain of salt ready). Isn’t it “monstrous,” Kristof concludes (hanky alert), “for politicians to avert their eyes, make excuses and deny coverage to innumerable Americans just like John?”

Ready for the punch line? Brodniak not only has coverage through Oregon’s Medicaid program, but has also been a patient at the prestigious Oregon Health and Science University in Portland (a safety-net institution that accepts all Medicaid patients) for the past three weeks — a fact Kristof either deliberately ignored and suppressed from readers or didn’t bother to find out before publishing his screed.

In other words, Brodniak was already being treated and cared for by a top-notch neurologist under our existing health care system when Kristof came along to scream at Congress for letting him die.

Kristof’s tale follows on the heels of at least two dubious horror stories disseminated by President Obama. In September, Obama told of Illinois cancer patient Otto Raddatz, who supposedly died after he was dropped from his insurance plan when his insurer discovered an unreported gallstone the patient hadn’t known about. The truth? He got the treatment he needed in 2005 and died just this year.

In another case, Obama claimed, a woman with breast cancer lost her insurance because “she forgot to declare a case of acne.” In fact, she failed to disclose a previous heart condition and did not list her weight accurately, but her insurance was restored anyway after intense public lobbying.

But why bother with troublesome facts? In the insatiable pursuit of government control, truth and rationality are the first casualties

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Obama IRS hires “hundreds” for new wealth unit

December 14th, 2009

Kim Dixon, Reuters

A new Internal Revenue Service unit set up to catch rich tax cheats hiding their wealth in complex business entities is rapidly taking shape with the hiring of hundreds of employees.

The IRS high wealth unit, part of a broader effort to combat international tax evasion, is focusing on “the entire web of business entities controlled by a high wealth individual,” IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman told a tax conference this week.

Another IRS official told Reuters “hundreds” of people have already been hired to staff the new unit, including some from within the agency.

“We have drawn top talent within the IRS that have expertise involving wealthy individuals as well as examination of their related entities,” said Mae Lew, an IRS special counsel.

The high-wealth unit is focusing on trusts, real estate investments, privately held companies and other business entities controlled by rich individuals.

While use of sophisticated legal structures can be legal, in other instances they “mask aggressive tax strategies,” Shulman said.

Read More:

Obama Slams Fat Cat Bankers

December 14th, 2009

By ELIZABETH WILLIAMSON, Wall Street Journal

Fat Cat bankers leave White House meeting with Obama 

President Barack Obama lashed out at Wall Street, calling bankers “fat cats” who don’t get it, in an escalation of tensions with the industry.

Mr. Obama, speaking on the eve of Monday’s meeting with the heads of major banks at the White House, said he would try to persuade bankers to free up more credit to businesses, with the aim of boosting job growth. But the president also expressed frustration with banks that the government has assisted.

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes” program on Sunday.

“They’re still puzzled why is it that people are mad at the banks. Well, let’s see,” he said. “You guys are drawing down $10, $20 million bonuses after America went through the worst economic year that it’s gone through in — in decades, and you guys caused the problem. And we’ve got 10% unemployment.

Read More:

How Barack Obama is destroying the dollar – and perhaps ushering in the Amero

December 14th, 2009

by Bob Murphy, LewRockwell.com

Will the Amero replace the US Dollar? 

First under the Bush Administration and even more so under President Obama, the federal government has been seizing power and spending money as it hasn’t done since World War II. But as bold as the Executive Branch has been during this financial crisis, the innovations of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke have been literally unprecedented. Indeed, it is entirely plausible that before Obama leaves office, Americans will be using a new currency.

Bush and Obama have engaged in record peacetime deficit spending; so too did Herbert Hoover and then Franklin Roosevelt (even though in the 1932 election campaign, FDR promised Americans a balanced budget). Bush and Obama approved massive federal interventions into the financial sector, at the behest of their respective Treasury secretaries. Believe it or not, in 1932 the allegedly “do-nothing” Herbert Hoover signed off on the creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which was given billions of dollars to prop up unsound financial institutions and make loans to state and local governments. And as with so many other elements of the New Deal, FDR took over and expanded the RFC that had been started under Hoover.

