The Defects of Obamacare

" The Defects of Obamacare! "

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$20.3 million in "migration assistance"
Believe It or Not
Repeal Is Not Enough
PICTURES OF TEA PARTY

" The Defects of Obamacare April 9, 2010 - 11:26 ET

There are four constitutional defects in the healthcare law recently signed by President Obama. "

The statute has many odd parts to it that are also subject to challenge, like the federal takeover of student loans, the creation of a healthcare army, which includes members of the states’ National Guard, and the hiring of 16,000 new IRS agents. But the main constitutional violations address what the Congress has ordered the States to do and what it has ordered individuals to do. These unconstitutional and troubling provisions are:

- Order the States to increase state taxes and spend the monies collected on healthcare.

- Order individuals to acquire health insurance that provides coverage acceptable to the federal government.

- Transfer regulation of healthcare from the States to the federal government.

- Put a federal bureaucrat between patients and physicians.

Can the federal government tell the States how to spend state generated tax dollars? In a word, NO.
Recall that the States formed the federal government, and not the other way round. When they did so, they gave away only seventeen specific powers, all written down in the Constitution, and expressly retained for themselves that which they did not give away. At the time the States formed the federal government, they were independent nation-states, and the powers that they gave to the new federal government were aspects of nationhood. Examples of the powers include raise an army and navy to defend the country, operate a court system, provide for standard weights and measures, coin money, and run a post office. These are all aspects of nationhood with which the States would no longer be concerned. But the States retained for themselves the power to legislate for the health, safety, welfare, and morality of the people in the States. The federal government simply has no authority under the Constitution to regulate in these areas or to tell the States how they should do so.

The Democrats have argued that the power the Constitution gives to Congress to regulate interstate commerce permits it to regulate healthcare. But I ask you; when you go to your doctor, is that for commercial purposes, or is it to enhance your health? The power to regulate interstate commerce was given to the Congress so it would keep commerce between the States regular, by eliminating state tariffs. It was not given to regulate purely local professional services like visiting a doctor. Can the Congress regulate a Tupperware Party? Of course not.

Since the federal government cannot tell the States how to tax and regulate in the areas reserved to the States and since the regulation of healthcare has been done by the States for the past 200 years, it follows that the Congress cannot order persons to purchase health insurance. The Congress cannot order us to wear shoes or buy guns, even though both are beneficial to us, so how can it order us to buy health insurance? As well, the Supreme Court has held that the most private—and thus most insulated from government intrusion—conversations we have are those between a patient and a physician. Yet, the statute just signed by the President violates that right to privacy by requiring physicians to share private medical information with federal bureaucrats and by permitting those bureaucrats to direct physicians how to treat you. The government cannot run the Post Office or Amtrak and has bankrupted Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Can we really expect it to manage healthcare?

The Congress that enacted this monstrosity recognizes no limits on its own powers. It does not take seriously its oath to uphold the Constitution and it acts like a general legislature that can right any wrong, regulate any activity and tax any event. That is 180 degrees contrary to the values of inalienable rights and limited government that the Framers gave us.

THE STUPIDEST STATEMENT EVER BY A PRESIDENT-
HERE IS HIS RESPONSE WHEN HE BACKED OFF FROM HIS DECISION TO REQUIRE THE MILITARY PAY FOR THEIR WAR INJURIES.

Bad press, including major mockery of the plan by comedian Jon Stewart, led to President Obama abandoning his proposal to require veterans carry private health insurance to cover the estimated $540 million annual cost to the federal government of treatment for injuries to military personnel received during their tours on active duty. The President admitted that he was puzzled by the magnitude of the opposition to his proposal.

"Look, it's an all volunteer force," Obama complained. "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice? It doesn't compute.." "I thought these were people who were proud to sacrifice for their country, "Obama continued "I wasn't asking for blood, just money. With the country facing the worst financial crisis in its history, I'd have thought that the patriotic thing to do would be to try to help reduce the nation's deficit.. I guess I underestimated the selfishness of some of my fellow Americans."

Please pass this on to everyone including every vet and their families whom you know. How in the world did a person with this mindset become our leader?

REMEMBER THIS STATEMENT.... "Nobody made these guys go to war. They had to have known and accepted the risks. Now they whine about bearing the costs of their choice?"

