This is from the Heritage Foundation’s Morning Bell:

Last week, the Obama Administration attempted to spin its announcement of a one-year delay in Obamacare’s employer mandate as an effort to implement the law “in a careful, thoughtful manner.” Don’t be fooled. Even Democrats have admitted the law has turned into a massive “train wreck,” with delays, glitches, and problems aplenty. Here are a dozen more Obamacare implementation failures.

1. The CLASS Act: ABANDONED, THEN REPEALED

One Democrat famously called this new long-term care entitlement “a Ponzi scheme of the first order, the kind of thing that Bernie Madoff would have been proud of” — and so it proved. In the fall of 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) admitted CLASS could not be implemented in a fiscally sound manner — and Congress eventually repealed the program outright.

2. Exchanges: MISSED DEADLINES

Most states resisted Obamacare’s call to create insurance exchanges, choosing to let Washington create a federally run exchange instead. However, a Government Accountability Office report released last month noted that “critical” activities to create a federal exchange have not been completed, and the missed deadlines “suggest a potential for challenges going forward.”

3. HHS mandate: DELAYED; UNDER LEGAL CHALLENGE

Last year, the Administration announced a partial delay for Obamacare’s anti-conscience mandate. However, many employers have filed legal actions against the mandate, which forces them to fund products they find morally objectionable or pay massive fines.

4. Small business plan choice: DELAYED

The Administration announced in April that workers will not be able to choose plans from different health insurers in the small business exchanges next year—a delay that liberal blogger Joe Klein called “a really bad sign” of “Obamacare incompetence.”

5. Child-only plans: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

A drafting error in Obamacare has actually led to less access to care for children with pre-existing conditions. A 2011 report found that in 17 states, insurers are no longer selling child-only health insurance plans, because they fear that individuals will apply for coverage only after being diagnosed with a costly illness.

6. Basic health plan: DELAYED

This government-run plan for states, created as part of Obamacare, has also been delayed, prompting one Democrat to criticize the Administration for failing to “live up” to the law and implement it as written.

7. High-risk pools: UNDERPERFORMING; FUNDING LOW

This program for individuals with pre-existing conditions faced higher costs and lower enrollment than advertised. Though it was originally projected to cover up to 700,000individuals, only about 110,000 have enrolled — yet the Administration had to halt new enrollment and take other radical measures to prevent the $5 billion program from running out of money.

8. Early retiree reinsurance: BROKE

The $5 billion in funding for this program was intended to last until 2014 — but the program’s money ran out in 2011, two years ahead of schedule.

9. Waivers: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

After the law passed, HHS discovered that some of its new mandates would raise costs so much that employers would drop coverage rather than face skyrocketing premiums. Instead, the Administration announced a series of temporary waivers — and more than half the recipients of those waivers were members of union health insurance plans.

10. Co-ops: DEFUNDED

Congress blocked additional funding to this Obamacare program in January, and with good reason: In one case, a new health insurance co-op was called “fatally flawed” by Vermont’s state insurance commissioner.

11. “Employee free choice”: REPEALED

This provision, which would have allowed certain workers to use contributions from their employers to buy exchange health plans, was repealed in April 2011, as businesses considered it too complex and unworkable.

12. Medicaid expansion: REJECTED BY MANY STATES

Last year, the Supreme Court made Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion optional for states,ruling that Obamacare as written engaged in “economic dragooning” that puts “a gun to the head of states.” Many states are resisting Obamacare’s call to expand Medicaid, knowing that expansion will saddle them with additional, unsustainable costs.

As these examples demonstrate, it’s not just the employer mandate that’s flawed — it’s the entire law. Recognizing these myriad, massive failures, Congress should hold the line and refuse to spend a single dime on Obamacare implementation.

We who counted ourselves luckier than the general run of humankind because we live in the United States of America are no longer standing on firm ground but on shifting sands.

What accustomed ways, what assumptions on which we’ve always relied, what expectations we’ve long held, what values we’ve taken for granted, are not being interrogated anew?

Customs, values, standards, principles – the elements that cement civilization – are being let go, one after another, at ever increasing pace as we are moved away from liberty into serfdom.

Have you relied on custom? On long accepted moral norms? On the probity of public servants? On high standards of medical practice? On the intellectual openness of universities? On the integrity of scientists? On the solidity of old established institutions? On common values of decency, civility, and honesty?

