Here come the health police 87

The dear leader Obama knows what is best for you, folks!

The Community Organizer that America has elected as its supreme leader is acquiring totalitarian powers to keep all Americans in the shape, physically and mentally, that he deems correct.

Terry Jeffrey writes in Townhall:

The Senate Health committee’s bill includes a section — “Creating Healthier Communities” — that authorizes paying tax dollars to so-called community-based organizations so they can monitor individual behavior patterns on the neighborhood level — and in schools — in the name of reducing “health disparities.”

They will be government-funded busybodies paid to monitor the personal behavior of a once proud and free people who surrendered an irretrievable measure of their liberty to a government-run health-care system spawned by the redistributionist vision of Barack Obama and his allies in the Congress.

Only community-based organizations that are part of a “national network of community-based organizations” will be eligible for these grants.

“In carrying out subparagraph (A),” says page 386 of the bill, “the eligible entity shall, with respect to residents in the community, measure — (i) decreases in weight; (ii) increases in proper nutrition; (iii) increases in physical activity; (iv) decreases in tobacco use prevalence; (v) other factors using community specific data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey; and (vi) other factors as determined by the Secretary.”

So, what will these government-funded, national networks of community-based organizations monitor in American neighborhoods in the interest of reducing “health disparities”?

Two continents pregnant with Islam 16

David Solway is the author of  a well informed and well reasoned article at Front Page Magazine. We who see ourselves as belonging to the RATIONAL RIGHT  agree with him.

We quote a part of the article. We recommend the whole thing. 

 If the rational Right fails to consolidate its base in the European political landscape, then the European Left will have brought its own eventual demise upon itself in the form of militant, illiberal and xenophobic parties of the extreme Right. It will, in fact, find itself squeezed between the jaws of an ideological vise of its own making, as two competing fascisms, one Islamic and the other indigenous, engage in a battle to the finish. Absenting the rebirth of a hardy and vigorous conservative movement, which does not shrink from instituting stringent immigration policies and enacting rules for the deportation of those who undermine the common peace, the long-term prospect for Europe doesn’t look encouraging. Even a best-case scenario is problematic: it may be too late for a conservative “revolution” to forestall either an Islamic or an ultra-reactionary denouement.

Europeans, says Walter Laqueur in The Last Days of Europe, idling away their future while Islamic political organizations patiently wait, “once the time is ripe, to launch mass violence” and the demographic time bomb is also ticking, are “quietly acquiescing in their own decline.” But, as I have argued, a growing number of Europeans are not, and the means they will adopt to counter the menace, whether successfully or not, will be harsh, coercive and turbulent. For as violence begins to move in from the Muslim enclaves in the banlieu toward the city center, as it were, and the authorities prove themselves increasingly helpless and vacillating before its progress, the reactionary Right will earn more and more legitimacy among the masses. We should make no mistake about this. The Jain-like attitude of the stimming [?]  political classes toward their avowed enemies, resulting in an anemic lack of fortitude that has become chronic, can only energize the factions of the extreme Right. The same applies to the Islamophilic and ever-compliant media, operating in tandem with a complaisant political establishment, whose motto might well be: Have pen, will grovel.

 The problem, however, is not confined to the Continent. It would be sheer folly to assume that we in North America are privileged spectators who are somehow exempt from the savage dialectic that Europe is now experiencing. It is starting to happen here as well. We may have a little more time at our disposal to try and come to terms with the predicament, but we are equally at risk. The gravest peril to America today is not an external enemy but its own developing fault lines. The tectonic plates that undergird the sense of national unity are moving apart. Strictly speaking, our situation is not identical to Europe’s, but close enough to warrant concern. If we are not vigilant and prepared to reconsider our generic assumptions about the culture of indiscriminate inclusion and the politics of spineless appeasement, Europe is our inevitable future.

Speaking at the National Press Club on June 10, 2009, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center warned that a “perfect storm is brewing for the buildups of these hate groups,” of which the Center lists over 900. Many of the members of these cadres enlist in the army “to learn skills they will later take back to their groups while, in other instances, [they] work to recruit frustrated veterans.” Dees isolates the phenomenon of rampant Latino immigration as “the biggest engine generating increase in hate groups,” though Jew-hatred also figures prominently. But there can be no doubt that galloping Muslim immigration and high fertility rates, as well as the burgeoning influence of radical Islamic organizations, will fuel the rage felt and violence perpetrated by these virulent cells and networks.

There is only one way to defeat the extreme Right as it rises to its own depraved version of the defence of the West, and that is to disarm the common enemy and, by so doing, deprive a nascent fascism of its populist fuel. Which is another way of saying that immigration policies currently in place will need to be rethought and rendered more appropriate to the nation’s requirements, as is the case, for example, inSwitzerland, the sole western European country that attaches a high value to citizenship. And unpleasant as this may sound, we will also have to become less tolerant of the intolerant Other which refuses to recognize our values if we are to avoid the pendulum swing toward a vicious intolerance of all perceived outsiders.

