Dakota Beacon

Watch the time interval of 12:00 through 13:30 minutes of the Youtube video of President Obama being interviewed by George Stephanopoulos on Sunday, September 20, 2009.

Where he tells Stephanopoulos when questioned about all of the current illegal Acorn weirdness that, “Frankly it is not something that I have been following closely, I did even know that Acorn was getting a lot of Federal money” – President Barack Obama (09-20-09)

But on December 12, 2007 he told thousands of Community Organizers and Acorn people at the Heartland Democratic Presidential Forum with Acorn’s Depak Bhargava as Master of Ceremonies, this video will help you to realize just exactly how dishonest President Obama really is…..

“During the transition, we are going to call all of you in to help shape the agenda. We’re going to be having meetings all across the country with community organizations so that you have input into the agenda for next presidency of the United States of America” – President Barack Obama (12-01-07)

Representative Mike Rogers must be watched!

With an outstanding resume both in the public and private sectors he speaks truth from knowledge because of his background:

A 1985 graduate of Adrian College in Michigan, Mike earned his reputation as a leader, problem solver and “people person” during service as a U.S. Army officer/company commander (1985-88), FBI Special Agent investigating public corruption as a member of the Chicago Bureau’s organized crime unit (1988-94), and in the Michigan Senate (1995-2000) where he served as Senate Majority Floor Leader (1999-2000). Mike also has a strong business background. He is a co-founder of E.B.I. Builders, Inc., a family-owned home construction business in Brighton, and is a member of several chambers of commerce. Mike served in the University of Michigan Reserve Officer Training Corp (R.O.T.C.), belongs to the Society of Former Special Agents for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and is an honorary member of Brighton Rotary Club.

If only the North Dakota congressional delegation had the guts and knowledge to tell it like it is:

From Eugene:

For those who have been missing my daily injection of insight and humor on market activity, your wait has ended and Senator Dorgan’s education has only just begun! 

Starting Monday September 21 at 9:53 a.m., I will be back on the radio across most of North Dakota via the Scott Hennen Radio Network out of Fargo on 1100 AM “The Flag”.  Their signal covers the Red River Valley and makes it as far west as Sterling, North Dakota.  The Bismarck affiliate is 1270 AM KLXX, in Dickinson it is 1460 AM KLTC, and in Tioga 1090 AM KTGO (whose signal covers Williston and almost makes it into Minot).  I will be doing a daily 5-minute “Inside the Numbers” market talk without being encumbered by political correctness.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009, Senators Dorgan and Conrad voted for the Motion to Invoke Cloture on the Nomination of Cass R. Sunstein, to be Administrator of the Office of Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget. Sunstein has a documented record of anti-gun, anti-hunting, animal rights, private property rights legal extremism!  From Faces of Agriculture web site of Trent Loos:

Take action now to block Cass Sunstein!

U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) has scheduled a vote for Wednesday, September 9 on a presidential nominee opposed by many American hunters, gun owners, and farmers. The nominee, Cass Sunstein, has been tapped to lead the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) or “Regulatory Czar” as the position is known. The job functions as the “choke point” between the White House and regulations from government agencies including the Departments of Interior, Agriculture, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

From the document “Who Is Cass Sunstein and Why Should You Care?” the tip of the iceberg is exposed:

1) President Obama has nominated Sunstein as his regulatory czar—Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs – to review and shape all major federal regulations; 2) Sunstein believes the way to fix many things is to impose the “right thing” by government regulation, supplemented by private lawsuits to go where government prosecutors haven’t the budget or time and 3) He has written extensively about animal “rights,” believing animals are underrepresented in our legal system and their circumstances are not well enough known by consumers.

If as a regulatory czar wouldn’t be frightening enough, Sunstein has also been mentioned as a Supreme Court candidate,given his legal background and Obama association at the University of Chicago.

In ruing the lack of time and money in most prosecutors’ offices to deal with animal welfare, Sunstein suggests citizens should be able to file lawsuits “directly against those who have violated [anticruelty] law, in “The Rights of Animals: A Very Short Primer.”” ” ...representatives of animals should be able to bring private suits to ensure that anticruelty and related laws are actually enforced,” (emphasis his). “Of course, any animals would be represented by human beings, just like any other litigant who lacks ordinary (human) competence; for example, the interests of children are protected by prosecutors, and also by trustees and guardians in private litigation brought on children’s behalf.”