You, we, can do so no longer. The wrecking crew is out. The fundamental transformation of America is underway.

Immense progress in science and technology will not help us because all invention will come under the ever-expanding control of the government and its ideological army of wreckers.

Over what part of our lives, even the most intimate, is government not taking control?

Our freedom of speech has been qualified by political correctness. Certain words are taboo, and it is widely accepted that they ought to be, on the grounds that some might take offense if they hear them.

In almost everything we commonly do, in almost every sphere of normal activity, we find ourselves in a state of uncertainty. So multitudinous are the regulations continually heaped upon us by government that we could be unknowingly breaking the law every hour of every day, in our businesses, our professions, our leisure, our shopping, our travel, or while simply breathing inside our own homes. The hand of government is on our thermostats. Its scolding tongue lashes us if we use more water than it deems necessary to our survival. It tells us what we ought to eat and drink; what we must do with our garbage; what we may not carry on a plane; what we may not move from one state to another. If we unintentionally break an obscure business regulation, we can be raided by an armed SWAT team and heavily fined. If we gather people together at regular intervals in our home to share a common interest we can be sentenced to a term in prison. (The example our link leads to concerns a bible-studying group. We would hate to attend it ourselves, but we defend the freedom of everybody.)

Do not expect the money you earn, save, or invest to keep its value. Our currency is being continually debased. We cannot even be sure that our cash will be safe in a bank. It’s all too possible that government will summarily confiscate it. What happened recently to private deposits in Cyprus banks could happen here – a blatant act of government theft:

According to in-house memos now circulating, the DHS has issued orders to banks across America which announce to them that “under the Patriot Act” the DHS has the absolute right to seize, without any warrant whatsoever, any and all customer bank accounts, to make “periodic and unannounced” visits to any bank to open and inspect the contents of “selected safe deposit boxes”.

We can  no longer rely on our title deeds to protect our property tenure. On the grounds of “eminent domain” any real estate, including your own home, can be snatched away by government and handed over to someone else who wants to change its use for his own benefit. In the case of land, the government can declare it subject to environmental laws that make it impossible for its owners to use it as they choose.

Government agencies which many or even most considered irreproachably honorable (if also terrifyingly powerful) – such as and chiefly the Internal Revenue Service  – have turned out to be rotten with corruption.

We are surveyed by government all the time. We have come to expect that we cannot make a phone-call 0r send an email that government doesn’t know we made or sent. And government can look at what we said in them at any time it chooses. Under “Obamacare” we cannot have an ingrowing toenail, a terminal disease, a deformity, an embarrassing whatever that untold numbers of persons will not be informed about.

In the matter of our health and “Obamacare”, we do not know how we will pay for medical consultations and treatment in future; what insurance we may have, at what price, or what it will cover.

The political principles on which the Republic was founded are no longer the bedrock of the American nation.

The values our civilization was built on – which are not in any religion but in pre-Christian classical antiquity and the Enlightenment – are no longer esteemed. Worse, they are despised, mocked, and discarded.

Mark Steyn, recognizing the rot, writes of a recent momentous day in the decay of America – June 26, 2013:

First thing in the morning, Gregory Roseman, Deputy Director of Acquisitions (whatever that means), became the second IRS official to take the Fifth Amendment, after he was questioned about awarding the largest contract in IRS history, totaling some half a billion dollars, to his close friend Braulio Castillo, who qualified under a federal “set aside” program favoring disadvantaged groups — in this case, disabled veterans. For the purposes of federal contracting, Mr. Castillo is a “disabled veteran” because he twisted his ankle during a football game at the U.S. Military Academy prep school 27 years ago. How he overcame this crippling disability to win a half-billion-dollar IRS contract is the heartwarming stuff of an inspiring Lifetime TV movie. …

The so-called comprehensive immigration reform is so comprehensive it includes special deals for Nevada casinos and the recategorization of the Alaskan fish-processing industry as a “cultural exchange” program, because the more leaping salmon we have the harder it is for Mexicans to get across the Bering Strait. While we’re bringing millions of Undocumented-Americans “out of the shadows,” why don’t we try bringing Washington’s decadent and diseased law-making out of the shadows?