We will, in short, have to embrace the conservative tradition of the moderate Right, based on the liberty of the individual, the duties of responsible citizenship, a coherent pluralism that respects the customs of the majority culture rather than a fractious multiculturalism that corrodes them, and the robust defence of the homeland against the threats, both domestic and external, that mobilize against it.

 Given that we can manage to avoid the Islamic future prophesied by Ottoman thinker Said Nursi who, in his famous Damascus Sermon, predicted that “Europe and America are pregnant with Islam. One day they will give birth to an Islamic state,” there is only one conceivable way out of the corner we are backing ourselves into. By electing moderate Right administrations, we may—just may—slip between the Clashing Rocks of the defeatist Left and the triumphalist Right.

To put it succinctly: assuming that Nursi’s prophecy does not come to pass—and that is a very big if—survival dicates that, as a society, we will have to “go conservative” and abandon the doctrinaire Left if we are not to succumb to the doctrinaire Right.

Smart power fails again 15

Secretary of State Cruella DeVille (aka Hillary Clinton) tried to impose Obama’s will on the Indians in the interest of controlling the weather.    

From Power Line:

Now, Clinton has finally visited India, but the government probably wishes she had stayed home. For Clinton used the visit to attempt to pressure India to accept binding limits on carbon emissions. Clinton made this effort despite the fact that (1) India’s carbon emissions are among the lowest in the world on a per capita basis and (2) its economy has been been wracked by the global financial crisis.

India flatly rejected Clinton’s overture, as well it should have.

Abe Greenwald [follow this link, it’s a good read – JB] points out, that this latest instance of U.S. “meddling” illustrates the major shortcomings of Obama’s foreign policy: (1) the administration takes our allies for granted, (2) it confuses its “gift of the gab” with an ability to persuade nations to act against their interests, and (3) it is simply arrogant.

In Greenwald’s words: “If the Obama administration bossed around our enemies with half the energy it puts into bossing around our friends, perhaps the planet wouldn’t look like a rogue nations’ free-for-all right now.”

Posted under Climate, Commentary, Energy, Environmentalism, India, News, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, July 20, 2009

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You’ve had your share, now die 117

The Obama administration believes that if you are too old to play an active part in the community they’re organizing, you should die. To help you do this, you will be denied medical treatment under their ‘health care’ plan, which will necessarily be a rationing plan.

This from  Newsmax.com 

Discrimination against the elderly when it comes to healthcare is not discrimination — at least not to a key member of the Barack Obama administration.

Ezekiel Emanuel is director of the Clinical Bioethics Department at the U.S. National Institutes of Health and an architect of Obama’s healthcare reform plan. He is also the brother of Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s White House chief of staff.

Express Riders, the blog of conservative businessman and philanthropist Foster Friess, reports that Ezekiel Emanuel has written that health services should not be guaranteed to “individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens.”

He also stated, “An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia,” according to Friess’ site.

Friess also points to an equally troubling article co-authored by Emanuel, which appeared in the medical journal The Lancet in January. It read in part: “Unlike allocation [of healthcare] by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination. Every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age.

“Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years.

“Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

Friess asks: “Are these the values we want undergirding our healthcare system?”

Posted under Commentary, Health, News, Socialism, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, July 20, 2009

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The absurdity of the dope 5

From SLICK.com

Q: What’s the difference between Obama’s cabinet and a penitentiary?
A: One is filled with tax evaders, blackmailers and threats to society. The other is for housing prisoners.

If Nancy Pelosi and Obama were on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it started to sink, who would be saved? … America!

Q: What do Miley Cyrus and Barack Obama have in common? 
A: They both stand onstage and attract young people with mindless yammer. 

Obama’s campaign slogan “Yes we can” has become “Yes you will.”

Posted under Commentary, Conservatism, Humor, United States by Jillian Becker on Monday, July 20, 2009

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How to defeat Islam 33

There is no doubt that Europe will be predominantly Muslim well before this century is out.

To see a Muslim gloating over this fact, watch this video:

The gloater points out, correctly, that Islam is spreading in Europe not only because of Muslim immigration and Muslim prolific breeding (while the native European populations are dying out), but also through conversion – or as the Muslims  call it, ‘reversion’,  their theory being that every human being is born a Muslim but many are forced into some other faith, so their turning to Islam is ‘turning back’.

What can be done about this ominous threat of a Muslim Europe, assuming the Europeans want to do something about it, which at present it seems they don’t, preferring appeasement or denial?

Christians who bring themselves to admit the approaching Islamic conquest say that Europe must recover its Christian faith and defeat Islam by converting its followers to Christianity.  A very long shot, that. It’s hard to defeat one irrationality with another.