His concession: since some, “because of some kind of ideological commitment to improving animal welfare… might go well beyond what the law actually says,” if such was a “genuine risk,” it might be advisable to force those , “who bring frivolous [lawsuits] to pay the defendants’ attorneys fees.” Wow, bet that would draw HSUS up short - for a nanosecond.

That’s just about better enforcement of current laws.

“But I think that we should go further,” Sunstein said. The law should impose further regulation on hunting, scientific experiments, entertainment, and (above all) farming to ensure against unnecessary animal suffering (italics his).” He goes on to suggest committees or boards to approve management practices, noting European’s example.

Of course, that’s partially why Europe is now importing meat not exporting.

Sunstein discusses the issue of animals as property:

“If getting rid of the idea that animals are property is helpful in reducing suffering, then we should get rid of the idea that animals are property.”

“The cruel and abusive practices generally involved in contemporary farming are largely unregulated at the state level,” Sunstein said.

He discusses the concept of animal “autonomy,” that is, animals freed from human control, based on an animal’s ability to “think,” and concludes, ” ... sometimes, [human] interests will outweigh those of other animals.”

Sunstein co-edited a book called “Animal Rights: Current Debates and New Directions,” a collection of essays that drew a recommendation from the infamous Laurence Tribe, another advocate for animal legal “rights.”

Sunstein’s other writings are equally alarming. Big Brother government is not good enough for Sunstein.

He prefers authoritarian father figures. Written with Richard H. Thaler, “Libertarian Paternalism Is Not An Oxymoron,” holds that, “Often people’s preferences are ill-formed” and “paternalism cannot be avoided,” and “libertarian paternalists should attempt to steer people’s choices.”

Their libertarian paternalism example involves a “cafeteria at some organization,” where the director has noticed customers choosing more of the items presented earlier in the line. How to order the lineup?

The paper posits four possibilities, with #4 being the cafeteria director putting items earlier in the line she thinks consumers would choose on their own. The authors’ dislike that. Option #1 is Sunstein and Thaler’s choice.

The director should “make the choices that she thinks would make the customers best off ... to promote their welfare, all things considered.” Even under market pressures, they maintain the director would have “a great deal of room to maneuver.” In other words, they believe it is the director’s job to change customers’ tastes and preferences! Lovely philosophy for a federal regulator, that!

Sunstein and co-writer Jeff Leslie in “Animal Rights Without Controversy,” propose their back door way to getting consumers more active regarding animal treatment.

“Consumers should be permitted to express their commitments [to proper animal treatment] through their purchasing decisions.” How?

A label on each package, indicating, for example, the percentage of animals hurt or injured or bones broken when raised by a particular husbandry method. Additional information could include natural daylight hours, bedding, cage or pen size, etc. We assume Sunstein’s classifications would accommodate “things we know,” like “piglets should have toys” and “cows should not be continuously bred.”

So this is Obama’s Big Papa?

1 “Liberty and Freedom,” David Hackett Fischer, Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.
2 “Liberty and Tyranny,” Mark R. Levin, Threshold Editions, New York, 2009.
3 “Common Sense,” Glenn Beck, Mercury Radio Arts/Threshold Editions, New York, 2009.

Senator Dorgan:
Washington, DC                   Bismarck
202-224-2551                     701-250-4618

Senator Conrad:
Washington, DC                   Bismarck
(202) 224-2043                     (701) 258-4648

About 6 months ago, on a news program on oil, one of the Forbes Bros. was the guest. This is out of context, but this is the actual question as asked. The host said to Forbes, “I am going to ask you a direct question and I would like a direct answer, how much oil does the U.S. have in the ground.” Forbes did not miss a beat, he said, “more than all the Middle East put together…” Please read below.

The U. S. Geological Survey issued a report in April (‘08) that only scientists and oil men knew was coming, but man was it big…  It was a revised report (hadn’t been updated since ‘95) on how much oil was in this area of the western 2/3 of North Dakota ;  western South Dakota ; and extreme eastern Montana .... check THIS out:

The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska ‘s Prudhoe Bay , and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable… at $107 a barrel, we’re looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.

‘When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea..’ says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature’s financial analyst.

‘This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years’ reports, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette.  It’s a formation known as the Williston Basin , but is more commonly referred to as the ‘Bakken.’  And it stretches from Northern Montana, through North Dakota and into Canada .  For years, U. S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end.  Even the ‘Big Oil’ companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago.  However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken’s massive reserves…. and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels.  And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL!

That’s enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight.