Just when you thought the day couldn’t get any more momentous, the Supreme Court weighed in on same-sex marriage. When less advanced societies wish to introduce gay marriage, the people’s elected representatives assemble in parliament and pass a law. That’s how they did it in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, etc. But one shudders to contemplate what would result were the legislative class to attempt “comprehensive marriage reform,” complete with tax breaks for Maine lobstermen’s au pairs and the hiring of 20,000 new IRS agents to verify business expenses for page boys from disparate-impact groups. So instead it fell to five out of nine judges, which means it fell to Anthony Kennedy, because he’s the guy who swings both ways. Thus, Supreme Intergalactic Emperor Anthony gets to decide the issue for 300 million people.

As Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben so famously says in every remake, with great power comes great responsibility. Having assumed the power to redefine a societal institution that predates the United States by thousands of years, Emperor Tony the All-Wise had the responsibility at least to work up the semblance of a legal argument. Instead, he struck down the Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that those responsible for it were motivated by an “improper animus” against a “politically unpopular group” they wished to “disparage,” “demean,” and “humiliate” as “unworthy.”

What stump-toothed knuckle-dragging inbred swamp-dwellers from which hellish Bible Belt redoubt would do such a thing? Well, fortunately, we have their names on the record: The DOMA legislators who were driven by their need to “harm” gay people include notorious homophobe Democrats Chuck Schumer, Pat Leahy, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, and the virulent anti-gay hater who signed it into law, Bill Clinton. …

In his dissent, Justice Scalia wrote that “to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions.” Indeed. With this judgment, America’s constitutional court demeans and humiliates only its own. …

As I say, just another day in the life of the republic: a corrupt bureaucracy dispensing federal gravy to favored clients; a pseudo-legislature passing bills unread by the people’s representatives and uncomprehended by the men who claim to have written them; and a co-regency of jurists torturing an 18th-century document in order to justify what other countries are at least honest enough to recognize as an unprecedented novelty. Whether or not, per Scalia, we should “condemn” the United States Constitution, it might be time to put the poor wee thing out of its misery.

Hayek warned us that an over-mighty state would put us on “the road to serfdom”. Well, we’ve arrived. We’ve passed the sign at the side of the road saying “Welcome to Serfdom” and we are now in Serfdom itself. It is built on a quagmire of erroneous theory. Serfs may console themselves with an illusion of security, but serfs are not secure; they exist at the whim of their masters.

By the time Islam takes over and imposes sharia law over the whole of North America, we’ll hardly notice any difference.

*

Afterword: One of our readers and commenters, Roger, laments the drop in standards of personal presentation among his professional colleagues with this description. (Please note we make no judgments of a person by his taste or appearance. We quote this comment because it conveys how some American citizens feel they have strayed into an alien world.)

Yes, our society is changing. I attended a construction “kick-off” meeting yesterday, at which all of the construction “professionals” were present as well as the major trades. This project is for the renovation of a very high end residence, if I mentioned the Client’s name many of you would know the person. The Architect wore an ill fitting suit that looked like it had been piled into a corner of the utility room for weeks, bare feet and flip-flops (on a construction site!) The project manager wore a loose undershirt of the type colloquially known I believe, as a “wife beater”. His entire upper body was covered in multicolored tattoos depicting what seemed to be scenes from robot wars featuring children’s Saturday morning cartoon characters. The representative of one of the mechanical trades wore a patched and worn out dungaree overall and sported a bone through his nose. [They all] wore various metal items in different parts of their faces; earrings, nose rings, lip rings, etc. None seemed in the least bit surprised at the attire of the others. I admit my concentration suffered as I wondered when it was exactly that I had been abducted and brought to this planet, and when the hell could I go home.

The Democrats in Congress, who finagled the passing of Obama’s socialist health care legislation – the Affordable Care Act, laughably so called – don’t want the horrid thing to affect themselves adversely. So they are moving to exempt themselves from certain of its provisions.

And the Republicans – who at least opposed its ever becoming law – also fear it applying to them, so they’re helping the Democrats achieve the exemption for all Representatives and Senators and their aides.

They all fear being hit by the exorbitant costs of Obamacare.

This is from Politico:

Congressional leaders in both parties are engaged in high-level, confidential talks about exempting lawmakers and Capitol Hill aides from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join as part of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, sources in both parties said.

The talks — which involve Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), the Obama administration and other top lawmakers — are extraordinarily sensitive, with both sides acutely aware of the potential for political fallout from giving carve-outs from the hugely controversial law to 535 lawmakers and thousands of their aides. Discussions have stretched out for months, sources said.

