Category Archives: Treason

Leftist Academics Teaching Military Instruct Army to Quell the “Tea Party”… (video)

Of course it is illegal for the Army to participate in law enforcement, but since when do laws like the Posse Comitatus Act matter to far left oligarchs bent on a radicalized agenda?

In this scenario the TEA Party comes into a town, occupies it without paying for permits, etc,  and takes over parts of the town illegally, while ignoring the requests from law enforcement. Now wait a minute, who behaves this way? Oh that’s right, the Obama endorsed Occupy Wall Street movement that has resulted in dozens of rapes, several deaths, arrests measured in the thousands, organized efforts to resist, even with violence – law enforcement, mass vandalism, threats etc. But it is the TEA Party folks who show up with cute signs and flags, and always clean up after themselves that are the problem.

PJTV’s Trifecta and reporter Anthony Martin respond:

Anthony Martin:

A retired U.S. Army colonel who now teaches modern warfare to soldiers at the University of Foreign Military and Cultural Studies at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. has co-written an article with a Civil War expert that has ignited a firestorm today among those increasingly concerned about what some say is a distinct anti-civilian tone that has infected much of the military and Homeland Security since 2009.

Retired Col. Kevin Benson and Jennifer Weber, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas, co-wrote an article for Small Wars Journal on a 2010 Army report titled, “U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, The Army Operating Concept 2016 – 2028.”

The report describes how the Army will respond to threats “at home and abroad” in the coming two decades and in doing so has made clear that a monumental cultural shift has occurred in the thinking of those at the top levels of military command. This shift has some government watchdogs worried, particularly given that Benson is using the platform provided at Fort Leavenworth to educate military personnel in his vision of the nature of modern warfare in America. According to the vision articulated by Benson, future warfare will be conducted on our own soil. The military will use its full force against our own citizens. The enemy will be average citizens whose values resonate with those articulated by the tea party.

The fictitious scenario used in the Army report as a teaching tool is a future insurrection of “tea party activists” in South Carolina. As the scenario goes, the tea party group stages a takeover of the town of Darlington, S.C. The mayor is placed under house arrest and prevented from exercising his duties. The police chief, the county sheriff, and other law enforcement officials are removed from office and told not to interfere. The city council is dissolved. The governor of the state, who had previously expressed solidarity with tea party goals, does little to address the situation.

A news conference is called by the new town leaders, all tea party activists, who tell the media that due to the failure of central government to address the concerns of the citizens, the Declaration of Independence has been re-imposed and the local government has been declared null and void.

Several items of interest are to be noted in the scenario the Army uses to describe the tea party activists — “right wing,” “extremists,” “insurrectionists,” all of whom are lumped together with militias and organizations that are considered “racist” and “anti-immigration.”

By contrast, those who oppose the tea party are referred to as “mainstream.”

The obvious question that arises is why would this sort of scenario, with its obviously biased and skewed portrayals, be presented as a teaching tool to military personnel? Why would the U.S. military consider the tea party to be “extremist” or “insurrectionist?” And why would the tea party be classified together with groups that are “racist, “anti-immigration,” and “extremist right wing?”

In the numerous tea party rallies that have occurred across the nation no racism was noted by any observer. Speakers included persons of all races and ethnic backgrounds. No sentiment was expressed against legal immigration but outrage was directed toward those break the law and enter the country by illegal means. And the charge that the tea party is extremist right wing is difficult to justify given that the main thrust of the movement is the protest against runaway government spending that has placed the nation on the brink of economic ruin due to its enormous and unsustainable debt.

Yet repeatedly since the election of Barack Obama in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has referred to the tea party as “potential homegrown terrorists.

More from Anthony Martin:

…the military under the Obama administration has made sure that the words “Jihad” and “Islamic” are deleted from all official documents concerning very real threats to the safety and security of citizens. The administration went out of its way, for example, to avoid referring to the Fort Hood terrorist as an “Islamic extremist.”

Yet when describing the frightening possibility that a U.S. city could be seized by an insurgency group, its mayor, police chief, and city council removed from office and placed under house arrest, the Army chooses to use the tea party, not an Occupy Wall Street nor a radical Islamist entity, as the insurgency group in the teaching tool.

When former U.S. Rep. Gabriella Giffords, D-Ariz., was shot along with others in the infamous Tucson massacre of 2011, the Obama administration, the mainstream media, and liberal activists were quick to blame the tea party, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Mark Levin for using “hateful rhetoric” that leads unstable persons such as the Tucson shooter to undertake such violent measures.

Yet none of the those mentioned as the sources for the hateful rhetoric have ever called for violence against anyone.

Several who posted comments on the PJTV video stated that they had attended Benson’s workshop and that each time someone would point out the threat posed by groups such as Islamic extremists, or the Occupy movement, workshop leaders would turn their comments around to continue the established scenario that ordinary citizens are the ones who pose the threat due to their hysteria over Islam and liberal insurrectionist groups.

Yet the ones who routinely call for violence against those who steadfastly resist their collectivist plans are the liberals in academia, government, the media, and left wing activist groups.