In the past year, the government has seized control of more than half of the nation’s mortgages, it has taken over one of the world’s biggest insurers, it literally controls major car companies, and it is now telling financial institutions how much they can pay their top executives. On top of this, the feds are seeking vast new powers over the nation’s energy markets (through the House Waxman-Markey “Clean Energy and Security Act” and pending Kerry-Boxer companion bill in the Senate) and, of course, are trying to “reform” health care by creating expansive new government programs.

Read More:

Uncoupling the U.S. from the UN

By Edward Bernard Glick

Over the past sixty years, the political architecture and political mathematics of the United Nations have changed drastically. Not only has the number of Security Council non-permanent members been increased from 6 to 10, but the pivotal position in the General Assembly once held by Latin America is now held by Third-world countries in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. They have hijacked the United Nations and transformed it into one of the most anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic organizations on the planet.

They are also determined to make the UN the substitute for sovereignty and the surrogate for a sovereign state’s decision-making institutions. Except when their own interests are at stake, they preach that the Security Council is the Government of the Earth and the General Assembly is the Parliament of Mankind.

America can keep the Security Council at bay because it has a veto there. But in the veto-free General Assembly, America, which pays 20 percent of the United Nations’ regular budget and about a third of its peacekeeping budget, has only four options: Either it abstains on a resolution, or it supports one it doesn’t like, or it introduces one it does like, or it waters it down to utter ineffectiveness in order to get the two-thirds vote required to pass a resolution in a General Assembly that is unrecognizably different from the one the UN’s founders envisaged in San Francisco in 1945. 

The situation is now so bad that it forced John Bolton, when he was the United States ambassador to the United Nations, to remark: “Many people want me to be the UN’s ambassador to the U.S. That is not my job. I am the U.S. ambassador to the UN, and my primary duty is to advance U.S. foreign policy.”

States, like individuals, can be inert. They remain tied to policies and processes long after they have ceased serving their intended purposes. One example is America’s membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization: Only God knows why the United States still belongs to NATO. NATO is a Cold War-generated anachronism whose only purpose was to deter Soviet aggression in Western Europe. Soviet Russia is gone, but the Europeans still want America to help them whenever they get into trouble. However, they have neither the means nor the will to help America when it gets into trouble.  

Another example of how inertia triumphs over intelligence is America’s membership in the United Nations. Although the United States was one of the organization’s founding members, it should separate itself from that body. And while it is doing that, it ought to encourage the United Nations to move its headquarters from New York City to a place more congenial to its orientation. Perhaps United Nations headquarters should be in the middle of Khartoum or in a suburb of Pyongyang.

Whatever usefulness the UN had in its early years has been dissipated by its indecency and irresponsibility in later years. A case in point is its incessant denunciations of Israel, to which it gave birth and legitimacy when it adopted the Palestine partition resolution in November 1947. Palestine and Israel aside, really important events, such as America’s recognition of Communist China, the ending of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and the defusing of the Cuban missile crisis, were settled not by the United Nations but by diplomats operating outside the world organization.

To those who would argue that America’s jettisoning the United Nations would mean its return to pre-Second World War isolationism, one should note that in the age of the computer, the internet, and the high-speed airplane, America can defend its vital political and socioeconomic interests in old-fashioned ways: ambassadorial diplomacy, summit meetings, bilateral and multilateral treaties, trade talks, and cultural and scientific exchanges.”

In short, when a more pro-American administration comes to power again in Washington, one of its first moves, after ending the current recession and so-called jobless recovery, must be starting the legal and administrative process of extracting the United States from the United Nations, and the United Nations from the United States.

Surely, when they put their heads together, the city, state, and federal governments will find a better use for the UN’s expensive and untaxed property along New York’s famed East River. 

Edward Bernard Glick is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Temple University

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/uncoupling_the_us_from_the_un.html at December 14, 2009 – 08:59:50 AM EST

We are in big trouble

By Larrey Anderson

Our country is in big trouble … huge trouble. It is time that Americans took a hard look at our values, our conception of justice, and our standards for truth. This piece is intended as a first step in that direction.

1) Values

The story of Tiger Woods and his (now admitted) “infidelity” is everywhere. The Woods’ story has piqued the prurient interests of America and the world. The story has dominated the mainstream media for days while the injustice being committed against our Navy Seals and the revelation of the computer code from the CRU (exposing the biggest hoax in the history of the world) have gotten scant attention.