2. And if THAT didn’t throw you on the floor, then this next one should - because it’s from TWO YEARS AGO!

U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World!
Stansberry Report Online - 4/20/2006

Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels.  On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?

They reported this stunning news:  We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:

- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
- 18-times as much oil as Iraq
- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
- 22-times as much oil as Iran
- 500-times as much oil as Yemen
- and it’s all right here in the Western United States .

HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this?  Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil! Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy…..WHY?

James Bartis, lead researcher with the study says we’ve got more oil in this very compact area than the entire Middle East -more than 2 TRILLION barrels untapped.  That’s more than all the proven oil reserves of crude oil in the world today, reports The Denver Post.

Don’t think ‘OPEC’ will drop its price - even with this find?  Think again!  It’s all about the competitive marketplace, - it has to. Think OPEC just might be funding the environmentalists?
Got your attention/ire up yet?  Hope so!  Now, while you’re thinking about it .... and hopefully P.O’d, do this:

3. Pass this along.  If you don’t take a little time to do this, then you should stifle yourself the next time you want to complain about gas prices—- because by doing NOTHING, you’ve forfeited your right to complain.

From over the internet transom…..Thanks Dennis

The mainstream media has done it’s best to ignore the latest Obama Administration scandal. Van Jones was the White House Council on Environmental Quality’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs. He was to have been the man in charge of the distribution of $30 BILLION of your dollars. He was fired early Sunday morning (before the Sunday morning political talk shows could prepare?). The truth is that Glenn Beck outed Van Jones who has been an avowed COMMUNIST! We almost had a man overseeing a huge amount of taxpayer money who likely could not even have obtain a rudimentary security clearance to work for a U.S. Defense Department contractor! Have you ever heard the term, “The nuts are running the asylum”? Here is the proof!

From Wikipedia:

He got involved with Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM), a group explicitly committed to revolutionary Marxist politics[15] whose points of unity were revolutionary democracy, revolutionary feminism, revolutionary internationalism, the central role of the working class, urban Marxism, and Third World Communism.

If you do nothing else today BE SURE to watch these two videos. VERY IMPORTANT!

Pat Cadell worked for Democratic presidential candidates George McGovern in 1972, Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1980, Gary Hart in 1984, Joe Biden in 1988, and Jerry Brown in 1992, is deeply alarmed:

If we learn nothing else (and we will learn precious little from the mainstream media), it is that the term ENVIRO-MARXIST is likely more the norm than the exception. Is it true as it has been asserted that environmentalist are like watermelon? GREEN ON THE OUTSIDE AND RED ON THE INSIDE?

?

“Not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties together and broadcasting those negotiations on C-Span so that the American people can see what the choices are because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process” – Barack Obama, January 2008

Candidate Obama over, and over promised that health care reform would be the most transparent process ever. He has operated just the opposite. You MUST watch this video.

http://www.breitbart.tv/naked-emperor-news-obamas-mother-of-all-political-lies-and-the-town-hall-mayhem-it-caused/

According to David Axelrod, Obama will go on offense over health care. Obama has scheduled an address before both houses of congress (the 13th such address since 1981). Be vigilant but with Barack Obama becoming the face of reform rather than letting congress take all the arrows is one of the most wonderful developments in this whole fiasco.

How many prevarications will that single speech have?

0-10?

>10?

>20?

Check out the signage of two respective events. Images of the “Health Care Now”, NDPeople rally show signs of obvious quality and uniformity. It seems as if the supporters of health care reform arrived and someone handed the signs out to everyone. ALL the signs are manufactured and professional in ALL of the images of the rally from the Fargo Forum story of August 30, 2009, entitled “Health care rally draws hundreds”. The articles states explains :

The rally was organized by NDPeople.org, a progressive advocacy group, and garnered support from nearly two dozen labor, children’s advocacy, faith and other groups.

It turns out that these different “groups” were asked to provide people for the rally.

If you have any questions watch this video of the MANUFACTURED FARGO HEALTH CARE EVENT.

Oddly, nine days before the rally Rob Port at Sayanythingblog.com posted a forwarded email in which it was explained that nine days before the rally in support of Obamacare it was well known that SEIU (union who’s thugs beat up townhall meeting participants in St. Louis) was paying for buses from Bismarck, stopping in Jamestown, would provide transportation to Fargo.

SEIU would pay for speakers and other costs including fliers! It is likely that the whole event was a staged and paid for SEIU union manipulated event! Somehow the Fargo Forum reporter thought that NDPeople was all there was to this even though the most read political blog in the state laid the facts out more than a week before the event!

