The New Slavery

Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in Stanley v. Georgia (1969):

If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men’s minds.

Bear with me while I stretch from a First Amendment issue to a “Commerce clause” issue.

If Marshall is correct that the government shall not have the right to “control men’s minds”, wouldn’t it also stand to reason that the US government does not have either legal or moral grounds to control our bodies, specifically with respect to the ObamaCare legislation? The government can not conscript a soldier (though of course, it has in the past, and Democrats floated the idea of a draft for the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). They can’t force us to be healthy or to buy anything.

I would even go so far as to say this is slavery. My body belongs to me (as the pro-abortion democrats have long shouted from the screech of bullhorns). My body is not something the US government should have even a whisper of control over. The ObamaCare bill will put my body in the purview of the Government’s control.

This is slavery. This is my body being used, manipulated, and directed by a force other than myself. It is coercion, and it is slavery. I believed we had settled this issue in the USA. I believed that all right thinking men and women assigned that ugly part of our history to the past. But now Obama has made slaves of us all. He will tell us what to eat, where to go for health care, whether or not we are treated.

Obama has reconstituted slavery in the United States of America.

Say no to slavery. Reject ObamaCare.

Guess Who Is Exempt From ObamaCare?

Turns out, leadership staffers are exempt from the health care bill that they helped craft.

If it’s so great, why did they ask for an exemption?

By the way, as of today, I am Amish. The Amish are exempt too. So … maybe I’ll go build a table now and raise a barn later.

The Next Steps

I believe that the President and his party will now completely forget about health care and move on to immigration and global warming legislation. They don’t want us to remember that they passed health care – they’d much rather we forget so we re-elect them in November. The only two “benefits” of the bill that will kick in immediately are the elimination of pre-existing conditions and allowing 26 year old “children” stay on their parent’s health insurance. I believe this will not be a smooth, orderly process. Furthermore, most of the “benefits” don’t kick in for four years, and we’re going to be paying higher taxes immediately. Those taxes are going to hurt everyone, not just “the rich”. So this monstrosity is going to be an albatross around their necks. We mustn’t allow them to forget. We must not forget what they have done.

Yet they will try to distance themselves. They’ll move on to other things. They might get immigration through – but I doubt they’ll get cap and trade. So when sanity is restored in the 2010 midterms, Obama will be slowed. Of course, by then the damage will have been done.

Mark Levin is filing suit this morning to repeal the bill. Attorneys General of thirty-three states are going to file suit. There is hope, however remote, this can be slowed. If we have enough seats in the House and Senate after November 2010, we still can’t get this repealed; Obama won’t repeal his own bill. But in 2012, with a new president, we can start overturning this monstrosity.

I don’t think that the Democrats will see power again for twenty years. Maybe longer. They’ve proved they can’t be trusted. They’ve demonstrated for us all that they’re a bunch of corrupt, slimy politicians who would sell out their own mothers for a taste of power.

One positive: No Republican’s fingerprints. No Republican voted for this. I think being the Party of No is appropriate for the next two years until we can get some real numbers in Congress. Until then, our guys should do whatever they can to delay, obfuscate and confuse the opposition.

After November, we’ll own both houses. In 2012, we will finally be free of Obama and his communist agenda. Just hang tight.

Sylvia Plath, Madonna and Socialized Medicine

Sylvia Plath had a week to live. London was blanketed with snow; it had never been so bad in living memory. Every morning she would trudge with her two children to the phone box, and leave them freezing in the car, while she made her phone calls. One of those calls was to the telephone service. At the time, the English would distribute phones. She had just moved into the new house, and the workers had not yet had time to install her phone. So like everything that comes from the state, there was a massive waiting list. The lack of phone, the fact she was freezing and feeling quite alone were weighing heavily on her mind. There was more, of course. She was organically ill. She’d attempted suicide before. She was certainly sinking fast. In retrospect, it looks to me like she was perhaps manic in those last fatal months. The furious move from Court Green, her lovely estate in Devon, to Yeat’s old house in London, her unpredictable behavior around her friends… and lastly, her work, the beautiful Ariel poems, which I believe are the finest poems ever crafted in the entire history of mankind. She wrote those quickly, writing four or five or seven of those massive poems per day, in the dark hours before the children awoke. All this has a manic frenzy to it. Even if I am wrong and she was not manic, she was certainly extremely ill. And she knew it. She needed hospital badly. Dr. Horner, her psychiatrist, was trying to get her into a hospital, but the NHS kept turning him down. There was simply no room for a woman with two children. She would just have to wait. Her depression, of course, was not waiting. She attempted to push it back. She took primitive anti-depressants and tried to hang on.

