The Powers Of Obama’s ‘Politburo of Proctologists’

Barack Obama, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Healthcare, Individual Rights, Regulation, Socialism

Not even the US Solicitor General Donald Verrilli can muster a spirited defense of ObamaCare. Said Verrilli, almost apologetically, on Tuesday before the Supreme Court: “Maybe they were right, maybe they weren’t, but this is something about which the people of the United States can deliberate and they can vote, and if they think it needs to be changed, they can change it.” [Oh really?]

Our state’s Attorney General Rob McKenna sees this as the most important case of our lifetime on Federal power under the Commerce clause. The Supreme Court was treating it very seriously, as have all the courts so far, in ruling on the individual mandate. The power to order individuals into private contract, says McKenna, is made up. It’s not as if it had been lying around undiscovered.

It’s a shame that McKenna seems to both support and anticipate ‘severability”—an outcome whereby the individual mandate is severed from the rest of the law, which is upheld.

To the fatuous point of the health-care market being unique, and thus requiring special treatment by the state, McKenna counters that uniqueness is not a constitutional principle.

The issue here is not healthcare policy but Federal power, he says, intimating that Obama’s “politburo of proctologists” cannot “create commerce in order to regulate it.” This is a first, claims McKenna.

As was pointed out in “Destroying Healthcare For The Few Uninsured,” the number of uninsured, by choice or not by choice, is grossly exaggerated.

“The key legal thinker in developing the case against the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate” is Facebook Friend Randy Barnett. Randy is “the originator of the activity/inactivity distinction” being used in the arguments against Obamacare.

Here is Randy’s interview on Ezra Klein’s WaPo’s blog.

Especially pertinent, in the Klein interview, is Randy’s distinction between “the government’s power to tax in order to pay for Medicare, which is a single-payer insurance program that [you’ll] get when over 65,” and the same entity’s constitutional authority to compel the individual to “self-insure on the private market before [he’s] 65.”

RB: “There are several answers, but I’ll limit myself to two. First, there’s the text of the Constitution itself. The text of the Constitution itself gives Congress the power to levy taxes on people and on income. We can’t dispute that. It does not give Congress the power under its commerce power, at least not expressly, to make them do business with private companies.
The second point I would make is that the duty to pay taxes is part of your duty to support the government in return for the protections the government gives you. What the government is claiming here is this power — and this ought to disturb people on the left — to make people do business with private companies when Congress thinks it’s convenient.”

It’s safe to say that even libertarians like Randy who might uphold the elaborate public works sprung from the General Welfare and Interstate Commerce Clauses as constitutional, have to agree that Thomas Jefferson would probably be appalled with it all.

Latest Act in American Vaudeville

America, Intelligence, Media, Pop-Culture, Psychology & Pop-Psychology, The Zeitgeist

American life has a vaudeville quality to it. You learn to shut it out, as you would white noise.

A perennial element of the national freak show is the obscene football scene. Another, it would appear, is the “Mega Millions” lottery. This is major news in mainstream. The queues for tickets are snaking around the country’s neighborhoods.

The odds of a “Mega Millions” jackpot win are 1 in 176 million.

What does it say of those who are placing bets on these odds?

UPDATE II: @Twitter, Trayvon Was “NO_LIMIT_NIGA” (The Latest, Feral, 10-Against-One Assault)

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Law, Political Correctness, Propaganda, Race, Racism

“Trayvon’s Tweets and Black Hate Crimes” is my latest column. Here’s an excerpt:

“Hoodie on the Hill’ blared the Drudge-Report headline, as the street theatre playing out over the shooting death of Trayvon Martin crossed over to the House floor. There, concealed by the by-now iconic hood and “gangsta” glasses was one Bobby Rush, a Democratic representative. Rush blessed Trayvon Martin’s departed soul.

The name Trayvon is soon to be a trademark. It may yet spawn a franchise, as the youth’s grieving mother has had the presence of mind to file with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

If you’ve managed to miss the news, Martin was a 17-year-old black youth, shot dead last month by a Hispanic man with a Jewish surname. George Zimmerman—who, for the purposes of the “Racism Industrial Complex” is being considered white—was patrolling a Florida gated community, as part of his neighborhood-watch duties.

Other than that Martin was unarmed and that George Zimmerman has not been arrested, the facts of the case have yet to be established. Since then, the “Racism Industrial Complex (RIC)” (columnist Jack Kerwick’s coinage), has galvanized on behalf of Trayvon.

The Hollywood faction of the RIC sicced its followers on the wrong Zimmerman, after tweeting out an unverified address in the hope of getting the shooter lynched. Somewhere in the Sunshine State a retired Jew is on the lam. …”

The complete column is “Trayvon’s Tweets and Black Hate Crimes.”