A source close to the talks says: “Everyone has to hold hands on this and jump, or nothing is going to get done.”

Yet if Capitol Hill leaders move forward with the plan, they risk being dubbed hypocrites by their political rivals and the American public. By removing themselves from a key Obamacare component, lawmakers and aides would be held to a different standard than the people who put them in office.

The poor dears shouldn’t fear being called hypocritical. Everyone’s always known they’re that and worse.

There is concern in some quarters that the provision requiring lawmakers and staffers to join the exchanges, if it isn’t revised, could lead to a “brain drain” on Capitol Hill, as several sources close to the talks put it.

The problem stems from whether members and aides set to enter the exchanges would have their health insurance premiums subsidized by their employer — in this case, the federal government. If not, aides and lawmakers in both parties fear that staffers — especially low-paid junior aides — could be hit with thousands of dollars in new health care costs, prompting them to seek jobs elsewhere. Older, more senior staffers could also retire or jump to the private sector rather than face a big financial penalty. …

As Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) pointed out, if the federal government doesn’t pick up “the 75 percent that they have been, then put yourself in the position of a lot of entry-level staff people who make $25,000 a year, and all of a sudden, they have a $7,000 a year health care tab? That would be devastating.”

Congressmen’s concern for their aides is sincere. They need those people. 

And even more sincere is their concern for how the Act is about to hit themselves:

Plus, lawmakers — especially those with long careers in public service and smaller bank accounts — are also concerned about the hit to their own wallets.

But how can they answer those accusations of hypocrisy?

Well, how’s this for some smart-ass double-talk by spokesmen for the lawmakers? –

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) is worried about the provision. … “Mr. Hoyer is looking at this policy, like all other policies in the Affordable Care Act, to ensure they’re being implemented in a way that’s workable for everyone, including members and staff,” said Katie Grant, Hoyer’s communications director.

Sleight-of-tongue! Brilliant!

And here’s a beautiful ‘s explanation of why the Republican Speaker of the House will support the shocked Democrats in trying to protect themselves from the result of their own folly:

When asked about the high-level bipartisan talks, Michael Steel, a Boehner spokesman, said: “The speaker’s objective is to spare the entire country from the ravages of the president’s health care law. He is approached daily by American citizens, including members of Congress and staff, who want to be freed from its mandates. If the speaker has the opportunity to save anyone from Obamacare, he will.”

Talk about smart! Such brains must not be drained!

Surely a little Schadenfreude on the public’s part is permissible now that the Democrats are rueing what they gloated over achieving by sly and shady means:

The developing narrative is potentially brutal for congressional Democrats and the White House. … The health care law, controversial since it was passed in 2010, has been a target of the right and, increasingly, the left.

Hoist  with their own petard. Harry Reid, who pushed and screwed the legislation through, now worried for himself. Nancy Pelosi concerned for her aides, now that she’s found out what’s in the Act as she so looked forward to doing when she enthusiastically voted for it without having read it … 

Okay, some of us at TAC tried covering our mouths to muffle our laughter, but finally had to leave the dignified chamber where we work in considerate silence to guffaw freely outside …

(Hat-tip Frank)

… death panels are here:

Fascism has always been ill-defined. It has come to mean little more than a style of behavior that the user of the word does not like.

So we must say what we mean by it, and that is: Government behaving as the master instead of the servant of the people. For decades now fascist authoritarianism has been manifested almost exclusively by the Left wherever it is in power. Socialism is intrinsically authoritarian. The Left is intrinsically fascist.

Fascist government can be less or more oppressive, less or more brutally sadistic.

In Britain it is becoming more oppressive and brutally sadistic, as the following stories demonstrate.

This is from PJ Media by Mike McNally:

Officials at a left-wing British council have removed three children from their foster parents because of the parents’ political affiliation and unsubstantiated allegations of racism against them.

Social workers from Rotherham council in Yorkshire, which is controlled by the Labour party, removed the three Eastern European children from the foster parents — and from what was by all accounts a stable and loving home — after learning that the couple were members of the right-of-center UK Independence Party, or UKIP. Among other policies, UKIP wants to tighten Britain’s notoriously lax immigration laws.