Time Magazine’s Joe Klein once accused conservatives shortly after the 2008 election that they were guilty of “sedition” and implied that sedition laws should be resurrected so that conservatives who resist the program being implemented by Barack Obama could be rounded up and jailed. Pamela Geller of the blog Atlas Shrugs has received countless death threats for merely reporting the facts on the activities of extremist Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood stated recently that America will be “brought to its knees.” Liberal commentators on various web sites have routinely called for the deaths of conservatives such as Dick Cheney and Michelle Malkin, and when former Fox News commentator Tony Snow was diagnosed with cancer, left wing hysterics stated that they hoped he would die a slow, painful death.

But these examples are only the tip of the iceberg. President Barack Obama stated in 2008 during the presidential campaign, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Obama’s friend and political ally Bill Ayers called for young people to kill their parents when he launched the very first “occupy” movement in Chicago in 1969. Ayers is also on record as stating that he supports the killing of tens of millions of conservatives unless they agree to be reeducated in his extremist liberal agenda.

Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, have often stated that they have not changed their views at all since the 1960s and wish they had done much more to advance their agenda.

In addition, the Communist-Socialist-Marxist ideology is singularly responsible for the deaths of over 100 million people during the 20th century alone. Stalin murdered at least 20 million Russians. Chairman Mao murdered at least 65 million Chinese. Fidel Castro along with his henchman Che Guevara murdered hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans, a figure that many say is much too low. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge murdered at least 5 million Cambodians and Southeast Asians after the Viet Nam War.

An in-depth study conducted by a University of Texas professor in 1997 for the National Center for Policy Analysis places the figures cited above much higher.

Over 100 Million Now Receiving Federal Welfare

Related:

CIS: 57% of illegal immigrant households on welfare – LINK

Welfare grew by 19% under Obama! Total Obama Stimulus Bills $2.5 TRILLION – LINK

5.4 Million Join Disability Rolls Under Obama – LINK

Real GDP Tanked at 1.7%. Food Stamps and Welfare at Record Levels – LINK

Food Stamp Spending Doubled Since 2008. Welfare Spending Nearing $1 Trillion a Year – LINK

 

 

The Weekly Standard:

“The federal government administers nearly 80 different overlapping federal means-tested welfare programs,” the Senate Budget Committee notes. However, the committee states, the figures used in the chart do not include those who are only benefiting from Social Security and/or Medicare.

Food stamps and Medicaid make up a large–and growing–chunk of the more than 100 million recipients. “Among the major means tested welfare programs, since 2000 Medicaid has increased from 34 million people to 54 million in 2011 and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or food stamps) from 17 million to 45 million in 2011,” says the Senate Budget Committee. “Spending on food stamps alone is projected to reach $800 billion over the next decade.”

The data come “from the U.S. Census’s Survey of Income and Program Participation shows that nearly 110,000 million individuals received a welfare benefit in 2011. (These figures do not include other means-tested benefits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit or the health insurance premium subsidies included in the President’s health care law. CBO estimates that the premium subsidies, scheduled to begin in 2014, will cover at least 25 million individuals by the end of the decade.)”

President of Poland: Obama Betrayed Us

It is true. In order to suck up to Putin for nothing in return, Obama scrapped a missile defense deal with Poland that our government had already promised. On top of that Obama has mistreated Poland at every opportunity.

I wrote about this on my old college blog back in 2009:

Obama Throws Allies Under the Bus: Scraps Missile Defense for Poland and Czech Republic. UPDATE – Poles and Czech’s say they have been betrayed! – LINK

Obama Lied about Reason to Renege on Eastern European Missile Shield – LINK

 

 

Heritage:

This week, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski accused the Obama Administration of betrayal, saying, “Our mistake was that by accepting the American offer of a [missile defense] shield we failed to take into account the political risk associated with a change of president.… We paid a high political price. We do not want to make the same mistake again. We must have a missile system as an element of our defences.”

In 2009, President Obama cancelled the deal the U.S. had with Poland and the Czech Republic to build an interceptor site and radar that would provide protection of the U.S. homeland and allies from rogue ballistic missiles. Polish and Czech leaders took on the task of educating their populations of the necessity of defending their populations from Iranian missiles, of collaborating with the U.S. to do this, of having American soldiers on their territory, and—the hardest of all—that the blowback from Russia over the sites was worth it.

It is an American tradition—and not a uniquely Republican or Democratic one—to resolutely stand with America’s friends and confront, if necessary, those who threaten them. It was President John F. Kennedy who said, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

The last several years, starting with the abandonment of the missile defense site, President Obama has taken the U.S. down a path that takes a sudden departure from this policy.

Oregon Man Gets 30 Days in Jail for Collecting Rain Water

Some idiot prosecutor actuality wasted the taxpayers money with this nonsense. These are the kind of idiots that get voted into office. Who is the judge that sentenced him? He should be made into a laughing stock.

CNS News:

Gary Harrington, the Oregon man convicted of collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his rural property surrendered Wednesday morning to begin serving his 30-day, jail sentence in Medford, Ore.

