The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Politics & RKBA => Topic started by: PegLeg45 on December 13, 2010, 06:13:24 PM
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How could Virginia ruling affect Obama’s health care law?
A federal judge has ruled on behalf of the state of Virginia that a key part of President Obama's health care law, passed in March, is unconstitutional.
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What's the nub of the legal dispute?
Lawyers for the state of Virginia argue that the "individual mandate" portion of the health care law -- that is, the part that requires Americans to have health insurance or else pay a fine -- is unconstitutional. Imposing a penalty on people merely for declining to buy insurance, they charge, is outside the scope of Congress' power under the Commerce Clause, which says that the federal government can regulate issues only that relate in some way to interstate commerce.
There's precedent for this view, the law's opponents say. They cite a 1995 case in which the Supreme Court invalidated a law making it a crime simply to possess a gun near a school. In that decision, the court found that the law didn't regulate economic activity, and thus fell outside Commerce Clause protections.
Lawyers for the Obama administration counter that the individual mandate is well within the scope of what the courts have defined as interstate commerce, in part because people who don't get insurance and rely on emergency rooms for care are burdening other taxpayers. The law's supporters point to a 2005 case in which the Supreme Court found that the federal government could criminalize the growth and possession of medical marijuana, even when the end product was sold and consumed within a single state, on the grounds that doing so was part of an effort to control the interstate drug trade.
More at link:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_thelookout/20101213/ts_yblog_thelookout/judge-rules-against-health-care-law-what-does-it-mean
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Won't make a difference until it gets to the supreme court and they rule on it.
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If the Dems appeal the decision it goes to SCOTUS and gets tossed by a 5-4 vote.
If they don't it can not be implimented as it sets a legal precedent that will be applied to all other challenges to it.
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The "game" was/is rigged, by design.....Implement all you can until it gets to SCOTUS. The Va. Judge, (unlike the other two previous rulings), simply had the testicular fortitude to say,....."what about the 10th Amendment" and the Feds CANNOT force a citizenry of states, to buy something or pay a penalty.
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It won't mean anything until SCOTUS rules as this ruling allows the provisions to be implemented until all appeals are heard. PLus there are already two other rullings, one from VA too, that go the other way.
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The deck is stacked. The desire is to take America down. And yeah, I'm getting a new roll of tin foil for my post-Christmas hats.
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The deck is stacked. The desire is to take America down. And yeah, I'm getting a new roll of tin foil for my post-Christmas hats.
You are dead right
http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/
I know there is a fair amount of dread out there right now. We’re ramping down one war, and ramping up another; the threat of total financial collapse seems actually possible; the moral decay and loss of decency in much of society is endemic and spreading… Good Lord, we’re seeing famine, pestilence and death… lions and lambs lying down together, plagues of frogs from the skies! – and no one seems to know exactly what is happening.
And a lot of people are starting to think that it’s hopeless. My friends, it’s not hopeless. It’s dire! But it’s not hopeless. It’s never hopeless.
You see, people have been here before. Not us, but other people. The great conceit of the modern age is that this is, in fact, a modern age. But it isn’t.
Let’s start at the top: with Barack Obama. Is he:
A. A Muslim-sympathizing, neo-Marxist true believer, who sees America and Capitalism as the principle barrier to fairness and world peace?
Or B, is he merely an empty suit, an unwitting pawn of much larger, hidden forces?
Or C, simply a self-obsessed, incompetent narcissist who happened to be at the right place at the right time.
I’ve given this a lot of careful thought, and I think the real answer is yes.
He is a product of his time; a product of a civilization that has been dynamic and successful long enough for its prosperity to feel inevitable and indestructible. It’s not even really his fault. It has always been pretty clear from his record who he is and what he believes, and we elected him because the country was in the mood for a “progressive” president.
But Progressivism is not progressive – it’s ancient. Cyclical. It’s circular. It is, in fact, the symptom and the eventual cause of impending collapse.
In fact, in all of human history, there has been only one genuinely progressive, genuinely liberating idea: a lightning bolt across the pages of history – the why in 1776, the how in 1787 – the idea of limited government, god-given rights, personal liberty and rule by the vast collective wisdom and industry of the common man, and not by the bored, pampered and self-hating elites that have run everything before and since. This is a once-in-history idea. This is why we have to conserve it. We have to conserve this fundamentally liberal idea.
I said that what we today call Progressivism is in fact ancient and circular. Don’t believe me? Well, the great roman orator Cicero, speaking in defense of his friend Sestius, around 55 BC, said – quote:
“Gaius gracchus proposed a grain law. The people were delighted with it because it provided an abundance of food without work. The good men, however, fought against it because they thought the masses would be attracted away from hard work and toward idleness, and they saw the state treasury would be exhausted.”
When a society – after generations of hard work, sacrifice and hardship – reaches a certain level of prosperity, “Progressives” like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Rosie O’Donnell and Gaius Gracchus – that last Progressive died in 121 BC – assume that the prosperity is endless, and push for more and more people to get more and more goods and services for less and less work. Why? Because – as today, in America, as with the British Empire, the French Empire, the Spanish Empire, the Ottomans, the Mongols, Rome, Greece, Eqypt, Babylon… They do it for political power. They live for political power. This “Progressivism” is ancient, recurring, tyrannical and ruinous.
And we voted for it. Just like the Romans did.
We can see from Cicero that throughout history, the disease is always the same – too much security and prosperity breeds laziness, narcissism, resentment and entitlement.
So if this is the cycle of civilization, and we see these same recurring signs around us in abundance today – how can there be any hope?