Council officials said the party was “racist,” and Joyce Thacker, the council’s director of children and young people’s services, said she had to consider the “cultural and ethnic needs” of the children: a baby girl, and an older girl and boy. But the council’s argument is a series of evasions based on a blatant lie. This is a clear case of left-wing officials abusing their power to persecute individuals for holding politically incorrect beliefs.  …

Just as Democrats spent the last few years playing the race card to silence critics of President Obama, when it comes to immigration and Britain’s relationship with Europe, British leftists have for years used accusations of racism to smear their opponents and to discredit their arguments.

UKIP is not racist. … The party campaigns not for an end to immigration, but for an overhaul of the system to end the wave of largely uncontrolled mass immigration that’s transformed large areas of Britain in recent years. It would also like to see Britain leave the European Union, which in recent years has moved from a trading bloc to an increasingly centralized and unaccountable political entity.

Both positions are supported by majorities of the British people. And both are fiercely opposed by the progressive, statist, bureaucratic liberal-left elite which controls swaths of British public life, and which invariably dominates the social services departments of councils such as Rotherham.

The couple appear to have unimpeachable credentials as foster parents. The husband works with disabled people and was a Royal Navy reservist for more than 30 years. His wife is a qualified nursery nurse. They’ve successfully fostered around a dozen children over a period of several years.

It’s been reported that the boy has been separated from his sisters and placed with a different family. …

Amid the political fallout from the Rotherham case, it’s important not to lose sight of who the real victims are: three vulnerable children, desperately in need of love and stability, who have been wrenched from parents who were providing both. …

While the council’s decision to remove the children is a chilling assault on freedom of thought and political belief, it’s also dreadful policy in practical terms. Britain is facing an adoption crisis. In 2010, just over 3,000 children were adopted, out of more than 65,000 in the care system, with the rest shunted between foster parents or languishing in children’s homes. The head of a leading children’s charity has warned that under the draconian rules imposed by social services departments, most parents wouldn’t be allowed to adopt their own children. …

You get the distinct impression that fanatics like Joyce Thacker and her colleagues would rather half the children in Britain were raised by the benevolent and right-thinking state than by any parent — however responsible and loving — who dares to deviate from the party line.

It’s difficult to imagine a more cruel and perverse manifestation of “progressive” left-wing thinking.

Only with the  last statement we disagree.  We don’t have to imagine worse. We are about to describe worse in the reality of socialist Britain.

This is what happens when a nation puts the responsibility for its health care – which is to say for each individual’s life and death –  in the hands of the state.

The story of National Health practice in one district is an example of practice throughout the United Kingdom. It comes from the Mail Online:

Sick children are being discharged from NHS hospitals to die at home or in hospices on controversial ‘death pathways’.

Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies.

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’. …

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

The use of end of life care methods on disabled newborn babies was revealed in the doctors’ bible, the British Medical Journal.

Earlier this month, an un-named doctor wrote of the agony of watching the protracted deaths of babies. The doctor described one case of a baby born with ‘a lengthy list of unexpected congenital anomalies’, whose parents agreed to put it on the pathway.

The doctor wrote: ‘They wish for their child to die quickly once the feeding and fluids are stopped. They wish for pneumonia. They wish for no suffering. They wish for no visible changes to their precious baby.

‘Their wishes, however, are not consistent with my experience. Survival is often much longer than most physicians think; reflecting on my previous patients, the median time from withdrawal of hydration to death was ten days.

‘Parents and care teams are unprepared for the sometimes severe changes that they will witness in the child’s physical appearance as severe dehydration ensues. 

‘I know, as they cannot, the unique horror of witnessing a child become smaller and shrunken, as the only route out of a life that has become excruciating to the patient or to the parents who love their baby.’ …

In a response to the article, Dr Laura de Rooy, a consultant neonatologist at St George’s Hospital NHS Trust in London writing on the BMJ website, said: ‘It is a huge supposition to think they do not feel hunger or thirst.’ …

Amazing that anyone should suppose such a thing.

Bernadette Lloyd, a hospice paediatric nurse, has written to the Cabinet Office and the Department of Health to criticise the use of death pathways for children.

“Death pathways” sound peaceful and painless; a conscience-soothing euphemistic phrase for forcing children to die of thirst and starvation.

‘‘I have seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die’

She said: ‘The parents feel coerced, at a very traumatic time, into agreeing that this is correct for their child whom they are told by doctors has only has a few days to live. It is very difficult to predict death. I have seen a “reasonable” number of children recover after being taken off the pathway.