If he thinks he will ever get another vote from an Active Duty, Reserve, National Guard service member or veteran of a military service he ought to think it over.. If you or a family member is or has served their country please pass this to them.

Please pass this URL http://www.vets-helping-vets.com/vhv20.htm to everyone. I'm guessing that other than the 20-25 percent hardcore liberals in the US will agree that this is just another example why this is the worst president in American history. Remind everyone over and over how this man thinks, while he bows to the Saudi Arabian king.

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$20.3 million in "migration assistance"

By executive order, President Barack Obama has ordered the expenditure of $20.3 million in "migration assistance" to the Palestinian refugees………Once again our wonderful president has gone behind our backs as well as our wonderful congress!!! Read below

HB 1388 PASSED You just spent $20,000,000 to move members/supporters of Hamas, a terrorist organization, to the United States ; housing, food, the whole enchilada.

Whether you are an Obama fan, or not, EVERYONE IN THE U.S. needs to know....
Something happened... H.R. 1388 was passed, behind our backs. You may want to read about it... It wasn ' t mentioned on the news... just went by on the ticker tape at the bottom of the CNN
screen.

Obama funds $20M in tax payer dollars to immigrate Hamas Refugees to the USA . This is the news that didn't make the headlines...

By executive order, President Barack Obama has ordered the expenditure of $20.3 million in "migration assistance" to the Palestinian refugees and "conflict victims" in Gaza .

The "presidential determination," which allows hundreds of thousands of Palestinians with ties to Hamas to resettle in the United States , was signed and appears in the Federal Register.

Few on Capitol Hill, or in the media, took note that the order provides a free ticket replete with housing and food allowances to individuals who have displayed their overwhelming support to the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) in the parliamentary election of January 2006.

Now we learn that he is allowing thousands of Palestinian refuges to move to, and live in, the US at American taxpayer expense.

These important, and insightful, issues are being "lost" in the blinding bail-outs and "stimulation" packages.

Doubtful? To verify this for yourself: www.thefederalregister.com/d.p/2009-02-04-E9-2488

PLEASE PASS THIS URL ON... AMERICA NEEDS TO KNOW

WE are losing this country at a rapid pace.

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Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)
By Tom Engelhardt

U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off

In my 1950s childhood, Ripley's Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: "If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and forever." Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine's parody, "Ripup's Believe It or Don't!"

With our Afghan and Iraq wars on my mind, I've been wondering whether Ripley's moment hasn't returned. Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the "drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq": "There are... more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq."

Admittedly, that list lacks the "believe it or not" tagline, but otherwise Ripley's couldn't have put it more staggeringly. And here's Pillsbury's Ripley-esque kicker: the American drawdown will be the "equivalent, in personnel terms alone, of relocating the entire population of Buffalo, New York."

When it comes to that slo-mo drawdown, all the numbers turn out to be staggering. They are also a reminder of just how the Pentagon has been fighting its wars in these last years -- like a compulsive shopper without a 12-step recovery program in sight. Whether it's 3.1 million items of equipment, or 3 million, 2.8 million, or 1.5 million, whether 341 "facilities" (not including perhaps ten mega-bases which will still be operating in 2011 with tens of thousands of American soldiers, civilians, and private contractors working and living on them), or more than 350 forward operating facilities, or 290 bases are to be shut down, the numbers from Iraq are simply out of this world.

Those sorts of figures define the U.S. military in the Bush era -- and now Obama's -- as the most materiel-profligate war-making machine ever. Where armies once had baggage trains and camp followers, our camp followers now help plant our military in foreign soil, build its housing and defenses, and then supply it with vast quantities of food, water, fuel, and god knows what else. In this way, our troops carry not just packs on their backs, but a total, transplantable society right down to the PXs, massage parlors, food courts, and miniature golf courses. At Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan, there was until recently a "boardwalk" that typically included a "Burger King, a Subway sandwich shop, three cafes, several general stores, a Cold Mountain Creamery, [and an] Oakley sunglasses outlet." Atypically enough, however, a TGI Friday's, which had just joined the line-up, was recently ordered shut down along with some of the other stores by Afghan war commander General Stanley McChrystal as inimical to the war effort.

In Ripley's terms, if you were to put all the vehicles, equipment, and other materiel we managed to transport to Iraq and Afghanistan "four abreast," they, too, might stretch a fair way around the planet. And wouldn't that be an illustration worthy of the old Ripley's cartoon -- all those coffee makers and port-a-potties and Internet cafes, even that imported sand which, if more widely known about, might change the phrase "taking coals to Newcastle" to "bringing sand to Iraq"?