“I’m sacrificing my liberty so we can stand up as a country and stand for our liberty,” Harrington told a small crowd of people gathered outside of the Jackson County (Ore.) Jail.

Several people held signs that showed support for Harrington as he was taken inside the jail.

Harrington was found guilty two weeks ago of breaking a 1925 law for having, what state water managers called “three illegal reservoirs” on his property. He was convicted of nine misdemeanors, sentenced to 30 days in jail and fined over $1500 for collecting rainwater and snow runoff on his property.

The Oregon Water Resources Department, claims that Harrington has been violating the state’s water use law by diverting water from streams running into the Big Butte River.

But Harrington says he is not diverting the state’s water — merely collecting rainwater and snow melt that falls or flows on his own property.

Harrington has vowed to continue to fight the penalty, stating that the government has become “big bullies” and that “from here on in, I’m going to fight it.”

“They’ve just gotten to be big bullies and if you just lay over and die and give up, that just makes them bigger bullies, Harrington said in an interview two weeks ago with CNSNews.com.

“We as Americans, we need to stand on our constitutional rights, on our rights as citizens and hang tough. This is a good country, we’ll prevail,” he said.

His release is expected in early September.

Muslim Brotherhood has Three Battalions Fighting in Syria

… and odds are the Obama Administration is arming them. The Obama Administration already helped the Brotherhood take over Egypt where they are already killing Christians and oppressing women and have promised war with Israel, and the Obama Administration helped the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya.

Times of Israel:

The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria has formed three armed battalions “for self-defense and to defend the oppressed,” the group’s spokesman said Sunday.

Mulham Al-Droubi told Saudi owned daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat that the battalions were created three months ago and are deployed across Syria, but “especially in areas with intense fighting.” He said they operated under the umbrella of the Free Syrian Army, which functions as a regular army but is composed of semi-independent units.

This was the first public acknowledgment of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood taking part in fighting on the ground. The precise number of combatants in the battalions is unknown.

The reports bolster expert opinions that the opposition forces include significant Islamist elements.

Droubi refused to tell the daily who was arming the forces, but noted that Syrians were capable of defending themselves and that no foreign fighters had entered the country.

British daily The Telegraph reported Friday that the Muslim Brotherhood “militia” was called “Armed men of the Muslim Brotherhood” and was formed in order to unite dispersed fighters on the ground. Hossam Abu-Habel, the son of a Syrian Muslim Brotherhood member in the 1950s, told the daily that he raises $40,000-$50,000 a month to provide weapons and other aid to Islamist fighters in the Homs region.

The Telegraph reported that a split has occurred between the Free Syrian Army (FSA), which conducts fighting on the ground, and the Syrian National Council (SNC), the political opposition in exile. The FSA has now established a political wing and receives funding from Saudi Arabia, while SNC is funded by Qatar.

An Islamic militiaman fighting in Aleppo told The Telegraph that he would be offended if associated with the Free Syrian Army.

GM Bailout: Obama Administration ordered the termination of retiree benefits for 20,000 non-union workers while topping off union benefits (video)

Welcome to Chicago….err I mean Detroit…..err I mean Washington; where if you don’t want to be punished you had better pay “the man”. This is unspeakable cruelty and where was the elite media?

UPDATE – Michelle Malkin tells the story:

UPDATE II – Retired Delphi Employees Spaek Out! http://www.whymrpresidentwhy.com/

UPDATE III – New ad tells story of how Obama screwed non-union GM employees:

Matt Boyle at The Daily Caller:

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.

Delphi, a 13-year old company that is independent of General Motors, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

The White House and Treasury Department have consistently maintained that the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) independently made the decision to terminate the 20,000 non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan. The PBGC is a federal government agency that handles private-sector pension benefits issues. Its charter calls for independent representation of pension beneficiaries’ interests.

Former Treasury official Matthew Feldman and former White House auto czar Ron Bloom, both key members of the Presidential Task Force on the Auto Industry during the GM bailout, have testified under oath that the PBGC, not the administration, led the effort to terminate the non-union Delphi workers’ pension plan.

“As a result of the Delphi Corporation bankruptcy, for example, Delphi and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation were forced to terminate Delphi’s pension plans, which means there are Delphi retirees who unfortunately will collect less than their full pension benefits,” Feldman testified on July 11, 2012.

The emails TheDC has obtained show that the Treasury Department, not the independent PBGC, was running the show.

Under 29 U.S.C. §1342, the PBGC is the only government entity that is legally empowered to initiate termination of a pension or make any official movements toward doing so.

NOTE – READ THE EMAILS HERE – LINK.

UPDATE IV – ‘Highly confidential’ internal Treasury documents show Obama admin’s involvement in Delphi pension scandal  – LINK

Liberal Extremists Send Death Threats to Olympic Shooter

And in case the attacks from the left on Gold Medalist Gabby Douglas didn’t turn your stomach in the case of Corey Cogdell the left has upped the ante.

UPDATE – The New York Times totally trashed American track record holder Lolo Jones because she is a Christian who is saving herself for the right man (and no I am not even linking it. We will not be referring hits to their trashy hit piece).