What the West as a whole can do (and the threat is in the long run to all of the West), is argue continually and insistently against the easily demolished beliefs of Islam. The teachings of Muhammad stand up to no scrutiny. He taught murder, intolerance, hate, enslavement, subjugation of women, and the silliest of superstitions (djinns play a big part in the Koran). If a majority of the Muslim population of Europe could be brought to an enlightened view of their inherited Islamic ideology, be persuaded that Western values are better for all mankind than their Prophet’s self-serving dark-age creed, their dominance would not be fearful as it is now.

Remorseless criticism of the ideology of Islam is urgently needed. Its ideas need to be attacked and defeated.

But the opposite is happening. Western leaders – Gordon Brown as a squashed dhimmi, Barack Hussein Obama as a sincere believer – tell us that Islam is a fine, noble, admirable faith, in complete conformity with Western values.  And the United Nations is  trying to make any criticism of Islam a punishable offense.

But now is the time to  raise every possible objection to the faith of the Muslims. Demolish it by argument. Ridicule it with cartoons and jokes. As a model, see this satirical video: 

Read the Koran and the hadith and go every day to Robert Spencer’s website The Religion of Peace for ammunition against the enemy.  Expose the evil of Islam as much as possible, at every opportunity, to the vast  numbers who look for informed comment on the Internet.

Become active soldiers for Reason, with the potent weapon of words, against the worst of the world’s widespread religions – even more cruel than Communism, even more restrictive than Environmentalism – and the one that now most threatens us all with conquest, oppression, enslavement and death.

Legal rape prepares girls for execution 10

Young women who protest against the Iranian regime risk not only death but sharia-required rape. 

From RantRave:

[An Iranian prison guard] said that, at 18, “I was given the ‘honor’ to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death.” 

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a “wedding” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially [she is] raped by her “husband.” 

“I regret that, even though the marriages were legal,” he said. 

Why the regret, if the marriages were “legal?” 

“Because,” he went on, “I could tell that the girls were more afraid of their ‘wedding’ night than of the execution that awaited them in the morning. And they would always fight back, so we would have to put sleeping pills in their food. By morning the girls would have an empty expression; it seemed like they were ready or wanted to die. 

“I remember hearing them cry and scream after [the rape] was over,” he said. “I will never forget how this one girl clawed at her own face and neck with her finger nails afterwards. She had deep scratches all over her.” 

The individual who spoke with the reporter was himself later arrested. What was his crime? Knowing what was in store for a female detainee, he set her free, rather than subjecting her to a legalised rape and execution. Apparently there is a decency among common folk that seems to elude their spiritual leaders. Even the “professional husband” employed by the Ahmadinejad regime suffered pangs of conscience. 

Posted under Commentary, Iran, Islam, Law, Muslims, News by Jillian Becker on Sunday, July 19, 2009

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Look who’s against wealth and privilege 30

Power Line’s Scott Johnson writes:

An attorney friend of mine who desecribes himself as a lifelong student of the Kennedy family has circulated the following email in honor of one anniversary that will pass almost entirely unremarked in the mainstream media:

I thought I would take a moment to bother you all, ladies included, to remind everyone that this is the 40th anniversary of the infamous Chappaquiddick incident in which an inebriated Senator Ted Kennedy marked a reunion of his brother Bobbie’s “Boiler Room” girls by driving one to her death off the Dyke Road bridge.

This manslaughter might have been forgiven if Kennedy hadn’t decided to evade responsibility for the accident and cover it up by failing to report it, trying to co-opt one of his aides to cop to being the driver, and then leaving them to try and fix it for him for over seven hours.

Worse, Mary Jo Kopechne, whose drowned body was found in a position trying to eke out the last molecules of air within the submerged car, was left to drown by the self-involved Senator, who chose not to seek immediate help.

After proceedings by a Kennedy-friendly judicial system in Massachusetts, Kennedy was found guilty of leaving the scene of an accident and had his driver’s license suspended. But perhaps the crowning event was Kennedy’s appalling nationally-televised apologia, which I remember viewing on TV, and which still reigns as probably the worst and most self-indulgent political pitch ever… 

Ted Kennedy has styled himself an opponent of wealth and privilege, but his career is a tribute to their power when wielded by a man of the left. The lesson of Chappaquiddick thus remains timely forty years on.

Posted under Commentary, Miscellaneous, United States by Jillian Becker on Sunday, July 19, 2009

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Of blue dogs and red herrings 7

The dishonesty of the Democrats in power is breathtaking.