There’s hope because we are Americans. We’re different. Not genetically – although we are in fact the world’s mutts and that is an enormous strength. No, we are different, unique and exceptional culturally – because unlike the Babylonians, the Eqyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, the Spanish, the French, The British and all the rest – we have actually done it. We have created the political tools to limit power and reward hard work, and we have lived with them for almost a quarter millennia. It is only by restoring and strengthening these truly progressive, but now-called conservative ideals that we can break the cycle of history.
How?
Well, first, we have to know how we got into this mess in the first place.
This time around – our cycle – the rot began to take hold in America due primary to a group called The Frankfurt School. Keep in mind that the Frankfurt school is merely a product of where they appear on this great wheel of history – there have been dozens of civilizations that had their own “Frankfurt schools” in languages now lost to history.
But right after World War One, in Frankfurt, Germany the Institute for Social Research – they wanted to call themselves the “Institute for Marxism” but that was too on the nose – was left wondering why the world communist revolution — predicted as a certainty by Marxist social science – was not leading to the international revolution of the proletariat, the actual common working man.
And they figured out that capitalism – damn it! – was providing enough comfort and material gain, enough of an increase in the working man’s standard of living – that it just simply wasn’t going to happen. Ever.
Now, one kind of person might look at this and say, hooray! People’s lives are getting better – guess we weren’t needed after all.
But not these guys. These guys felt they had to bring heaven to earth.
And so they asked themselves: if the vanguard of the revolution wasn’t going to be the worker, then who would it be? And the answer they came up with was: the dispossessed.
The Neo-Marxist revolution would not attack the capitalist economy – that was too successful. The target of the new Marxist revolution would be the Culture.
Marxist philosophers like Antonia Gramsci, and later, Saul Alinski – personal hero to such present-day fellow travelers as Chris Matthews, Hillary Clinton and, of course, The President of the United States – started to create narratives – stories – about America. This rapidly evolved into a philosophy called “Critical Theory” and the idea of Critical Theory was to attack the dominant culture – that would be us – from all sides, simultaneously.
For instance, Black Americans would be told that their labor built the entire country, while White Americans merely sat back and essentially stole everything. Black slave labor did build the cotton economies of the Southern Confederacy, but the entire Confederacy had less factory capacity than New York City alone.
Nonetheless, many black Americans today have been taught that all of this belongs to them and not the truth, which is that that they were, and are, an integral and essential part of the group effort that built this country together.
Likewise, women are told that we live in an evil patriarchy, where all men are tyrants and potential rapists, determined to keep them in a form of domestic slavery, instead of being their partners and helpmates and husbands and protectors.
Gays are told not that this is one of the most inclusive and forgiving societies in the history of the world, but rather home to knuckle-dragging, murdering Neanderthals – when in plain sight, across the seas, one and a half billion Muslims routinely hang or stone or crush to death innocent people merely because of their sexual practices.
And on and on.
And when you try to argue against this social weapon of theirs, this Narrative, this lie that they tell again and again, well then, prepare for their counter-attack, which is called Political Correctness – the attempt to put the argument out of bounds before it can be had.
They use terms like Hate Speech and Racism. They want to put our arguments and rebuttals out of bounds so that they don’t have to hear them or deal with them. They have to exclude those arguments because if they don’t, those arguments are going to kick their asses and they know it.
And by the way: charges of Racism only work on decent people. You go up to a Klansman or a Nazi and call them a racist, and they say “duh!” Of course they’re racists. They’re proud of being racists. But you go up to someone who is not a racist, a person who finds racism appalling and disgusting, and tell them what they are saying is racism – even when it not only isn’t racism, but is in fact the opposite of racism– well, they’ll shut up. Mission Accomplished.
The objectives of the Frankfurt School, of Gramsci and Alinski in their assault on the culture, were laid out in detail and were very clear: Eliminate not only the voice, but the very idea of reason. Destroy history. Delegitimize shared morality. Medicate instead of discipline children. Promote the idea that problems are so complex that only elitists, experts and academics can discuss, let alone solve them. A later pair of American Marxist philosophers developed what became known as the Cloward-Piven strategy: overwhelm America’s social systems – welfare, health care, immigration, etc. by telling people they were owed things, and by intentionally overwhelming them, cause them to collapse – leaving nothing but smoking wreckage, and no where to turn but to the government.
But above all, for this Frankfurt school strategy to work, it needed to foster resentment, envy, hopelessness and despair.
And it’s been spectacularly successful.
My fellow Americans… we are in an information war, a battle of narratives, and if that analysis is true then you and I are the last best hope of the last best hope. We are, together, soldiers in this narrative war for America and for civilization.
So can we win?
Of course we can win!
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http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/
“Progressives” like Bill Maher, Janeane Garofolo, Rosie O’Donnell
Three people that make my skin crawl. The LBGT gang!
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Tremendous post, Tom.
It formalizes many of the thoughts, feelings, hunches and suspicions I have had and opens several lines of thinking I had not uncovered.
Takes stuff I thought was dumb luck, coincidence and perhaps a conspiracy and places those pieces in a Master Plan of which I had envisioned only some parts and it has filled in many parts I had not.
Thank you.
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Tremendous post, Tom.
It formalizes many of the thoughts, feelings, hunches and suspicions I have had and opens several lines of thinking I had not uncovered.
Takes stuff I thought was dumb luck, coincidence and perhaps a conspiracy and places those pieces in a Master Plan of which I had envisioned only some parts and it has filled in many parts I had not.
Thank you.
It's like I've been saying right along, the Democratic party is a criminal subversive conspiracy.
I don't have time to go into detail now, it would take a book, but they have opposed defending America since the days of Jefferson, and their primary support comes from criminals, from Boss tweed at Tammany hall, through Capone's support of them during prohibition right up to Terrorist sympathizer Holder and "Panthergate" today.
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Thanks for that link, Tom, definitely had to share with a few of my friends who would read it and get it.