Team USA Corey Codgell
Team USA Corey Codgell

Via Michelle Malkin:

Threats to Corey Codgell 2Threats to Corey Codgell 1

Obama Administration Sues To Stop Military From Voting (video)

The Obama Administration is suing to make it harder for the military to vote in the key swing state of Ohio. This is not a surprise. Al Gore in 2000 sued Florida to get military ballots thrown out. Another trick is that counties ran by Democrats will deliberately mail out requested absentee ballots for military personnel late so that they cannot make it back on time. They always say “oops we made a mistake”. It is a mistake they make every election year.

Military ballots mailed late… – LINK

Dearborn Overseas Primary Ballots Coming in Despite Late Sendout: Dearborn is one of 70 municipalities included in a federal lawsuit for sending absentee ballots out past the June 23 deadline – LINK.

California counties miss deadline to send ballots to overseas, military voters – LINK.

Election clerks once again miss federal absentee ballot deadline: More than three dozen local election clerks appear to have missed a federally mandated deadline for sending out absentee ballots to military voters – LINK.

Congress votes to ignore checks and balances on political appointees…

We do not often post pieces from New American, but no matter what you think of them, this particular piece is spot on. I don’t know about you, but amending the Constitution by legislative fiat creeps me out. Aside from the fact that the law is royally unconstitutional, is LESS Congressional oversight of the Executive what we really need right now? There are some on the GOP who still just don’t get it and the Democrat leadership is off in Saul Alinsky land.

New American:

By a vote of 261-116, the House of Representatives passed a bill rewriting Article II of the Constitution and divesting the Senate of the power to accept or reject the appointment of many presidential nominees.

Last year, the Senate passed the measure by a vote of 79-20, so it now goes to the desk of President Obama for his signature.

“Important positions will be filled faster, government agencies will be more capable of offering valuable services to their constituents, and the overall confirmation process will be more efficient,” said Senator Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Dozens of key management positions in the Departments of Agriculture, Defense, Commerce, and Homeland Security (including the treasurer of the United States, the deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, the director of the Office for Domestic Preparedness, and the assistant administrator of FEMA) will now be filled by presidential edict, without the need of the “advice and consent” of the Senate, a phrase specifically removed from the process in the text of the bill.

Although the House vote occurred on Tuesday, the Senate voted to surrender its constitutional check on the executive over a year ago on June 29, 2011.

Despite a last-minute attempt by some House leaders to put the measure to a voice vote, thus allowing members to vote in favor of the legislation without being listed on the record, a roll call vote was taken, and the name of every congressman who voted to unconstitutionally neuter the legislative branch is listed.

The process began last March when Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and 15 cosponsors, including Republicans Lamar Alexander (Tenn.); Scott Brown (Mass.); and Mitch McConnell (Ky.), introduced S. 679, the “Presidential Appointment Efficiency and Streamlining Act.” The measure struck from many current laws the “advice and consent” requirement for many executive branch appointments, giving the president unchecked power to fill key administration positions.

In a memo sent to Capitol Hill in advance of Tuesday’s vote in the House, Thomas McClusky of the Family Research Council reminded lawmakers, “The United States Constitution does not bestow kingly powers on the President to appoint the senior officers of the government with no process.”

Although McClusky’s reading of the Constitution is accurate, as of Tuesday it is no longer the law of the land. According to proponents of the measure, the bill benefitted from such strong bipartisan support (95 Republicans joined 166 Democrats voting in favor of passage) because its sole purpose is to relieve the backlog of unconfirmed appointees by eliminating the confirmation requirement for about 200 offices.

The process by which heads of executive branch departments are appointed and confirmed is set forth by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution. The “Appointments Clause” provides that the president:

shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

Now, as soon as President Obama adds his signature to the bill, the checks and balances established by our Founding Fathers as a protection against tyranny will be eliminated, as well as the concept of enumerated powers.

NAACP leader sent to prison for 10 counts of vote fraud

This is why Eric Holder, the Obama Administration, oppose voter ID laws.

Daily Caller:

While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme.

In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee.

Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently, according to the Tunica Times, the only media outlet to cover the sentencing.

“This crime cuts against the fabric of our free society,” Judge Webster said.

Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross.

 

Obama Gives AARP $52 Million – And It Wasn’t Because He Loves Seniors….

AARP, whose board of directors has been hijacked by liberal political activists threw seniors under the bus when they supported ObamaCare with its bureaucrats that can deny seniors access to care (after Obamacare is fully implemented) and its half a TRILLION dollars in Medicare cuts. President Obama of course sought to enrich those who run AARP with some giveaways [from my old college blog – yes we were paying attention even then]:

AARP Making Mega-Millions on Corrupt ObamaCare “Easter Egg” – LINK

Corrupt AARP Health Care Deal Puts Seniors at Risk – LINK

AARP and Many Others Hiking Premiums or Dumping Coverage Because of ObamaCare – LINK

 

Now this. Big Government:

Today, the Department of Labor proudly announced that it had given away some $260 million in grants to various organizations through its Senior Community Service Employment Program (SCSEP). SCSEP is “a community service and work-based training program for older workers – providing subsidized, part-time, community service training for unemployed, low-income persons 55 or older who have poor employment prospects.”