‘I have also seen children die in terrible thirst because fluids are withdrawn from them until they die.

‘I witnessed a 14 year-old boy with cancer die with his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when doctors refused to give him liquids by tube. His death was agonising for him, and for us nurses to watch. … ’

The power of life and death in the hands of bureaucrats. The sadistic use of that power. There you have a glimpse of America’s future under Obamacare.

Although the Koran is believed by Muslims to contain all the knowledge a man could ever need, the Obama administration is spending ample tax-dollars coaching Muslims in science and technology.

As far as we can discover, it is the only religious group at home or abroad to be given this expensive attention.

But then, Islam has earned its reward from Americans, hasn’t it?

Here’s the information quoted in full from a US Government Fact Sheet:

Science and Technology Engagement With the Muslim World

Progress in Realizing the President’s Vision of Enhanced Science and Technology (S&T)
Partnership in the Muslim World

1. Science Envoys: Three of America’s most prominent scientists traveled and engaged with counterparts in Morocco, Egypt, Indonesia, and other countries.

2. OPIC Fund: The OPIC Global Technology and Innovation Fund attracted almost $2 billion in private investment to support technological development projects to be implemented in Muslim communities around the world.

3. Center of Excellence on Water: USAID and State Department began the creation of a Middle East Water Center after extensive consultations across the region.

The program pursues the shibboleths of the left:

4. Center of Excellence on Climate Change: USAID and the State Department began the creation of an Asia Regional Climate Change Center after extensive consultations across the region, with an anticipated initial focus on water-scarcity issues.

Here’s one specially worth noting:

5. Gulf Nuclear Energy Infrastructure Institute: This newly established institute — a collaborative effort involving the State Department, Department of Energy (DOE), Khalifa University of Science, Technology and Research, Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation, UAE Federal Authority for Nuclear Regulation, Sandia National Laboratory, and Texas A&M University’s Nuclear Security Science & Policy Institute — will work with Gulf States through regional workshops and follow-up bilateral training to assist those states that decide to pursue nuclear energy with the tools to do so in a safe, secure, and safeguarded manner.

It all sounds wonderfully friendly and cozy, this communion with the religion that is dedicated to our destruction:

6. Entrepreneurship Summit: This summit brought together successful business and social entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, development bankers, and other business experts to discuss ideas and share experiences with a view toward creating support networks that will help promote development in Muslim communities.

7. Expanded Science Corps: Secretary of State Clinton committed to expanding the number of Environment, Science, Technology, and Health (ESTH) officers at embassies, with new positions already being filled in the Middle Easter and North Africa (MENA).

But she grudges every penny spent on protection for our diplomats in the Islamic Middle East. (See all our recent posts on the murder of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans in Libya.)

8. Regional R&D Collaboration: The State Department launched six new Middle East Regional Cooperation projects to fund applied research and S&T cooperation involving institutions in Jordan, West Bank/Gaza, Tunisia, and Israel on topics in agriculture, environmental protection and global and regional health.

Cooperation projects? Jordan, “West Bank/Gaza”, Tunisia with Israel?  Well, good luck with that.

9. Bilateral R&D Collaboration: The United States and Indonesia concluded a new S&T Agreement and the United States provided a doubling of financial support for S&T agreements with Egypt and Pakistan.

10. Frontiers of Science Program: The U.S. National Academy of Sciences expanded this program to support linkages between young scientists in the United States and Southeast Asia, with planned expansion to additional regions as well.

11. MENA POWER 2010: The U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) sponsored a Middle East and North Africa technology and projects forum to match MENA policymakers and project stakeholders in the electric power sector with U.S. providers of equipment and service solutions.

For such vital “investment”, the heavily-indebted United States borrows or prints money.

Lots more moola is to be lavished on solar panels (and windmills?)  in Islamic states – “green energy” being another bee in Obama’s bonnet:

12. Energy:

• Memorandum of Understanding for Clean Energy Cooperation: DOE partnered with UAE’s multi-billion-dollar Masdar City clean energy initiative, with delegates and DOE officials outlining an initial work plan.
• Memorandum of Understanding for Cooperation: Secretary Chu signed this MOU during his visit to the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, in Riyadh, to facilitate partnerships with DOE national laboratories, U.S. universities and scientific institutions.
• Feasibility Studies: USTDA supported extensive feasibility studies throughout the region to determine potential capabilities for geothermal energy, solar energy, and smart grid technology.