Tiger Woods was on the cover of every magazine and tabloid that I saw while standing in line at the grocery store yesterday. Those publications and those stories are on the grocery stores’ racks for a reason: Americans are buying them.

We are more interested in the private life of a guy whose claim to fame is that he can hit a little ball with a stick better than anyone else in the world (whoopee!) than we are about the destruction of our culture.

It is not Tiger Woods’ moral values that concern me. (Celebrities of his stature face enormous temptations from all kinds of hustlers and harlots everyday of their lives.) It is the facts that while our freedoms and Constitution crumble before our eyes … we are focused on Tiger and his bimbos.

This is our iniquity — not Tiger’s.

2) Justice

Meanwhile our politically correct military has arraigned two Navy Seals for allegedly punching Ahmed Hashim Abed in the lip. Abed was the terrorist who, several years ago, led the murder and the brutalization of the corpses of four Blackwater security people in Iraq.

Al Qaeda instructs its members how to claim and/or fake being tortured if a member of the terrorist organization is  captured.

But Al Qaeda is not the real issue here. We are. America has become so politically correct that a terrorist/murderer/sadist, who bitches about his bloodied lip, might get some of the best and bravest men on this planet thrown into jail. Americans had better pay attention, and soon, to this nonsense.

Very special and highly trained military men, including these Navy Seals, are all who stand between a worldwide Islamic war of Jihad and you and me. If we do not rise up to defend these brave soldiers, and demand a full pardon and their immediate release, here is what will happen: Dedicated young men and women will refuse to put their lives on the line if a poke in the face, of someone who would kill them in a heartbeat, gets the soldiers time in the brig.

Would you take that job? Make those sacrifices?  Put your life on the line? Would you complete your mission, catch the bad guy, and then be thrown into jail for your efforts? I wouldn’t. No rational human being would.

Justice in the real world is not politically correct. “Pretty please” or “We respect your unmitigated desire (and efforts) to kill us” are not phrases that matter to a mass murderer. And the next time some whiny PC liberal tells me “We are better than they are,” my reply is going to be, “Of course we are. That’s why Ahmed Hashim Abed only got (allegedly) punched in the face. He wasn’t shot in the head, beaten with sticks, burned, and hung on a bridge. How much better than they are do we have to be to make you happy?”

3) Truth

Since the release of the CRU documents that prove the fraud of the science behind man made global warming, Al Gore has said at least three times (Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun puts it at four) that the emails and information were all ten years old. This is a lie. It has been repeated again and again by Al Gore. Some of the emails are less than two months old.  And dozens upon dozens are less than ten years old. And everyone — but Al Gore — knows it.

Watch the video of the CNN interview with Gore here. One reporter does say to Gore, as a kind of aside, “Some of them [the emails] were from ten years ago, but many of them were far more recent than that.” 

Gore ignores the statement. Neither of the two reporters further disputes Gore’s “ten year old” fabrication. No follow-up challenge from the CNN reporters to Gore’s out right lie. None.

The mainstream media has downplayed the significance of the CRU documents. The headline of a recent AP story proclaims that the science from the CRU was not faked.  Really? As (among others) Marc Sheppard, Lord Monckton, and I have proven the CRU findings most certainly were doctored. The raw date was manipulated to “prove” that the world is exponentially warming. There is no doubt about this.

And still, the mainstream media has not challenged Al Gore on the blatant absurdity of his claim that the documents were at least ten years old and have no real impact on the AGW debate. CNN did ask him to recite his new poem on the impending doom of mother earth. See that video here. (But not if you have recently eaten a meal.  You could lose it.)

John 8:32 states the following:

Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

The corollary of this brilliant piece of scripture should also be written.  It would go something like this:

If you ignore the lies, the lies will imprison you.

Wake up America. The time for the truth to set us free is growing very, very short.

Larrey Anderson is a writer, a philosopher, and submissions editor for American Thinker. He is the author of The Order of the Beloved, and the memoir, Underground: Life and Survival in the Russian Black Market.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/12/we_are_in_big_trouble.html at December 14, 2009 – 08:48:54 AM EST