She died before a bed could become available.

Since this happened in 1963, there is a good argument that I’m being facetious by using Sylvia Plath as an example of how awful collective medicine is. So I shall use the modern era, and Madonna.

When Madonna was pregnant with her second child she was living in London with Guy Ritchie. She told a UK paper that she would never have a child in England because the hospitals were all built in the Victorian era, were cold, filthy, horrifying places. The English went crazy defending their precious National Health Service, but Madonna ultimately returned to Los Angeles for the birth of her son. I mention this only because soon there will not even be a place for someone like Madonna, who can afford the best medical care in the world, to go.

There are millions of stories like this from Canada and England, and other places that have attempted socialized medicine. I say “attempted” because it’s never been successful. Never. Anywhere. And tonight, that’s what we’ve signed up for.

Health Care Vote Counts

I’ve found two excellent analyses of where the health care vote stands:

The Hill has an excellent detailed analysis of each vote.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has the vote at:

YES – 212
NO – 212
UNDECIDED – 7

(As of 12:33 A.M. central standard time).

This is going to be a nail-biter. If this passes, the United States will no longer be the place where I grew up and fostered my strong sense of self-reliance, independence, and optimism. Obama will have achieved his stated goal of “fundamentally” transforming the USA. And the next steps -amnesty for illegals and cap and trade – will not be far behind. We are in a great deal of trouble.

UPDATE 1

Democrats claim they have the votes. Two possibilities: They actually have the votes, or they are trying to convey a sense of fait accompli to sway the undecides to vote with them.

Where Is Our Right To Privacy?

What is a right to privacy? Since the blogosphere has been abuzz with discussions about rights these past few weeks, I’m curious what it actually is. Any serious discussion must agree that it is the right of citizens to be protected from the government, i.e.: the Fourth Amendment protects us from unreasonable searches not from each other, but from the government. So if the government takes over health care, do we still have that right? If any government bureaucrat in any drab, butterwaxed corridor can browse our medical files, how do we still have privacy? What if our medical files show we’re addicted to crack? Can they share that with the DOJ or the city we reside in to build a prosecution? What if our medical files show we’re being treated for some disease that ravages our lungs, but our liver is perfectly healthy. And then some other person needs a liver. Would it be appropriate or sanctioned for the USA – who is now responsible for organ transplants, and keeping costs down – to decide (via a death panel) that it’s too expensive to treat us, but that tasty liver would be affordable for our neighbor, thus we’re basically used for parts?

It is an extreme example, but what is to stop the government from doing it? They’ve proven that they don’t play by the rules and that the ends justify the means. Do they still look like benevolent little angels now? Do you really trust them to make the right decision for you? Because by giving them the power to do so, they will use it.

Since abortions will be paid for, and since the gov is paying for them, what is to stop them from using the fetuses for research?

And since abortion is the home for privacy issues, where the hell is the liberal left screaming about the right to privacy? What is the right to privacy vis a vis abortion? That the state can’t interfere in a relationship between a woman (not a man – he has no right to privacy, apparently) and her doctor. Well, by giving us government run health care, the pro-abortion crowd has just unwound the 30+ years of Roe v. Wade

Funny how they don’t seem to mind now.

An Independent Approach To Health Care

I never understood the fury about health care. For most of my professional life, I never had it. That was partly because I tended to start my own companies and couldn’t afford it, and because the companies I joined were small and couldn’t afford it. But I never missed it. I just paid for my own ob/gyn visits, I treated my colds with Nyquil, and I took care of myself. It was never a big deal; I can’t imagine why these things are somehow so horrific to most of the populace. The same whiny little schmoes who squeal over a $160 office visit to the doctor think of nothing of spending that per month for cable service or a cell phone. Suddenly the whole world is gonna implode if otherwise responsible adults must pay for the ordinary maintenance of their human bodies.