Some examples: 

David Limbaugh writes:

When will Americans open their eyes? Everything about Obama’s plan is a lie. He says he wants to increase competition and choice, improve the quality of health care, reduce costs, and achieve universal coverage. But his plan would reduce competition, with mandatory government controls and mandates that would require uniformity of coverage. It would dramatically increase overall costs by artificially increasing demand. It would destroy the quality of health care, and it would crowd out and force out private insurers, through stacking the deck in favor of the euphemistically labeled “public option.” Congressional Budget Office projections indicate that for all the Draconian coverage mandates, the plan wouldn’t even solve the overarching problem of insurance coverage. Of course, the insurance coverage issue has been enormously distorted by this bunch, by their failure to disclose that millions of the uninsured are not American citizens, millions are young and healthy and choose not to buy insurance though they can afford it, and almost half of the uninsured only remain so for an average of four months…On top of all this… [is] the bureaucratic nightmare that awaits us if we adopt this plan … for what? Reduced health care quality, choice, costs and availability — in exchange for economy-destroying tax increases. Now is the time for all good Blue Dog Democrats to come to the aid of their country.

Nancy (‘Pythoness’) Pelosi claimed that the CIA lied to Congress and her grand ophidian self about its waterboarding of terrorists. It hadn’t. So she tried to find something that the CIA had lied about to justify her claim which was being challenged by Republicans in Congress. The best that Obama’s new man at the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, could come up with to satisfy this slithery demand – after he’d ransacked the filing-cabinet and grilled the staff – was a discussion about whether there ought to be a program that would instruct CIA operatives to hunt down the leaders of al-Qaeda and other violent enemies of the US and kill them.  Scandalously, such a program was never put into effect. It was also, like all programs not put into effect, not reported to Congress. Pelosi wants this to be seen as proof of the CIA’s betrayal of its responsibilities, a deception if not an actual lie, in order to exonerate her, and, as a bonus, to allow her to blame it on Dick Cheney, the subject of her everlasting paranoia. In truth it is a giant Red Herring. 

The government is in great need of Red Herrings. As Jonah Goldberg says:   

 Democrats are clamoring yet again for an investigation into Bush-era policies at precisely the moment their agenda is starting to unravel. The stimulus is looking more like a dud every day, Obama’s health-care and cap-and-trade schemes are acquiring an increasingly bad odor politically, and suddenly Democrats, Panetta included, are looking to offer up a big, distracting spectacle by turning the CIA into a partisan cudgel.

Posted under Commentary, Socialism, United States by Jillian Becker on Friday, July 17, 2009

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You will obey 72

From Investor’s Business Daily:

It didn’t take long to run into an “uh-oh” moment when reading the House’s “health care for all Americans” bill. Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal.

When we first saw the paragraph Tuesday, just after the 1,018-page document was released, we thought we surely must be misreading it. So we sought help from the House Ways and Means Committee.

It turns out we were right: The provision would indeed outlaw individual private coverage. Under the Orwellian header of “Protecting The Choice To Keep Current Coverage,” the “Limitation On New Enrollment” section of the bill clearly states:

“Except as provided in this paragraph, the individual health insurance issuer offering such coverage does not enroll any individual in such coverage if the first effective date of coverage is on or after the first day” of the year the legislation becomes law.

So we can all keep our coverage, just as promised — with, of course, exceptions: Those who currently have private individual coverage won’t be able to change it. Nor will those who leave a company to work for themselves be free to buy individual plans from private carriers.

From the beginning, opponents of the public option plan have warned that if the government gets into the business of offering subsidized health insurance coverage, the private insurance market will wither. Drawn by a public option that will be 30% to 40% cheaper than their current premiums because taxpayers will be funding it, employers will gladly scrap their private plans and go with Washington’s coverage.

The nonpartisan Lewin Group estimated in April that 120 million or more Americans could lose their group coverage at work and end up in such a program. That would leave private carriers with 50 million or fewer customers. This could cause the market to, as Lewin Vice President John Sheils put it, “fizzle out altogether.”

What wasn’t known until now is that the bill itself will kill the market for private individual coverage by not letting any new policies be written after the public option becomes law.

The legislation is also likely to finish off health savings accounts, a goal that Democrats have had for years. They want to crush that alternative because nothing gives individuals more control over their medical care, and the government less, than HSAs.

With HSAs out of the way, a key obstacle to the left’s expansion of the welfare state will be removed.

The public option won’t be an option for many, but rather a mandate for buying government care. A free people should be outraged at this advance of soft tyranny.

Washington does not have the constitutional or moral authority to outlaw private markets in which parties voluntarily participate. It shouldn’t be killing business opportunities, or limiting choices, or legislating major changes in Americans’ lives.

It took just 16 pages of reading to find this naked attempt by the political powers to increase their reach. It’s scary to think how many more breaches of liberty we’ll come across in the final 1,002.

Posted under Commentary, Economics, Health, Socialism, United States by Jillian Becker on Thursday, July 16, 2009

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