The people at the rally were so concerned about health care that the “organizers” (SEIU/NDPeople) also provided the means to contact elected officials. From the Forum article:

Organizers provided stationery and cell phones for those looking to contact their representatives on the spot. Attendees signed Band-Aid-shaped slots on a petition calling for a public insurance plan option.

And…

“The power of money is on the opposing side right now,” Morrison said. “It’s an uphill battle to have the voice of ordinary people be heard.”

So, the power of SEIU money does not count? Concern that SEIU union members (ordinary people) are not being herd? Are they being herded? Like sheep?

BY THE WAY, IS NDPEOPLE AN SEIU FRONT GROUP?



On the other hand at the Bismarck Tea Party the only signs were home-made and I may be mistaken but I doubt that anyone rode a bus to the event. Video of the Fargo Tea Party evidences no professional sings, no buses, no union organized rent-a-mob. These people used their own phones, paper, envelopes, and stamps to contact their congressional delegation. Just like…...real “ordinary people”?

I have a possible new name for the union financed, everything-provided rent-a-mob astroturfers who claim to speak for “ordinary people”, perhaps, based on the facts we might refer to them as NDSheeple?

Where is the North Dakota media?......Asleep or flacking for the Union?

Even with fawning coverage of the Obama family vacation in Marxist Vineyard, and the distraction of Senator Kennedy’s death and funeral, the downward spiral continues for The Anointed One. According to the Sunday, August 30, 2009 Daily Presidential Tracking Poll people seem to be on to the Obama double talk with a significant disapproval:

Proverbs 13:5, “A righteous man hateth lying: but a wicked man is loathsome, and cometh to shame.”

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Senator Edward M Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

“Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life…”

That’s the way to do it! An “accident”, “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to name check the bit players. What befell him was …a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

“Like all figures in history - and like those in the Bible, for that matter - Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse”. When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the Senator changed - he certainly changed Mary Jo’s - but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the Senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history… Who knows – maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal”, the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse”, a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his “progressive” agenda, up to and including health care “reform”. It was an odd kind of “redemption”: In a cooing paean to the Senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted’s “favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, ‘Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?’”

Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?

Beats me!

Why did the Last Lion cross the road?

To sleep it off!

What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! “He was a guy’s guy,” chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the Senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the US Congress”. Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution…”

Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former Solicitor-General favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had an identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and co, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that “fleeting wisp of glory”, that “one brief shining moment” - must run forever, even if “How To Handle A Woman” gets dropped from the score. The Senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

By careful choice of words in discussion of a specific aspect of current health care legislation Obama and socialized medicine supporters continue to try and fool Americans about the implications of taxpayers paying massively for the health care of illegal aliens.

Senator Byron Dorgan, Jamestown, North Dakota, August 21, 2009:

“There is not going to be a health care plan passed by the congress that covers illegal aliens, it has been alleged that the plan does, it does not.”

Barack Obama, radio address, August 27, 2009:

“I want to spend a few minutes debunking some of the more outrageous myths circulating on the Internet, on cable TV, and repeated at some town halls across this country.

“Let’s start with the false claim that illegal immigrants will get health insurance under reform. That’s not true.  Illegal immigrants would not be covered.”

This is the oft cited single line of H.R. 3200 that supporters of the bill claim proves that illegal immigrants will not get government health care as a result of the bill’s passage. Section 241 (pages 128 – 132) provides for “affordability credits”, or subsidies, to pay for insurance premiums or annual out-of-pocket health care costs. It is about who by law is limited to obtaining help buy insurance, and that illegal immigrants are not eligible.

THIS DOES NOT SAY THAT NO WAY, NO HOW CAN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS GET TAXPAYER FUNDED MEDICAL CARE AS A RESULT OF H.R. 3200!

THIS IS ANOTHER PURPOSEFUL DECEPTION BY BARACK OBAMA!



From the document, “Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200” by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service:

“Under H.R. 3200, a ‘Health Insurance Exchange’ would begin operation in 2013 and would offer private plans alongside a public option…H.R. 3200 does not contain any restrictions on noncitzens—whether legally or illegally present, or in the United States temporarily or permanently—participating in the Exchange.”

Illegal noncitizens WILL get health care under H.R. 3200!



In a Human Events article of August 27, 2009, Ernest Istook explains why, “Nothing illustrates America’s distrust of Congress quite like the illegal immigrant provision of the House health care bill, HR 3200.”

