In a procedure that was aptly dubbed “Cash For Cloture,” “The Senate voted on Saturday to begin full debate on major health care legislation,” reports the NYT, “propelling President Obama’s top domestic initiative over a crucial, preliminary hurdle in a formidable display of muscle-flexing by the Democratic majority. … The 60-to-39 vote, along party lines, clears the way for weeks of rowdy floor proceedings that will begin after Thanksgiving and last through much of December.”
I have not found a news report that specifies which of the Bill’s permutations will proceed in the Senate.
“Liberty is a simple thing. It’s the unassailable right to shout, flail your arms, even verbally provoke a politician [or a policeman], unmolested. Tyranny is when those small things can get you assaulted, incarcerated, injured, and even killed. Evidence of tyranny in America is mounting” (“Tasers ‘R’ Us”)
You might call Heather Ellis’s behavior rude. That’s how the authorities described her cutting the queue at Walmart and refusing to be “removed” from the store by police. But for “belligerence,” The Machine brought the full force of the state down on Ellis. She was charged with “disturbing the peace, trespassing, resisting arrest and assaulting police officers,” and could have faced a jail term of 15 years.
In case you think I’m minimizing her crimes, let me not omit that Ellis also “stiffened her body” when the brutes tried to place her in the police car.
My oh my: doesn’t Heather know that as a subject she ought to have complied with her sovereigns?
Dr. Boyce Watkins, who spoke eloquently on her behalf on CNN, asked: “If ‘no one was seriously injured,’ why was she facing up to 15-years in prison?”
Heather Ellis took a plea deal.Writes Watkins: “According to the terms of the deal, Ellis will plead guilty to disturbing the peace and resisting arrest. She will also serve a year of unsupervised probation, attend an anger management course and serve four days in jail before the end of the year. Also, if she stays out of trouble for the year, the charges will be sealed and the arrest will not be on her permanent record.”
Imagine being forced into this predicament, when you are innocent in the natural law.
Statism, not racism, is at work here. But being black and alleging racism might have saved this woman from a fate far worse.
A good dose of anti-authoritarianism didn’t hurt Ellis and her supporters. Given their distrust of the state, blacks are often more defiant of the American police state. It serves them in good stead.
Update I (Nov. 23): I watched a segment of the reality show COPS. Two female police officers responded to a domestic altercation and ended up arresting the crying woman for the offense of not replying right away to the law’s queries. The bully babe in uniform explained to the poor woman that she was being arrested becasue she needed to be taught a lesson: “If a cop asked you something, you respond right away, you hear?”
Let’s see if I got this right: a woman in trouble calls the cops, who just about break down her door, yell at her for being out of it and cuff her, leaving children and an elderly mother unattended.
To serve and protect.
This kind of outlaw conduct from cops is clearly more common than we think. Having observed it, I’d have to conclude that it is best not to invite the bastards into one’s home.
Update II: A reader hereunder brings up the travesty that is the plea bargain, an abomination that is presented in every episode of “Law And Order” as a matter-of-fact route to “justice.” The truth is that such “wheeling and dealing” is anything but. This from “TRUTH OBSCURED IN JOHNNY JIHAD’S PLEA BARGAIN“:
There’s a reason the American Constitution emphasizes “the right of trial by jury.” The justice system’s mandate is to unveil the truth. This can only be done in a court of law, and in accordance with due process. The plea bargain is nothing more than a negotiated deal which subverts the very goal of the justice system: In the process of hammering out an agreement that pacifies both prosecution and defense, truth usually falls by the way. As the predominant method of adjudication in the United States, the plea bargain taints the system.
“Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is advancing on the country with an $848 billion health-care bill in hand, which he hopes to bring to the Senate floor before he and cohorts go on holiday.
Yet the swiftest arrow in the Republican punditocracy’s Obamacare quiver remains this:
If the government can’t pull off the ‘Cash For Clunkers’ scam, how will it handle health care?
Or this:
If government can’t manage the gallery of the grotesque – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – how will it run a sixth of the economy?
When all else fails to persuade, they galvanize the argument from Hitler. Taking their cues from Rush Limbaugh, it is not uncommon for Republican commentators to pair B. Hussein’s health care with Hitler’s hobby horses: smoking bans, abortions, euthanasia and eugenics.
Hitler and the mismanagement by government of Medicare and Medicaid (but not of the military) – this is the Republican commentariat’s repertoire of riffs.
Anything but First Principles, with which the GOP has an oil-and-water relationship.” …
“Substandard professional performance would get one purged from the private sector. It did nothing to undermine Hasan’s employment status, rank, six-figure income, and secret security clearance in the military.”
Government committees are where accountability goes to die.