Sounds great. Except the biggest recipients of SCSEP cash are Democratic political surrogates.

The largest single recipient of general SCSEP funds was – you guessed it – the American Association of Retired Persons Foundation, which pulled down almost $52 million. The AARP Foundation is a wing of the AARP, which stands to make some $1 billion over the next decade thanks to Obamacare and spends hundreds of millions of dollars to push liberal policies. The head of the AARP contributed some $8,900 to Obama’s campaign committees in 2008.

Coincidentally, the DOL is handing $6.6 million to the National Urban League – and it just so happens that President Obama spoke at the NUL this week in an attempt to reinvigorate his black support base.

The goodies keep on coming for President Obama’s friends. And that’s his entire campaign strategy: buy off specific constituency with taxpayer cash, and then let them push him to victory.

Senator Hatch: Obama Holding Country Hostage With Tax Plan

The GOP needs to get the message out that the tax the Democrats wish to raise does not have much impact on millionaires and billionaires, because most of their income is defined as “unearned”; rather it will impact the small businesses who actually employ people the most.

Remember that new taxes that are designed to soak the rich for some reason just don’t. Instead they impact the productive middle class and risk takers which benefits large, well connected mega-corps.

Newsmax:

President Barack Obama blamed Republicans on Saturday for a stalemate that could increase taxes on Americans next year while a leading Senate Republican cast Obama and his Democratic Party as obstructionists who want to place the tax burden on businesses during an economic slowdown.

In his weekly radio and online address, Obama pressed the Republican-controlled House to extend Bush-era tax cuts for households making $250,000 or less while letting lower rates on wealthier taxpayers expire and go up. The Democratic-controlled Senate narrowly passed such a measure earlier in the week, but the House is not expected to follow suit.

“Instead of doing what’s right for middle-class families and small-business owners, Republicans in Congress are holding these tax cuts hostage until we extend tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans,” Obama said.

Responding on behalf of the congressional GOP, Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said Obama’s plan would do more harm to the economy and criticized him with almost identical language. He called for extending current tax rates for all taxpayers and spending 2013 overhauling and simplifying the tax code.

“Raising taxes as our economy continues to struggle is not a solution, and the majority of Americans and businesses understand that,” Hatch said. “The president and his Washington allies need to stop holding America’s economy hostage in order to raise taxes on those trying to lead our economic recovery.”

Obama Administration Reverses on Jerusalem Being Capital of Israel

We saw the first part of this video of Jay Carney as it went viral on the net, but stay tuned and watch what comes next from the State Department in the form of Spokesman Victoria Nuland on March 29, 2012. We apologize for totally missing this when it happened. It got very little coverage.

Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” comments were not out of context (video)

Romney Obama Built Out of Context

Judge for yourself. When Obama goes off teleprompter he gets that tear and hesitation in his voice that we have gotten to know so well.

Governor Romney makes a good point here – “The Context Is Worse Than The Quote”

The “You didn’t build that/you don’t deserve to keep most of your profits” theme is nothing new among radicalized anti-capitalist academia. I heard it when I was in college from Marxist professors. In the video below Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren, the professor who lied about being a native American to get her job at university, says the same thing (listen to the hostility in her voice).

Report: FBI Didn’t Probe Ft. Hood Shooter Over ‘Political Correctness’

People in government do not behave this way because they fear Republicans….
Newsmax:

The FBI was too concerned about political correctness and did not launch an investigation into a man who was later charged with killing 13 people in a 2009 attack at the Fort Hood military installation in Texas, despite significant warning signs that he was an Islamic extremist bent on killing civilians, according to a lawmaker briefed on a new report about the terrorist attack.

In emails to a known terrorist, Army Maj. Nidal Hasan expressed his support for suicide bombings and killing civilians, while the terrorist, Anwar al-Awlaki, encouraged Hasan to stay in touch, Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, told The Associated Press on Wednesday after he was briefed on the findings of a new review of the attack.

The review was done by former FBI Director William Webster and was more than two years in the making. FBI Director Robert Mueller asked that Webster conduct an independent review, and the bureau is expected to release an unclassified version this week.

Much was already known about the series of oversights and missteps the government made leading to the terror attack at the Fort Hood Army post.

Soon after the attack, it was revealed that members of two FBI anti-terrorism task forces saw emails between the Army psychiatrist and al-Awlaki beginning in December 2008. Those task forces reviewed the communications and decided they were in keeping with Hasan’s research at the time, and as a result, no formal investigation of Hasan was opened. Hasan was writing a research paper about the effects of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But McCaul said Webster’s report offers some new details that show the FBI was concerned about investigating an American Muslim in the military, and that is why an investigation was not pursued.