When I had my huge surgery, an appendectomy, I didn’t have insurance. The bill was outrageous, but I just paid it. And the hospital gave me a massive discount because I didn’t have insurance. There could have been no strong argument against insurance than that.

Colds, getting birth control, routine dental checkups and cleaning, those small things should not be covered at all. Insurance is for disasters. If everyone just had catastrophic insurance, the rates would be incredibly low. We’d all be happy, healthy people.

I guess we live in such an entitled society that even taking care of ourselves is outsourced to our neighbors. How sad.

Why You Should Oppose ObamaCare

John Hawkins at Right Wing News has a great post about why you should oppose ObamaCare, all in the words of Democrats.

Must read.

Kindness

I have been reading the comments to various stories about the health care legislation that will bankrupt us all, and basically the argument from the liberals seems to be: we are kind, therefore we are right. That is, when they can even make a cogent argument. I literally saw a comment on the Yahoo News site that said a two year old little girl “caught” leukemia, and “how could that happen in America?”

Here’s a newsflash: this legislation won’t cure cancer.

Kindness has no place in our legislation, like empathy has no place in our judges. Legislation should be a stoic process based on what is appropriate for the society, not for favoring one group over another.

Kindness is not heaping my tax dollars on every poor person in the country. Kindness is giving them a chance to become rich themselves. This word is killing us. It’s terrorizing us by forcing us to choose what is right (both for ourselves and our society) or what is “kind” to the people who need kindness.

I don’t need kindness from Nancy Pelosi. Or you. Or anyone else. I need to be left alone so I can make money.

Congress Disappears As Health Care Looms

The Hill reports that Rush Limbaugh has asked his listeners to call their representatives in Congress to express displeasure with the health care bill and urge them to vote against it.

Great idea.

But they aren’t answering the phone. And they don’t seem eager to hear from us anyway. Ultimately, I do not believe the voices of ordinary Americans matter anymore. The people who have the power to enact this grotesque piece of garbage care nothing about what the people who must abide by it actually think. And with the Slaughter Rule in play, our voices matter even less. By using the Slaughter Rule, Pelosi provides some protective cover for the members who would otherwise be bashful about seeing their constituents at home after the vote. In other words, not only is this monstrosity going to be pushed through, there will be very little accountability for it.

I watch the congressional calculus with interest, attempting to divine where the votes are. Kucinich changed to a “yes” this morning after his initial no, a protest for lack of a public option. His ride on Air Force One with President Obama to his home district was a not-so-subtle enticement to hear the President out. But what scares me is that Kucinich was so far left (he wants only a single payer system) that for him to come around to the Senate bill, he must have been promised something. My gut tells me that Obama shared the truth with Kucinich: that this was just a first step. Single payer is coming. Be patient. Vote for the bill, and help craft an even more massive single-payer system.

Other votes seem to be shifting for and against. A source in the US Senate tells me he still believes it won’t make it through the House. He claims the political risk to House members is too great to pass the health care bill via the Slaughter Rule, and it has become so toxic that even some hard-core supporters are peeling away. On the other hand, some who voted No initially are voting Yes this time. Jason Altimire of PA, a blue dog, is voting yes with concerns.

I know Altimire. I once knew him very well. This surprises me. But whatever, he’s not the only one.

The focus of Republicans seems to be that if health care gets passed, we’ll have a single-payer system in no time, which is true. But I haven’t seen anyone speaking about a more immediate threat. If Obama manages to grease this to his desk, the fortified Democrats will push hard for other liberal initiatives: cap and trade, immigration, etc. Since they know they’re going to be voted out in November, their confidence in creating a liberal paradise would be untethered by reality. And in the next seven months, we could see our country become, literally, a place none of us recognize.

This bill must be stopped. Republicans are watching, dismayed, as they’re repeatedly cut out of the process. American citizens who view the bill with disdain are being turned away from the phones. So we’re powerless but enraged. My country is changing; it is becoming Cuba. Our elected officials are shredding the Constitution; we have no recourse. Our lives will become beholden to the State if this passes. I want it to stop, but I don’t know how. So I just wait and watch and count the votes, waiting to see if we have another week of normalcy, another month. Even after 9/11, I didn’t feel this scared. We adjusted, as a country. As Americans. We healed. But I don’t know if we can ever heal the rift caused by out of control socialism.