13. Information Communication Technology:

• Iraq Science and Technology Virtual Science Library project was officially transferred to Iraqi government control and administration. 7500 users are now registered, 95% of the university population is participating, 1,000,000 articles have been downloaded to date, and publications by Iraqi authors are increasing apace and expected to reach about 300 this year.
• NSF supported a host of electronic networking programs, including implementation of a multi-million-dollar broad-band internet linkage to Egypt and Pakistan, and provided support to involve Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, France, and nearly all countries in North Africa in a network for research on new materials for renewable energy. Maghreb Digital Library. The State Department supported the establishment of a Digital Library for the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania) to support development in S&T, increase access to digitized scientific data and research, and encourage partnership and networking.

14. Health:

• Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) jointly hosted a Health Dialogue with Ministers of Health from the OIC member states in Geneva on the margins of the World Health Assembly. Concrete steps were outlined for enhanced collaboration.
• The National Institutes of Health conducted training in tobacco control, injury and trauma, bioethics [?] and genetics. This included meetings among twelve regional nations across MENA and SE Asia, leading to the creation of new programs in medical schools in the participating nations.

15. Water: The U.S. Geological Survey supported extensive training in collection and analysis of water samples, workshops on water contamination, training on the establishment of digital water resources data systems, and consultation on the establishment of water quality laboratories across the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia.

16. Space: NASA signed agreements with several nations for future collaboration on space programs. NASA now has agreements with 30 of the world’s more than 50 Muslim-majority nations.

17. Pollution: The Environmental Protection Agency has teamed up with Indonesia and Jordan to create programs aimed at decreasing air pollution in both nations. Breathe Easy Jakarta and Jordan’s Environmental Rangers are just two of the programs implemented to increase public participation and enforcement and accountability in the fight against pollution.

And lots more is in the pipeline. Unless, that is, Mitt Romney becomes president and cancels this massive transfer of US borrowed wealth to Islamic states.

Top 10 Activities in the Year Ahead

1. Global Engagement Fund: S&T collaboration is an important part of the new $100M Global Engagement Fund submitted to Congress for FY2011.

2. US-Egypt Year of Science 2011: This year-long enterprise will celebrate US Egypt engagement in science, promote interest among Egyptian youth in science-related careers and research, and promote digital engagement among the Egyptian science community with US peers and institutions.

3. New Science Envoys: The Administration will name three new envoys, with plans to travel to Central Asia, East and West Africa, and Southeast Asia.

4. Science, Technology, and Innovation Conference 2011: This conference will include representatives from Muslim communities around the world in cooperation with Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) and other key stakeholders.

5. White House/OSTP Digital Knowledge Networking Event: This major international event will bring together ICT leaders from public and private foundations involved in electronic knowledge sharing, technology, education, and development, along with other experts, to move from idea to realization of a significant increase in on-line knowledge-sharing in science and technology.

6. Middle East Energy Efficiency Center: DOE, State, and USAID will launch an effort in the Middle East to promote and enhance regional cooperation in science and technology, focusing on six energy-efficiency initiatives.

7. Challenges & Awards: EPA/USAID will launch a challenge to drive innovation for water technologies serving international and domestic constituencies.

8. Forest Conservation: The Department of Interior will work with several nations to preserve nature reserves and protect endangered species.

9. Eye on the Earth – Abu Dhabi 2010: EPA will co-sponsor this event to address the establishment of a global environmental information network.

10. Joint Ocean Exploration: NOAA’s research vessel Okeanos Explorer and the Indonesian research vessel Baruna Jaya will make a pioneering joint mission to the “Coral Triangle” in the Indo-Pacific region in the summer of 2011.

Note that in all this there is no mention of any project to promote the education of women in the Muslim world. We do not advocate the spending of US tax dollars on women’s education in Afghanistan (for instance), only suggesting that if the Obama administration is concerned with improving knowledge in Islam, they might raise the subject in some of their get-togethers with their Muslim buddies.

It seems at the moment that a majority of Americans want the Democrats with their socialist agenda and pro-Islam sentiment to rule them, and therefore to change everything that the United States has stood for from the beginning.

If Obama is re-elected, and has his way – which he will if both houses of Congress are given Democratic majorities – what will happen?