IAC: Previous IPCC Reports failed to meet basic academic standards; Participants “too political”

I have been waiting for this for a long time. When I was in college finishing my latest degree I was making many of these very same claims about global warming alarmist nonsense as the IAC report below. Leftist students and faculty pretty much told me that I was nuts, and I wasn’t a climate scientist so how would I know? Well it looks like I knew. It was easy. First of all it doesn’t take a genius to see when the scientific method is being ignored and second of all, what I am an expert on is politics and I know a political movement when I see one.

At the bottom of the article I posted a list of links that I wrote starting in 2007 saying many of the same things the IAC has pointed out below. Why am I so often using the word “I” when that is not an attitude that as editor I often take here at Political Arena? To be honest, I am going to take the low road and revel in rubbing it in my critic’s noses. I reactivated my old college blog just for the purpose of posting this story. We should ask ourselves what has happened to our education system when the doctoral academics who doubted me and called me names behind my back were all wrong, while the mere undergrad like me was spot on? – Chuck Norton

President of the Heartland Institute Joseph L. Bast:

On June 27, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the Inter Academy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”

Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.

If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as a many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined.  The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary.  Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted.  Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist.

The “recommendations” issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound scientific procedure.  Here are some of the findings of the IAC’s 2010 report.

Alternative views not considered, claims not properly peer reviewed

The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and are not “consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their responses” (p. 22).  In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer-reviewed.

No formal criteria for selecting IPCC authors

The IAC found that “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18).  Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18).  In other words: authors are selected from a “club” of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.

Too political…

The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists — a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers — was plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking.  “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the IAC auditors wrote.  The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25).

Really?  Too political?  We were told by everyone — environmentalists, reporters, politicians, even celebrities — that the IPCC reports were science, not politics.  Now we are told that even the scientists involved in writing the reports — remember, they are all true believers in man-made global warming themselves — felt the summaries were “too political.”

Here is how the IAC described how the IPCC arrives at the “consensus of scientists”:

Plenary sessions to approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and commonly end with an all-night meeting.  Thus, the individuals with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).

How can such a process possibly be said to capture or represent the “true consensus of scientists”?

Phony estimates of certainty

Another problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony “confidence intervals” and estimates of “certainty” in the Summary for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34).  Those of us who study the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in 2007.  Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some prediction, and then affix a number to it such as “80% confident.”  Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.

The IAC authors say it is “not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty” (p. 34), a huge understatement.  Unfortunately, the IAC authors recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called “level of understanding scale,” which is more mush-mouth for “consensus.”

The IAC authors warn, also on page 34, that “conclusions will likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of ‘very high confidence’ will have little substantive value.”  Yes, but that doesn’t keep the media and environmental activists from citing them over and over again as “proof” that global warming is man-made and a crisis…even if that’s not really what the reports’ authors are saying.

IPCC participants had conflicts of interest

Finally, the IAC noted, “the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written input” as well as “the practice of scientists responsible for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work.  The Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is beyond the mandate of this review” (p. 46).

Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all.  That’s a structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems already reported.

IPCC critics vindicated

So on June 27, nearly two years after these bombshells fell (without so much as a raised eyebrow by the mainstream media in the U.S. — go ahead and try Googling it), the IPCC admits that it was all true and promises to do better for its next report.  Nothing to see here…keep on moving.

Well I say, hold on, there!  The news release means that the IAC report was right.  That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable.  Not just “possibly flawed” or “could have been improved,” but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.

It means that all of the “endorsements” of the climate consensus made by the world’s national academies of science — which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis — were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised.  It means that the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health — was wrong and should be overturned.

And what of the next IPCC report, due out in 2013 and 2014?  The near-final drafts of that report have been circulating for months already.  They were written by scientists chosen by politicians rather than on the basis of merit; many of them were reviewing their own work and were free to ignore the questions and comments of people with whom they disagree.  Instead of “confidence,” we will get “level of understanding scales” that are just as meaningless.

And on this basis we should transform the world’s economy to run on breezes and sunbeams?

In 2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global warming was compromised and probably false.  On June 27, the culprits confessed and promised to do better.  But where do we go to get our money back?

Related from my old college blog:

Inconvenient Questions Global Warming Alarmists Don’t Want You to Ask – February 18, 2007 – LINK

Top Scientists Say: You Are Not the Cause of Global Warming – October 22, 2007 – LINK

Global Cooling Continues; Global Warming Alarmists Still Issuing Death Threats – December 28, 2008 – LINK

UK Telegraph: 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved – December 28, 2008 – LINK

National Climatic Data Center: Cooling in Last 10 Years – January 10, 2009 – LINK

The Debate is Over. Global Warming Alarmism is About Achieving Central Control of the Economy and Now They Admit It Openly – March 27, 2009 – LINK

Al Gore: Climate change issue can lead to world government – July 11, 2009 – LINK

EPA Tried to Suppress Global Warming Report Admitting Skeptics Correct – October 23, 2009 – LINK

New AP Article on “Global Cooling Myth” Spins a Bad Study – UPDATED: Look where they put THIS ground station… – October 27, 2009 – LINK

