| Read the Background Material… |
| All right, here’s Pelosi from last hour. This is during her weekly news conference as she came out of the big closed-door meeting with House Democrats. They canceled all committee hearings today and all the House business, and had this big confab behind closed doors where we assume they were discussing the Slaughter Rule.Read more at www.rushlimbaugh.com |
 The “Slaughter Solution”, so named for Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY) Chair of the House Rules Committee and Pelosi lapdog, is an unconstitutional scheme being employed to overcome the lack of votes needed to pass ObamaCare. In a nutshell, the bill will be “deemed” passed in the House without a direct vote. |
| Steve Schippert, a U.S. Marine from June 1985 to June 1993, including service during Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, has an interesting piece at Threat Watch. |
In “This We Will Defend”, Schippert writes, “There is tyranny afoot and it must be confronted and defeated with confidence, determination and passion. The confrontation is not about health care or any other piece of legislation. It is not about politicians, politics or parties. The confrontation is about process. The confrontation is about fidelity to the Constitution.”
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There’s a lively debate going on in the blogosphere and the press about whether Democrats would be better off passing or not passing a health care bill. |
| Some liberals claim that Democrats would be better off passing a bill, any bill |
| Others, mostly conservatives but also some liberals speaking privately, figure that Democrats would be better off letting the issue drop |
I’m inclined to think both sides are wrong. They both assume that there exists some optimum course that will produce happy results. But sometimes in politics there is no course that leads to success. Disaster lies ahead whatever you do. |
In this view, the Democrats’ mistake was making government-directed health care a priority in the first place. They assumed that economic distress would make Americans more amenable to big government programs. They felt history calling: Harry Truman called for national health insurance in 1945 and Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare in 1965; now it was time to go farther. Read more at www.washingtonexaminer.com |
| Less than three months ago, they were stunned at the way the Democrats managed to get 60 senators to vote |
| Then Scott Brown took them back down to 59, and Republicans were again stunned |
| And, when polls showed an ever larger number of Americans ever more opposed to Obamacare |
| Republicans were further stunned to discover that, in order to advance “reconciliation,” Democrat reconsiglieres had apparently been offering (illegally) various cosy Big Government sinecures to swing-state congressmen in order to induce them to climb into the cockpit for the kamikaze raid to push the bill through. The Democrats understand that politics is not just about Tuesday evenings every other November, but about everything else, too. |
| A year or two back, when the Canadian Islamic Congress attempted to criminalize my writing north of the border by taking me to the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission, a number of outraged American readers wrote to me, |
| Arizona Democrat makes the case for her proposal in the most direct manner possible: “The leadership of both parties have ignored the voices of the people for decades. |
| It’s been 77 years since members of Congress took a pay cut. |
| Today, a first-term Arizona Democrat, Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, has garnered a record number of co-sponsors for her proposed Taking Responsibility for Congressional Pay Act. |
| Kirkpatrick’s measure has attracted 19 co-sponsors, the most ever for a pay cut bill, she says. Kirkpatrick is not waiting on her colleagues to implement the pay cut, either, as she is returning $8,700 in equal monthly installments to the Treasury. |
| When Congress was working to end the Great Depression, they cut their salaries — why haven’t we taken that same basic step? |
| The time for politics as usual is over, and the time for action is now. Washington needs to finally step up. |
WASHINGTON (AP) - Major business groups say President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul is a job killer, and they’re launching a multimillion-dollar ad campaign to take that message to voters. |
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers, and groups ranging from contractors to retailers said Tuesday the Democratic health care bills would raise their expenses, while failing to control health care costs. |
Advertisements will start airing nationwide Wednesday on cable television and shift in a few days to 17 states, targeting moderate and conservative Democrats whose votes are critical to passing the bill in the House. The campaign is estimated to cost between $4 million and $10 million, with the insurance industry paying part of the cost.
Read more at apnews.myway.com |
“I’ve been a military lawyer for almost 30 years, I represented people as a defense attorney in the military that were charged with some pretty horrific acts, and I gave them my all[.]… This system of justice that we’re so proud of in America requires the unpopular to have an advocate and every time a defense lawyer fights to make the government do their job, that defense lawyer has made us all safer.” |
“This is specious. ‘The unpopular’ are not ‘required’ to have ‘an advocate’ if (a) “the unpopular’ include war prisoners seeking to challenge their status as enemy combatants (or unprivileged belligerents) and (b) by ‘advocate,’ Graham means a lawyer. In fact, Sen. Graham was a sponsor of the Military Commissions Act which not only endorsed a system that did not provide counsel for detainees but further (and quite properly) sought to deny those detainees access to the federal district courts.” Read more at www.weeklystandard.com |
National security flip-flop |
I want to take you back to November 13, 2009, less than four short months ago. |
| As I noted the day the news broke, it was a Friday. The president was flying off to Asia. Congress was not in session. It was the perfect time to drop a bombshell on the American people. Here is what I wrote at the time: |
| Well, another Friday is upon us. President Obama will be flying off to Asia in a few weeks. Congress is tied up with health care |
| President Obama’s advisers are nearing a recommendation that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, be prosecuted in a military tribunal, administration officials said, a step that would reverse Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.’s plan |
Classical liberalism — which we shall call here simply liberalism — is based on the conception of civil society as, by and large, self-regulating when its members are free to act within very wide bounds of their individual rights. Among these the right to private property, including freedom of contract and free disposition of one’s own labor, is given a very high priority. Historically, liberalism has manifested a hostility to state action, which, it insists, should be reduced to a minimum (Raico 1992, 1994). |
II. Austrian Economics and Wertfreiheit |
| Ludwig von Mises, for instance (1949, p. 881), stated that, “economics is apolitical or nonpolitical … it is perfectly neutral with regard to judgments of value, as it refers always to means and never to the choice of ultimate ends.” |
| the fact is that all of the major figures in the development of Austrian economics habitually took positions on policy issues that they held to be somehow grounded in their economic doctrines.Read more at mises.org |
Scott Brown on Kudlow & Company, 3/3/10
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Pelosi Eyes “Slaughter Solution” to Govern by Fiat