For all the sand Iraq did have, from the point of view of the U.S. military it didn't have the perfect type for making the miles of protective "blast walls" that became a common feature of the post-invasion landscape. So, according to Stephen Farrell of the New York Times, U.S. taxpayer dollars floated in boatloads of foreign sand from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar to create those 15-ton blast walls at $3,500 a pop. U.S. planners are now evidently wondering whether to ship some of the leftover walls thousands of miles by staggeringly roundabout routes to Afghanistan at a transportation cost of $15,000 each.

When it comes to the U.S. drawdown in Iraq and the build-up in Afghanistan, in fact, the numbers, any numbers, are little short of unbelievable.

* Believe it or not, for instance, U.S. commanders in our war zones have more than one billion congressionally mandated dollars a year at their disposal to spend on making "friends with local citizens and help[ing] struggling economies." It's all socked away in the Commander's Emergency Response Program. Think of it as a local community-bribery account which, best of all, seems not to require the slightest accountability to Congress for where or how the money is spent.

* Believe it or not (small change department), the Pentagon is planning to spend an initial $50 million from a "$350 million Pentagon program designed to improve the counterterrorism operations of U.S. allies" on Croatia, Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, all of whom, in the latest version of the Coalition of the Billing, just happen to have small numbers of troops deployed in Afghanistan. The backdrop for this is Canada's decision to withdraw its combat forces from Afghanistan in 2011 and a fear in Washington that the larger European allies may threaten to bail as well. Think of that $50 million as a down payment on a state bribery program -- and the Pentagon is reportedly hoping to pry more money loose from Congress to pay off the smaller "allies" in a bigger way in the future.

* Believe it or not, the Defense Logistics Agency shipped 1.1 million hamburger patties to Afghanistan in the month of March 2010 (nearly doubling the March 2009 figure). Almost any number you might care to consider related to the Afghan War is similarly on the rise. By the fall, the number of American troops there will have nearly tripled since President Obama took office; American deaths in Afghanistan have doubled in the first months of 2010, while the number of wounded has tripled; insurgent roadside bomb (IED) attacks more than doubled in 2009 and are still rising; U.S. drone strikes almost doubled in 2009 and are on track to triple this year; and fuel deliveries to Afghanistan have nearly doubled, rising from 15 million gallons a month in March 2009 to 27 million this March. (Keep in mind that, by the time a gallon of gas has made it to U.S. troops in the field, its cost is estimated at up to $100.)

* Believe it or not, according to a recent report by the Pentagon inspector general, private contractor KBR, holding a $38 billion contract to provide the U.S. military with "a range of logistic services," has cost Washington $21 million in "waste" on truck maintenance alone by billing for 12 hours of work when, on average, its employees were actually putting in 1.3 hours.

* Believe it or not, the State Department has paid another private contractor, Triple Canopy, $438 million since mid-2005 simply to guard the massive, 104-acre U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the largest on the planet. That's more than half the price tag to build the embassy, the running of which is expected to cost an estimated $1.8 billion dollars in 2010. Triple Canopy now has 1,800 employees dedicated to embassy protection in the Iraqi capital, mainly Ugandan and Peruvian security guards. At $736 million to build, the embassy itself is a numbers wonder (and has only recently had its sizeable playing field astroturfed ï¿½ "the first artificial turf sports field in Iraq" -- also assumedly at taxpayer expense). Fans of Ripley-esque diplomatic gigantism should have no fears about the future either: the U.S. is now planning to build another "mother ship" of similar size and cost in Islamabad, Pakistan.

* Believe it or not, according to Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com, nearly 400 bases for U.S. troops, CIA operatives, special operations forces, NATO allies, and civilian contractors have already been constructed in Afghanistan, topping the base-building figures for Iraq by about 100 in a situation in which almost every bit of material has to be transported into the country. The base-building spree has yet to end.

* Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan -- and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.

Believe it or not, the staggering logistics effort underway to transport part of the American way of war from Iraq to Afghanistan is now being compared by those involved to Hannibal (not Lecter) crossing the Alps with his cohort of battle elephants, or to that ancient conqueror of conquerors, Alexander the Great ("the largest building boom in Afghanistan since Alexander built Kandahar"). It has become commonplace as well to say, as President Obama did at Bagram Air Base on his recent six-hour Afghan drop-in, that the U.S. military is "the finest military in the history of the world," or as his predecessor put it even more emphatically, "the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known."

