The problem with the Commonwealth of Virgina’s pleasing legal victory in challenging the constitutionality of Obama’s “healthscare” is this: The individual mandate and much of the health care bill may be manifestly violative, but most of the limits the Constitution placed on the federales (and the courts themselves) are no longer upheld by the courts (or by Congress, that other co-equal branch of government), starting with the Tenth Amendment.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So, as PBS’s News Hour reported, once again so well (appending as it always does a PDF document of the Decision), “Federal judge Henry Hudson ruled Monday afternoon that a major provision of the health care reform law is unconstitutional. In his decision, the judge sided with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, who argued that the Congress does not have the authority to require Americans to purchase health insurance. ‘The Minimum Essential Coverage Provision is neither within the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution,’ Judge Hudson wrote.”
But along could come the Supreme Court Justices and nullify the health-care preferences of the people of Virginia. That’s because the framers’ constitutional dispensation is now nothing but a sad joke. The Appellate Court could beat the SCOTUS to it.
The so-called lame ducks are far from disabled, although they ought to be. “A lame duck,” explains Wikipedia, “is an elected official who is approaching the end of his or her tenure, and especially an official whose successor has already been elected. Wikipedia: “In U.S. politics the period between (presidential and congressional) elections in November and the inauguration of officials early in the following year is commonly called the lame duck period. …”
Lame duck officials tend to have less political power, as other elected officials are less inclined to cooperate with them. However, lame ducks are also in the peculiar position of not facing the consequences of their actions in a subsequent election, giving them greater freedom to issue unpopular decisions or appointments.
Besides, what kind of a practice is it to allow embittered politicians who’ve been dismissed in disgust to continue to legislate?
BBC: “This year, the biggest issue looming over the lame duck session revolves around taxes. The so-called Bush tax cuts are set to expire, which would impact the pay packets of the vast majority of Americans.”
The ducks that should be lamed may still manage to soak the “rich,” to the detriment of all—rich and poor alike.
Fliers who are frisked should write down the name of the TSA agent who pawed them, and then blog or YouTube the event by exposing the personal details of the perp. Footage abounds, but the agents—the stars in these horror films—remain nameless. Name the bastards! It’s one way to bring about some attrition. If you know an agent; be sure to dissociate from him or her. If I knew one of these vermin, I’d pin the perp’s poster to a tree or something.
The revolt against The Transportation and Security Administration has resulted in very little fundamental change, so far, other than exemptions for sectional interests. By fundamental change, I mean restoring the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.
The TSA is just one department. All government departments are like the TSA: Bureaucrats write most of the laws under which we live, and which no elected official has approved. This is why some conservatives (the smart ones) use the term “Managerial State” for the Thing the Huckster and the Hannity call “our freedoms,” “our democracy.” We really have very of the first. And as bad as mobocracy is, we are, in truth, managed by unelected apparatchiks.
I am unable to fly to a destination of my choosing because I refuse to be fondled or zapped with photons.
UPDATE (Nov. 29): MAKE THAT REMORSELESS DOGS. Finally, a lone agent has repented. Well, sort of. I guess he’s feeling the antipathy. Having discovered the Ten Commandments, this man laments that, “It goes back to, ‘Do upon others as you would wish others to do upon you.’ And I would not want that done to me, or my family, or my mother, or my grandmother.'”
MAUL MALIA; SCAN SASHA. NO, DON’T. Having seen the children down whose miniature trousers TSA goons have been reaching; having witnessed heroic little Mandy Smith’s ordeal (and her father’s reprehensible abdication); being in possession of a keen sense of justice and rights—I could never-ever condone such futile, en masse, state sadism and fascism. Not ever. Not against innocent adults. And most certainly not against children, not even the president’s kids, who seem sweet, and whose only flaw is to have been born to a miserable excuse for a human being.
Make that two.
The First Lady has seemingly not experienced a visceral reaction against what is being done by her husband’s administration (begun under his predecessor) to the American people. She has, at least, failed to give voice to a gut reaction to this mass contagion; this moronity, if indeed one was experienced.
This is the same FLOTUS of the “Fat-Based Initiatives”; the woman who so cares for America’s bloated kids. In this post I asked, “Why no white butterballs?” Even Michael Savage hasn’t dared to ponder what would Michelle say if more kids who looked like hers were being mauled by malevolent state workers.
As a mother—as a human being with a heart—I cannot stand to see kids being subjected to the cruelty of strangers. What a miserable excuse for a mother is this woman, Michelle Obama.