Istook cites the attempt by Republicans to amend H.R. 3200 to explicitly exclude illegal immigrants from taxpayer paid health care under the bill:

The House bill not only makes a major expansion of Medicaid eligibility but also restricts (in Section 1702) inquiries about immigration status. Efforts to fix this and to add enforcement provisions to HR 3200 were offered in the Ways & Means Committee by Rep. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and in the Energy & Commerce Committee by Rep. Nathan Deal (R-Ga.), but voted down. No Democrats supported Heller.

On Friday, Democrats moved one step closer to giving free health insurance to the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal aliens when they successfully defeated a Republican-backed amendment, offered by Rep. Dean Heller, R-Nev., that would have prevented illegal aliens from receiving government-subsidized health care under the proposed plan backed by House Democrats and President Barack Obama.

The House Ways and Means Committee nixed the Heller amendment by a 26-to-15 vote along straight party lines, and followed this action by passing the 1,018-page bill early Friday morning by a 23-to-18 margin, with three Democrats voting against the plan.

Hold your breath starting right…..NOW!

An absolutely brilliant article by Barry Goldwater Jr. over at The American Spectator entitled, “Health Care? The Government Can’t Even Run a Railroad” gives the facts point by point about why ObamaCare is doomed if ever enacted:

Medicare and Medicaid has ovr $60 billion in fraud per year!

Medicare has $36 TRILLION in unfunded liabilities!

The U.S. Postal Service lost $7 BILLION last year with major service cost hikes!

It is demonstrable that the Federal Reserve deserves direct complicity in the recent economic meltdown!

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailed out to the tune of $400 BILLION!

After 38 years Amtrak continues an unbroken record of consecutive loses and federal subsidies!

After $2.5 TRILLION spent on drug prohibition it is very easy to get drugs on the streets of America!

The Department of Energy was established 30 years ago to achieve energy independence and we are not even close!

And you, Mr. President, want the federal government to run health care?

City, State, % of People Below the Poverty Level

1.  Detroit ,  MI 32.5%

2.  Buffalo ,  NY 29.9%

3.  Cincinnati ,  OH 27.8%

4.  Cleveland ,  OH 27.0%

5.  Miami ,  FL 26.9%

6.  St. Louis ,  MO 26.8%

7.  El Paso ,  TX 26.4%

8.  Milwaukee ,  WI 26.2%

9.  Philadelphia ,  PA 25.1%

10.  Newark ,  NJ 24.2%

U.S. Census Bureau, 2006 American Community Survey, August 2007

What do the top ten cities (over 250,000) with the highest poverty rate all have in common?

Buffalo,  NY (2nd, poverty rate: 29.9%) ) hasn’t elected one since 1954;

Cincinnati ,  OH (3rd, poverty rate: 27.8%) )...since 1984;

Cleveland ,  OH (4th, poverty rate: 27.0%)...since 1989;

Miami ,  FL (5th, poverty rate: 26.9%) has never had a Republican mayor;

St. Louis ,  MO (6th, poverty rate: 26.8%)....since 1949;

El Paso ,  TX (7th, poverty rate: 26.4%) has never had a Republican mayor;

Milwaukee ,  WI (8th, poverty rate: 26.2%)...since 1908;

Philadelphia ,  PA (9th, poverty rate: 25.1%)...since 1952;

Newark ,  NJ (10th, , poverty rate: 24.2%)...since 1907.

Einstein once said, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’

“You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift. You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down. You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred. You cannot build character and courage by taking away people’s initiative and independence. You cannot help people permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.”- Abraham Lincoln

..................and Mr. Obama, you are no Abe Lincoln

From Over the Internet Transom - Thanks Gene

On NRO, Jerry Bowyer scrutinizes the numbers in his article “Longest. Lives. Ever.” and explains the insanity of the chattering class:

Our chattering classes chatter on about derivative abstractions, such as the increase in the percentage of GDP that we allot to health care. The cable-television pundits remind us that we’re spending about 16 percent of our national output on health care, and conclude that this is some kind of national scandal. Why? What percentage should we be spending? Is 10 percent more acceptable? Is 5 percent?

He then asks that most important question:

Our great-grandparents spent much less than 16 percent of GDP on health care, and they barely made it into their 60s. Would any of you willingly give back 20 years in exchange for less health-care spending?

The argument that health care spending is out of control and way too high is insanity. Are you willing to have the government control “costs” so that you have a shorter more uncomfortable life? Of course not! Do you want technical innovation to slow tremendously with the government in control like it has almost stopped in every other country where socialized medicine is in place?