Let’s look at the worst plausible scenario.

Most Americans will be poorer. The national debt, vast as it is, will grow even bigger. Unemployment will increase. The value of the dollar will fall as inflation rises. More tens of thousands will be on food stamps (45.8 million are now).

Much private housing will be expropriated. Large numbers of people will be herded into government-supplied accommodation. How warm you may keep your room in winter and how cool in summer will be decided by local government. Car ownership will be discouraged by high gas prices, lack of parking facilities, and pressure on town-dwellers to use bicycles and commuters to use public transport. The countryside will be returned to wilderness. Roads will be destroyed. (All this in line with Agenda 21. Put “Agenda 21” in our search slot for corroboration.)

“Free Speech” will be severely restricted and so cease to be free. This is happening already with the Obama administration trying to stop criticism of Islam.

Your guns will be confiscated.

Sharia law will be applied in courts across the land and take precedence over the Constitution.

What you may eat in restaurants, schools and hospitals, and what food stores may sell, will be decided by Michelle Obama (assisted by New York’s Mayor Bloomberg). (See our post The orderers, June 5, 2012.)

Obamacare will prevail. The treatment you may have or be refused when you are ill will be decided by bureaucrats. If you are old and ill your survival will be arbitrated by a death-panel, whatever euphemism of a name it goes under. You have only to look at the British National Health Service to see the horrid future of health care in America. (Put “death-panels” and “NHS” into our search slot to find the grisly details.)

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be turned into the equivalent of the KGB. It is almost there now.

There will be no more free elections.

China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Iran will all become more powerful as America is deliberately weakened militarily. What will that mean? Let your imaginations soar.

World government by that collection of corrupt and savage despotisms, the United Nations, will be established with the enthusiastic help of the American government.

Innovation will cease as freedom goes. The great experiment in freedom that was America, its prosperity and its power, will be over. There will be no turning back.

And all that is just first-thought – but bitterly informed – prediction.

Readers’ gloomy predictions are invited. And expressions of despair.

*

The Republican Party is allowing this to happen. It seems to have lost the plot. The last election was the turning point when it insanely put up John McCain as it’s presidential candidate. With such a feeble alternative to a candidate who offered the electorate a chance to feel good by voting for him chiefly because he was black (a thoroughly racist reason), the ideology of collectivism triumphed. Now that so many people have been reduced to dependence on the state is it likely they will vote away their free ride through life?

Of course, socialism does not work. The system will collapse as it always has because it must. And the country will come to ruin, like Greece. But apparently more than half the voters of America are unaware of this terrifying fact, or else they don’t give a damn.

Why aren’t the Republicans telling the voters in the strongest terms that this is what will happen?

It’s a real question.  We’d like to know why.

The Constitution was carefully composed to protect Americans from tyranny; to keep them free. The Health Care law which has been upheld by the Supreme Court takes away their freedom. In the name of being true to it, the Court has nullified the Constitution. Its essential purpose has been discarded.

Neal Boortz, as much in anger as in sorrow it would seem, wants to be sure that Americans understand that this is what has happened.

He writes:

Do Americans – do you — really understand the gravity of what happened in the Supreme Court … ? Do you have any idea at all how the power of the Imperial Federal Government of the United States has been exponentially increased?

Answer? No, you probably don’t. You really can’t be faulted for that, I guess. After all, our wonderful government school system was designed to educate you, but only to the point that you don’t become a threat to your political rulers. The American people are a product of those schools, and the American people are, by and large, acting in the manner proscribed by those who “educated” them. …

I think a lot of people are missing something here; missing something very important. The Court’s ruling on ObamaCare grants the Congress of the United States the power to command virtually any action – any action that would not in and of itself constitute a crime – of any individual in this country, and to demand compliance with that command or be penalized. The federal government can now regulate virtually any human activity in which you wish to engage, and to regulate whether or not you will be allowed to refuse to participate in that activity, so long as a penalty is attached to your noncompliance. …

This is a sad day indeed for our Constitution.

A sad day for the people of the United States.

Sit back now and try to imagine anything the federal government cannot require of you – just so long as there is a penalty if you say “no.”

Is there no hope then? Is liberty, in the land of the last best hope of mankind, irrecoverably lost?

Perhaps not irrecoverably. But a re-election of Obama in November would signify that a majority of Americans no longer want to be free.