The Ripley-esque numbers, however, tell a somewhat different story. If war were really a Believe It or Not matter, or victory lay in the number of hamburgers transported or the price of fuel consumed, the U.S. military would have been the winner long ago. After all, it may be the most product-profligate military with the heaviest "footprint" in history. Though it's seldom thought strange (and rarely commented upon in the U.S.), the Pentagon practices war as a form of mass consumption and so, not surprisingly, bears a striking resemblance to the society it comes from. Like the Taliban, it carries its way of life to war on its back.

It's striking, of course, that all this is happening at a moment when, domestically, small businesses can't get loans and close to 10% of the population is officially out of work, while state governments are desperately scrabbling for every available dollar (and some that aren't), even as they cut what would once have been considered basic services. In contrast, the Pentagon is fighting its distant wars as if American pockets had no bottoms, the national treasury had no limits, and there was quite literally no tomorrow.

And there's one more small contrast to be made when it comes to the finest military in the history of the world: for all the private security guards, mountains of burgers, lakes of gasoline, miles of blast walls, and satchels of cash to pass out to the locals, it's been remarkably unsuccessful in its pacification campaigns against some of the motliest forces of our time. The U.S. military has been fought to something like a draw by relatively modest-sized, relatively lightly armed minority insurgencies that don't even pass muster when it comes to shooting straight.

Vast piles of money and vast quantities of materiel have been squandered; equipment by the boatload has been used up; lives have been wasted in profusion; and yet the winners of our wars might turn out to be Iran and China. The American way of war, unfortunately, has the numbers to die for, just not to live by.

Note on Sources: Let me offer a small series of bows to six websites I find invaluable for keeping up on America's wars. Each is a regular morning stop on my tour of the Internet: Antiwar.com, a site full of surprises, which collects the most interesting reporting of the day on America's wars and incursions; Juan Cole's Informed Comment which, for years now, has provided an analytic framework for, and a brilliant running commentary on, American war policy in the Middle East; the War in Context whose canny editor, Paul Woodward, recently aptly termed the American war in Afghanistan "a war of indifference"; Asia Times, a high-quality online publication that provides regular overviews on the Middle East and Asia; Noah Shachtman's Danger Room at Wired, a must-visit for the latest in U.S. military developments; and Katherine Tiedemann's "Daily Brief" at the AfPak Channel which provides a daily summary of key mainstream reporting on the Afghan war.

In addition, special thanks go to Christopher Holmes, my eagle-eyed volunteer copyeditor in Tokyo who keeps TomDispatch remarkably error-free, week in, week out. His is a major labor of love and, even though I don't say so often enough, couldn't be more appreciated day in, day out!]

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Repeal Is Not Enough
By Steve Palmer
04/17/2010
Steve Palmer is the State Chapter Coordinator for the Pennsylvania Tenth Amendment Center.

On March 21, when the Intolerable Act of 2010 was passed by the House of Representatives, calls for repeal began almost immediately.

Shortly thereafter, the congressional minority party began campaigning on the platform, "Repeal and Replace". As-if… This is the party we elected in 2000 on promises to privatize social security. After six years in power, instead of privatizing social security, they gave us No Child Left Behind, The Patriot Act and Medicare Part-D. After the congress changed control, the same president gave us TARP and Auto-Maker bailouts. With that track record, does anyone really believe they're going to repeal the Intolerable Act of 2010? Not likely.

We need to remember that all politicians respond to incentives. The incentives for the Washington republicans in this situation are to give the plausible appearance of trying to repeal it, without actually getting it done. That way, they get reelected and they get to keep their new-found power too. Incentives work in our favor at the state level, but not in Washington.

Let's suspend disbelief for a moment anyway and imagine that these Washington politicians, who have never in my lifetime managed to eliminate a major government program, actually do manage to repeal the Intolerable Act. Then what?

