If Amy Cooter wishes to follow a real hate group, she should embed with the Southern Poverty Law Center. Cooter spent protracted time with a cross-section of the country’s maligned militias, for a PhD. in sociology, I presume. As hard as the Egg Head from CNN tried to extract from her the line the Southern Poverty Law Center peddles about many patriotic Americans, he came away empty handed (and headed).
Although talker Monica Crowley has blamed Obama for the Missouri State police report entitled “The Modern Militia Movement,” and dated February 20, 2009 (it warned about subversives like … me), I believe it was initiated in the Bush era. Once again, here too, there is no difference between the Republicans, when in power, and the Dems in their statist collaboration to defame the best of America.
And the “Hutaree militia”? I’m now old and scarred enough to say openly what as an MSM editor I would merely have cunningly proposed as an interesting hypothesis to some energetic young reporter: I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that any group of white blue collar workers would naturally want to attack the local police, another blue collar group.
I think, as Richard Hoste has argued, that it’s far more likely to turn out to be a case of entrapment by some ambitious prosecutor trying to please his/her political masters.
In an interview with NewsMax.com, Judge Andrew Napolitano outlined the grounds upon which the Supreme Court of the United States ought to repeal major portions of Obama’s overweening health care legislation:
“The Constitution does not authorize the Congress to regulate the state governments,” Napolitano says. “Nevertheless, in this piece of legislation, the Congress has told the state governments that they must modify their regulation of certain areas of healthcare, they must surrender their regulation of other areas of healthcare, and they must spend state taxpayer-generated dollars in a way that the Congress wants it done. …
That’s called commandeering the legislature,” he says. “That’s the Congress taking away the discretion of the legislature with respect to regulation, and spending taxpayer dollars. That’s prohibited in a couple of Supreme Court cases. So on that argument, the attorneys general have a pretty strong case and I think they will prevail.” …
The Supreme Court has ruled that in areas of human behavior that are not delegated to the Congress in the Constitution, and that have been traditionally regulated by the states, the Congress can’t simply move in there,” Napolitano says. “And the states for 230 years have had near exclusive regulation over the delivery of healthcare. The states license hospitals. The states license medications. The states license healthcare providers whether they’re doctors, nurses, or pharmacists. The feds have had nothing to do with it.
“The Congress can’t simply wake up one day and decide that it wants to regulate this. I predict that the Supreme Court will invalidate major portions of what the president just signed into law.”…
Napolitano believes the federal government lacks the legal authority to order citizens to purchase healthcare insurance. The Congress [is] ordering human beings to purchase something that they might not want, might not need, might not be able to afford, and might not want — that’s never happened in our history before,” Napolitano says. “My gut tells me that too is unconstitutional, because the Congress doesn’t have that kind of power under the Constitution.”
The sweetheart deals in the healthcare reform bill used that persuaded Democrats to vote for it – the Louisiana Purchase, Cornhusker Kickback, Gatorade Exception and others – create “a very unique and tricky constitutional problem” for Democrats, because they treat citizens differently based on which state they live in, running afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause according to Napolitano. “So these bennies or bribes, whatever you want, or horse trading as it used to be called, clearly violate equal protection by forcing people in the other states to pay the bills of the states that don’t have to pay what the rest of us do,” Napolitano says.
Exempting union members from the so-called “Cadillac tax” on expensive health insurance policies, while imposing that tax on other citizens, is outright discrimination according to Napolitano. “The government cannot draw a bright line, with fidelity to the Constitution and the law, on the one side of which everybody pays, and the other side of which some people pay. It can’t say, ‘Here’s a tax, but we’re only going to apply it to nonunion people. Here’s a tax, and we’re only going to apply it to graduates of Ivy League institutions.’ The Constitution does not permit that type of discrimination.” …
[SNIP]
In this televised interview, the Judge laid out more clearly the test for a constitutional challenge, namely that one is harmed by the legislation.
Note the comment on the impossibility of reading and making sense of H.R.4872 Reconciliation Act of 2010 (my experience) each section of which amends and alludes to other laws in the US Code, which in itself is large enough to fill a house with paper stacked to the ceilings.
A couple of day ago a number of major companies came out with the preliminary assessment of the costs to each of the “Manna From Mount Olympus” bill, namely Obama’s healthscare legislation. The fascist state that America has become responds sternly to economic forecasts that go against the government’s grain. You may be called on to justify yourself if your assessment of your books diverges from the government’s.
“Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, has summoned some of the nation’s top executives to Capitol Hill to defend their assessment,” reports the Washington Examiner.