If you’d like to feature this column in or on your publication (paper pr pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

Support this writer’s work by clicking to “Recommend,” “Tweet” and “Share” the “Paleolibertarian Column” on RT and “Return To Reason” on WND.

UPDATE I: (March 30):

To me, what stands out in this “Media Mash” featuring the “Racism Industrial Complex (RIC)” is the sub-intelligent level of it all. Via NewsBusters:

Reacting angrily to selective editing by NBC that suggested racial animus by George Zimmerman, NewsBusters publisher Brent Bozell complained to Fox News’s Sean Hannity last night that NBC News was engaged in an “all-out falsehood.” The story in question was a March 27 Ron Allen report on NBC’s ‘Today’ in which 911 audio was edited to make it sound like George Zimmerman said “he looks black” immediately after saying “this guy looks like he’s up to no good.”
In the actual 911 audio, Zimmerman only described Martin’s race after the dispatcher asked, “And this guy: is he white, black, or Hispanic?” “To edit that out is so distorting,” Hannity complained. “Sean, it’s not distorting, it’s advancing a falsehood, it’s worse,” Bozell corrected the Fox News anchor. [see video below page break]
What’s more, with Al Sharpton in the NBC family on cable channel MSNBC, the network has been ginning up another Tawana Brawley-like atmosphere where passions are whipped into a frenzy before all the facts are laid out on the table.
“The radical left has already acted as judge, jury and executioner in this. This is another Tawana Brawley moment we’re looking at folks,” Bozell noted, reminding viewers that “Sharpton never apologized for that” incident.
“Every single person who hung this person [Zimmerman] without knowing the facts has got to respond to this,” Bozell complained.

To pick up on the aforementioned sub-intelligent themes in the cognoscenti’s one-sided “conversations” about race, I just heard a black commentator advance the following on MSNBC: A white girl dying at the hands of a black is sad, but devoid of the significance that attaches to the crime when visited on a black. I paraphrase the moron.

The pundit didn’t seem a malevolent man, just deeply stupid, for the non sequitur he was advancing was that black-on-white crime can never spring from endemic and epidemic racial hatred. Thus is it devoid of social and symbolic significance. “Casualty of racial hatred”: This is a construct that exists (in the abstract) for blacks alone.

MSNBC’s Tamron Hall, who is unburdened by brains, tweeted her affections for the guest (from Freedom Watch we know that these shows are more often about entertaining the host’s “good friends.”)

tamronhall .@Toure passionate and fury all wrapped into one very smart and loyal friend coming up live in 2min

UPDATE II (March 31): The Latest, Feral, 10-Against-One RACIAL Assault:

Seven black teens have been arrested on suspicion that they committed a hate crime when they attacked a 15-year-old Hispanic boy while he was walking home from school in Southern California, according to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office.
The March 14 beating in Palmdale was captured on video and posted on YouTube, but has since been removed from the site. The seven boys, ages 13 to 16, were arrested Wednesday for investigation of assault and committing a hate crime, Lt. Don Ford said.
The attack happened near Cactus Middle School, but Ford didn’t know if any of the teens involved were students there.
The video shows as many as 10 boys surrounding the victim and challenging him to a fight. The suspects then began hitting the teen while others watched.
During the beating, the teens made racially derogatory statements that were captured on the video, Ford said.
After the victim fell to the ground, the assailants kicked him multiple times in the head, knocked out several teeth and left shoe impressions on his skin, Ford said.

UPDATED: BHO’s Tactical Slip Of The Tongue

Barack Obama, Elections, Ethics, Etiquette, Foreign Policy, Russia

Mitt Romney, and everyone Republican, “seized on Obama’s comments to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, in which Obama suggested greater ‘flexibility’ on negotiations regarding missile defense after the election.”

Romney launched into a scary cold-war diatribe against Russia, to which Russian President Dmitry Medvedev retorted with reference to reason and history (no wonder the Fox News report refrained from quoting Medvedev’s one-two punch):

Medvedev advised the White House hopefuls, including Romney, to “rely on reason, use their heads,” adding, “that’s not harmful for a presidential candidate.” He further said, “It’s 2012, not the mid-1970s, and whatever party he belongs to, he must take the existing realities into account.”

[ABC]

Obama is right to suggest that the US should reconsider its policy of “getting into Russia’s space and getting into Russia’s face.”

Where Obama went wrong is in carelessly revealing the Knavish connivance he shares with just about every politicians.

Republican hysteria notwithstanding, Obama’s slip of the tongue was a tactical error, no more.

UPDATE: Nicki, many would say there’s a critical-mass of evidence that the US government and its various democratic proxies do indeed meddle on the level you suggest. See “The Adventures Of America’s Alinskyites in Egypt.”