The year long defiance exhibited by this Congress in passing the Intolerable Act included lies, midnight votes, parliamentary tricks, bribery with public funds public attacks and demonization levied upon American people who dared to disagree with the aristocracy, finally culminating with an AYE vote for a piece of unconstitutional legislation. This shows us that the legislative branch no longer answers to the people nor recognizes Constitutional limits on its authority. The legislative branch holds us in contempt. Even if the Intolerable Act is repealed, these facts will remain, unchanged.

In the 2010 State of the Union Address, our president spoke of a bipartisan commission on the deficit, saying, …Yesterday, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created this commission. So I will issue an executive order that will allow us to go forward…

Two consecutive administrations from both parties have now shown, through their unbridled use of executive orders and signing statements, that the executive branch holds not just the people, but also the legislative branch in contempt. In February, our president, who had claimed as a senator that the Patriot Act is unconstitutional, signed legislation to renew the Patriot Act. In March, our president signed the unconstitutional Intolerable Act. Even if the Intolerable Act is repealed, we will be left with an executive branch who believes it is free to legislate when unsatisfied with the work product of the actual legislators. We will be left with an executive branch who feels free to sign
unconstitutional laws.

Given these facts, even if the repeal effort succeeds, if we don't fix the structural defects in the system, there will be another Intolerable Act. It is only a matter of time. Washington will keep grabbing and clawing at our Liberties until they are all lost, or until we put a lasting stop to it. So yes, we should be working to repeal the Intolerable Act, but that is only part of the challenge. We also need to restore the concept of Defense in Depth to our own Liberties. Defense in Depth ensures that when one layer of defense is breached, another layer is encountered. Hopefully, the attacker is repelled before the layers of defense are exhausted. ComputerWorld describes it like this,
Defense in depth should be thought of not as a set of independent steps to be executed separately, but as a series of related and overlapping technical and nontechnical security measures that, when strategically deployed together, have a greater effect than their individual components.

Although they may have had a different name for it, our founders understood this concept and designed it into our Constitution. Alexander Hamilton said "This balance between the national and state governments is of the utmost importance; it forms a double security to the people. If one encroaches on their rights they will find a powerful protection in the other."

So our first layer of defense against this Intolerable Act lies with the minority party in Washington DC and the 2010 election. That battle is important, but it is probably not one that Tenth Amendment advocates should focus on. Other layers of defense involve the states. These layers are the ones where the Tenth Amendment comes into play.

Beyond repeal, one layer of defense comes from the law suits by the states demanding Tenth Amendment relief from the courts. The problems here are that 1.) The law suits will take a great deal of time and 2.) Ultimately, we are counting on the federal government to rule against itself. As with repeal, this is really not likely. It is important that these go forward though, for if they do manage to succeed, they will have the effect of restoring some limits on the rogue executive and legislative branches. Also, if the law suits don't succeed, then at least we will benefit from the knowledge that all three branches of the federal government believe that the Constitution has been nullified.

Another layer is in state level legislative resistance such as Pennsylvania HB2053, HB2179 or The Tenth Amendment Center's Federal Health Care Nullification legislation template. A benefit of this layer is that it can start producing results earlier than the courts. Another benefit is that we are not relying on the federal government to slap its own wrist. Also, successful nullification efforts by the states may embolden the supreme court to actually do its job and uphold the Tenth Amendment.

An important layer of defense is the mobilization of the people. We must be visible in our states and in Washington if we want our political officials to act on our behalf. Silence is consent. Tea Parties, letters to the editor, letters to our state officials are things everyone can do. Our officials will be more effective if we motivate them.
All of those defenses are being mounted in tandem, and quickly. Other possible layers of defense include law suits by individual citizens and private organizations, non-compliance by medical professionals or individuals as well as amending the constitution.

If the Intolerable Act is allowed to stand, we will have lost the Constitution. If it is repealed but the system that produced it is allowed to survive, another Intolerable Act is sure to follow. If our children are not to be enslaved, we must void this act and we must also restore the numerous layers of defense which have been silently breached by federal scope creep. Our job is not done until we have reminded Washington of what limited government means and compelled them to recognize and honor their boundaries. It's time to roll up our sleeves.

Copyright © 2010 by www.TenthAmendmentCenter.com Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

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Oh, those Tea Party people don't amount to anything............RIGHT!
PICTURES OF TEA PARTY CROWD AT SEARCHLIGHT, NEVADA
Tea Party Rally to Oust "Dingy Harry" Reid Searchlight, Nevada -- March 27, 2010 Photos © 2010 - American Border Patrol

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