Waxman wants “the executives to explain themselves at an April 21 hearing before the Energy and Commerce Committee’s investigative subcommittee.”
As Byron York points out, “Waxman’s demands for documents are far-reaching. ‘To assist the Committee with its preparation for the hearing,’ he wrote to Stephenson, ‘we request that you provide the following documents from January 1, 2009, through the present:
“(1) any analyses related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T; and (2) any documents, including e-mail messages, sent to or prepared or reviewed by senior company officials related to the projected impact of health care reform on AT&T. We also request an explanation of the accounting methods used by AT&T since 2003 to estimate the financial impact on your company of the 28 percent subsidy for retiree drug coverage and its deductibility or nondeductibility, including the accounting methods used in preparing the cost impact statement released by AT&T this week.”
“Waxman’s request could prove particularly troubling for the companies. The executives will undoubtedly view such documents as confidential, but if they fail to give Waxman everything he wants, they run the risk of subpoenas and threats from the chairman.”
AN enterprise’s freedom of speech, right to privacy, prerogative to disseminate information about its finances and accounting—this government is asserting ITS right to infringe all these and more.
The Republicans had similar witch hunts when in power (which is why I’m perplexed that some conservative commentator are convinced, and keep repeating, that only now, under Obama, have they lost these freedoms). The “Sarbanes-Oxley Act,” signed into law by President Bush, was government’s response to The People hoisting their pitchforks against business. Also known as the Corporate Corruption Bill, it singled out a much-maligned minority for the kind of persecution that, if visited on women, blacks or Jews, would be considered actionable, hate-filled discrimination. Hearings were all the rage at the time too.
Democrats, in their zeal to raise revenues and improve Obamacare’s claimed effect on the federal deficit outlook, took away a tax break these companies needed in order to supply prescription drugs to their retirees. The tax subsidy, itself a government accounting ruse crafted in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration to dissuade corporations from dumping their retiree drug benefit programs on the then-new Medicare Part D, becomes taxable under Obamacare. Corporations are now being reminded of the harsh truth: What Big Government giveth, Big Government taketh away, too.
Update II (March 31): Henry “Nostrilitus” Waxman (thanks for the laugh, Greg):
In 2008, on this space, I inquired naively, “Ever wonder why the epidemic of allegations that has almost bankrupted the Catholic Church has not caught on in the UK and Europe? I venture that this is because the pop-psychology that undergirds the allegations and the attendant class-action law suits that ensued is American through-and-through.
But, two years hence, Americans can boast of one lucrative EXport, or shall I say SEXport!? The repressed memory mythology, and my priest-did-me syndrome have been adrift at sea, but have finally dropped an anchor across the pond.
My favorite Pope, Benedict XVI, has stood up admirably against the exported $2 billion lawsuit industry:
“Christ guides us towards goodness and does not let us be disarmed by ingratitude.” He also spoke of how man can sometimes “fall to the lowest, vulgar levels” and “sink into the swamp of sin and dishonesty”.
Against this, the religion of Democracy preaches the rule of the mob and the masses—in particular instituting the lowest common denominator in all spheres of life, from morals to aesthetics. The Catholic Church is among the last historical institutions where the masses are ministered to by their betters (mostly). The impetus and instinct to bleed it dry is a manifestation of a democratic—or is it demonic?—uprising. It is driven by those who’ve, in the Pope’s words, “fallen to the lowest, vulgar levels … into the swamp of sin and dishonesty.”
Reread “SEX, GOD & GREED” by Daniel Lyons for a dissection of the veracity of the sexual abuse claims against the Church.
Update I: The “Another” of the post’s title alludes to the health care revolution, ushered in by the Obama coup.
Update II (March 30): What did I miss? Was there a priestly ritual murder? Plain murder? Boer murder? Evidence beyond hearsay of all the rest? You’d thinks so, wouldn’t you, at least from Schmidt’s hyperbole hereunder. I suggest, as I already have, the reading of Daniel Lyons’ “SEX, GOD & GREED.”
Update III: In reply to Hugo: Thanks for your always provocative posts. Still, it’s baffling to see an Objectivist poo-poo standards of evidence and due process—class action suits being but one legal emblem of the abuse of the principle of a case-by case adjudication.
Also perplexing is it to encounter an Objectivist, which I know Hugo to be, blame genocide in Rwanda on anyone other than the barbarians who, with malice aforethought, took machetes to their innocent neighbors (I was just revisiting that for my book).
Update IV (March 31): A discussion on Hardball with Pat Buchanan, a Catholic, of cover-ups and papal culpability. No discussion of the veracity and standards of the evidence, though.