SAVAGING THE SAVAGES:
MORE PUTRID, PUSHOVER PARENTS
UPDATE I (Nov. 22): WHERE ARE THE MEN? This is no country for men, any men. You emasculate them, feminize them, make them over in the image of woman, and they’ll offer up their own children as sacrifice. Liberal men have been “liberated” from the natural instinct to protect their own. You can’t blame them. Women most certainly can’t blame men. This is what modern women have worked for; the state as parent and protector.
UPDATE II: RADIATION REALISM. Every doctor I’ve known has tried to persuade me that his particular brand of diagnostic radiation was just dandy for my health. When quizzed about the cumulative effects from the radiation prescribed by his colleagues to keep me in good shape, the medical man would become less cocksure. A cursory perusal of the literature on the additive effects of any radiation confirms that it is anything but safe. The issue here is that no innocent human being should be made to choose between “the Scylla of the scan and the Charybdis of the ‘enhanced pat down,'” even if the first boosts his health (as if). It’s a matter of choice. I have always chosen skepticism when it comes to invasive modalities when used liberally on healthy people.
Now comes a scholarly study, first reported in the The Daily Mail, according to which “full-body airport scanners are just as likely to kill you as a terrorist’s bomb blowing your plane out of the sky”:
Peter Rez, from Arizona State University, said the probability of dying from radiation from a body scanner and that of being killed in a terror attack are both about one in 30 million.
He said: ‘The thing that worries me the most, is not what happens if the machine works as advertised, but what happens if it doesn’t.
A potential malfunction could increase the radiation dose, he said.
Rez has studied the radiation doses of backscatter scanners using the images produced by the machines. He discovered that the radiation dose was often higher than the manufacturers claimed.
Rez suggested that the statistical coincidence means that there is really no case to be made for deploying any kind of body-scanning machine – the risk is identical.
But he added: ‘They’re both incredibly unlikely events. These are still a factor of 10 lower than the probability of dying in any one year from being struck by lightning in the United States.’
Critics say the low level beam used delivers a small dose of radiation to the body but because the beam concentrates on the skin – one of the most radiation-sensitive organs of the human body – that dose may be up to 20 times higher than first estimated.
A number of scientists have already written to to the Food and Drug Administration to complain that the safety aspects have not been properly addressed before the nationwide rollout of the scanners.
UPDATE III: TSA THEME SONG, again. I still think that “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” best captures the TSA’s mission, conduct, and the mien of its mindless supporters. Do you disagree?
UPDATE IV: I’ve been remiss, and so have you for not pointing this out to me: even if you choose what to you is a lesser evil, the photons as opposed to the fondle (as Myron puts it), your TSA dominatrix could still pull you over for a once-over. It’s not like your decision between “the Scylla of the scan and the Charybdis of the ‘enhanced pat down'” is honored:
After “electing to go through the airport’s new full-body scanner,” “a bladder cancer survivor from Michigan who wears a urostomy bag that collects his urine,” “was pulled to the side to be patted down by a TSA agent.”
The 61-year-old retired special education teacher said he asked to be examined more discreetly.
Sawyer told WLNS correspondent Jessica Maki that after being taken to a private area, he alerted the TSA agents about his urostomy bag and the danger of its lid being undone, but they didn’t listen.
And when the pat-down began, Sawyer says the agent was so rough, the cap on the urostomy bag came off, spilling urine on him.
“No apology, no recognition – Is that urine? – no nothing, no offer to help me,” Sawyer said. “And I had to face the fact that I had to walk through the airport with urine.”
Do the hos who support this—other than the Fox blond squad, and polls point toward a majority in favor—detect a critical mass in the incidence of abuse travelers have experienced?
[Myron, do not expose Anna to this. Traveling for a wedding is not an emergency. Take a stand.]
When you hear the usual suspects on Fox wax about the land of the free we’re so blessed to live in; switch off. America is a fascistic state by any other name.
UPDATE V: REMOVING A PROSTHETIC BREAST. CBS: “A flight attendant and cancer survivor said she was forced to remove and show her prosthetic breast to a TSA agent during a security pat-down.”
However, what I’ve termed “sectional interests” have piped up again. Instead of arguing for the rights of all customers who purchase an airline ticket constrained by a state-monopolized system—cancer survivors are engaged in special pleading. Ditto airline pilots, flight attendants, etc.
UPDATE VI: As to Myron’s suggestion about special permits; I’ve been trying to make the point that special interests-based rights to pass without pain are bad for everyone and wrong. No one other than the suspicious should be searched. Why do you think Israeli security gives out special permits to those with cancer, the elderly, the pilots, the pretty… They don’t. See “TSA: Home Grown Terrorism (& Cretinism).” They do not molest people as we are doing; they question them politely.