Professors Paid to Plagiarize – UPDATE: Global warming scientists hacked emails show manipulation of data, hiding of other data and conspiring to attack/smear global warming skeptics! – November 19, 2009 – LINK

National Association of Scholars on the “ClimateGate” Scandal – November 28, 2009 – LINK

Examples of the “Climategate” Documents – UPDATE: BBC Had the emails and files for 6 weeks, sat on story. UPDATE II – They carried out their conspiracy threat; much of the raw data from CRU destroyed! – November 28, 2009 – LINK

Scientific American thinks you are stupid: The dissection of a blatant propaganda piece for global warming alarmism. – December 6, 2009 – LINK

The Roundup: IPCC Authors Now Admitting Fault – No Warming Since 1995 – Sea Levels Not Rising. Senator Inhofe: Possible criminal misuse of taxpayer research funds. – February 23, 2010 – LINK

OOPS AGAIN: IPCC scientists screeching about the cataclysmic effects of sea-level rises forgot to consider sedimentary deposits… – April 23, 2010 – LINK

UN IPCC Co-chair: climate policy is redistributing the world’s wealth – November 18, 2010 – LINK

More Hadley Center Global Warming Horror Claims Debunked by Real Science – December 6, 2010 – LINK

ClimateGate One Year Later. Elite Media Still Lying – December 6, 2010 – LINK

More ClimateGate One Year Later – December 7, 2010 – LINK

IPCC Lead Author Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT: Most global warming models are exaggerated, many scientists in it for the grant money or treat it like a religion – December 7, 2010 – LINK

How Global Warming Propaganda Works – December 8, 2010 – LINK

NASA’s global warming evidence page filled with lies, half truths and suspect data – December 10, 2010 – LINK

Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research: Halt economic growth, start government rationing. Global Warming Alarmists Party Fat in Cancun – December 21, 2010 – LINK

Global Warming Conference Delegates Sign Petitions to Ban Water and “Destabilize U.S. Economy” – February 15, 2011 – LINK

Global Warming Alarmist Quote of the Day – Former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart: No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.

AAUP Seeks to Limit Transparency Over Climate Science – September 19, 2011 – LINK

US Govt. Makes Deal With Mexican Government to Push Food Stamps on Mexicans…..

Is this the change you voted for?

Daily Caller:

The Mexican government has been working with the United States Department of Agriculture to increase participation in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps.

USDA has an agreement with Mexico to promote American food assistance programs, including food stamps, among Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.

“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance,” the USDA explains in a brief paragraph on their “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics With Nutrition Assistance” web page. “Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”

The partnership — which was signed by former USDA Secretary Ann M. Veneman and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Ernesto Derbez Bautista in 2004 — sees to it that the Mexican Embassy and Mexican consulates in America provide USDA nutrition assistance program information to Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals working in America and migrant communities in America. The information is specifically focused on eligibility criteria and access.

The goal, for USDA, is to get rid of what they see as enrollment obstacles and increase access among potentially eligible populations by working with arms of the Mexican government in America. Benefits are not guaranteed or provided under the program — the purpose is outreach and education.

Some of the materials the USDA encourages the Mexican government to use to educate and promote the benefit programs are available free online for order and download. A partial list of materials include English and Spanish brochures titled “Five Easy Steps To Snap Benefits,” “How To Get Food Help — A Consumer’s Guide to FNCS Programs,” “Ending Hunger Improving Nutrition Combating Obesity,” and posters with slogans like “Food Stamps Make America Stronger.”

When asked for details and to elaborate on the program, USDA stressed it was established in 2004 and not meant for illegal immigrants.

[Political Arena Editor Responds – That is what the Obama Administration said about Fast & Furious; the documentation revision for this program is dated Feb, 16, 2012.]

Corrupt banks still paying Democrats….

In 2008 I wrote a long series of articles about the mortgage collapse, who engineered it, who got paid and who is lying.

Related: House Oversight Committee: Members of Congress Received Special Favors from Mortgage Lenders – LINK

Our dear friend Michelle Malkin has put out a column that takes us through memory lane on who was getting paid by the big banks, who was peddling influence, and who was engaging in a pattern of government corruption that is becoming all too familiar. And what is below is only HALF of her column as the examples are almost unending….

 

Michelle Malkin:

Your guide to sleazy Democratic Party-backed banks
Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod and his hatchet people are still yammering about GOP presidential rival Mitt Romney’s overseas investments. It’s time for the Romney campaign to educate voters about all the shady financial institutions embraced by Democrats right here on American soil.

The fat-cat narrative attacks on Republicans won’t go away by making nice with the White House — or by relying on Beltway journalists to drop their double standards and vet the president’s own bad bank entanglements. Indeed, The New York Times admitted this week that their staff and other political journalists from every major media outlet submit their work to the White House for unprecedented review, editing and “veto power.”

Fortunately, the truth manipulators and message massagers haven’t gotten to this column yet. So, let’s talk sleazy Democratic Party-backed banks, shall we?

Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Forget Switzerland. The mother and father of all financial industry outrages are rooted in Washington, D.C. And Obama Democrats are among the biggest winners of lavish, out-of-control compensation packages from fraud-plagued Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Obama confidante James Johnson raked in $21 million. Former Obama chief of staff and current Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel “earned” at least $320,000 for a brief 14-month gig at Freddie Mac. And Clinton Fannie Mae head and Obama economic confidante Franklin Raines bagged some $90 million in pay and stock options earned during the government-sponsored institution’s Enron-style accounting scandal on the public dime.

Self-appointed banking policewoman and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has, uncharacteristically, kept her mouth shut about these wealthy barons.

Superior Bank. One of the Obamas’ oldest Chicago friends and wealthiest billionaire bundlers, former Obama national finance chairwoman Penny Pritzker, headed up this subprime lender. Even after it went under in 2001 and left 1,400 customers destitute, Pritzker was pushing to expand its toxic subprime loan business. Pritzker and her family escaped accountability by forking over $460 million over 15 years. Obama happily accepted the nearly $800 million in campaign and inaugural funding Pritzker drummed up for him. To protect her family’s multibillion dollar fortune, Pritzker’s enterprises park their money in the very same kind of offshore trusts her candidate is attacking Romney over.

Broadway Bank. In 2010, President and Mrs. Obama personally raised money for their Chicago friend and fundraiser Alexi Giannoulias, who ran unsuccessfully for Obama’s old Illinois Senate seat. As I reported then, Giannoulias’ Greek immigrant family founded Chicago-based Broadway Bank, a now-defunct financial institution that loaned tens of millions of dollars to convicted mafia felons and faced bankruptcy after decades of engaging in risky, high-flying behavior. It’s the place where Obama parked his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign funds. And it’s the same place where a mutual friend of Obama and Giannoulias — convicted Obama fundraiser and slumlord Tony Rezko — used to bounce nearly $500,000 in bad checks written to Las Vegas casinos.

Chicago’s former inspector general blasted Giannoulias and his family for tapping $70 million worth of dividends in 2007 and 2008 as the real estate crash loomed. Broadway Bank was sitting on an estimated $250 million in bad loans. The cost to taxpayers after the bank was shut down two years ago: an estimated $390 million.

ShoreBank. The “progressive” Chicago-based community development bank, a “green” financial institution whose mission was to “create economic equity and a healthy environment,” folded in August 2010. Obama personally had endorsed the politically connected bank and appeared in a video promoting its Kenyan microlending project. But it was a doomed social justice experiment. After regulators shut it down, Obama crony companies including Bank of America and Goldman Sachs took over the mess courtesy of taxpayer subsidies.

Countrywide/Bank of America. Earlier this month, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released a report on corruption-plagued Countrywide Financial Corp., which was bailed out by taxpayer-bailed-out Bank of America. The House investigation confirmed the notorious favor-trading scheme, which involved sweetheart home loan deals for members of Congress and their staff, top government officials and executives of doomed mortgage giant Fannie Mae.

“These relationships helped (Countrywide CEO and Democratic subprime loan king Angelo) Mozilo increase his own company’s profits while dumping the risk of bad loans on taxpayers,” according to the new report. Mozilo copped a $67.5 million plea to avert a high-stakes public trial in the heat of the 2010 midterm election season. Since then, Obama’s Justice Department has taken no action to prosecute Countrywide officials on federal bribery charges.

Among the influence-peddling operation’s most prominent beneficiaries: the aforementioned Obama top adviser Jim Johnson, who accepted more than $7 million in below-market-rate Countrywide loans, and former Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, whose ill-fated 2010 re-election bid was personally endorsed by Obama. Obama stood by Dodd even as sordid details of his two discounted Countrywide loans and record Countrywide PAC donations mounted.

Bank of Democratic America, which raked in $45 billion in Obama-supported TARP bailout funds and billions more in secret emergency federal loans, footed the $50 million restitution payment bill for Mozilo and another Countrywide official. In 2008, BofA’s political action committee gave its biggest contributions to Obama, totaling $421,000. And as I noted in January, Bank of America supplied the Democrats with a $15 million revolving line of credit, along with an additional $17 million loan during the 2010 midterms.

Embarrassed by the party’s ties to shady Bank of America, progressives are now trying to rebrand the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, N.C., where Obama will give his nomination acceptance address. They’re referring to it as “Panthers Stadium” instead.

Obama threatened to Veto the Defense Authorization Act because it would require that soldiers shot by home grown terrorists be given the purple heart

Now why would Obama be so opposed to soldiers getting a purple heart who were shot by home grown jihadists such as those at Fort Hood by Major Hassan? This speaks volumes about the radicalized mindset of this president. Remember how Obama wanted to define the Hassan shootings as “workplace violence” instead of what it really was?

USA Today:

This spring, the Obama administration threatened to veto the 2013 Defense Authorization Act. Of all the reasons given for the threat, the objection to granting the Purple Heart to Pvt. Andy Long stands out as strange. That is, unless you know the story.

On June 1, 2009, Pvt. Long was killed outside an Army recruiting office in Little Rock by Carlos Bledsoe, who had become Abdul Hakim Mohammed after converting to Islam. Since then, we, the fathers of Carlos and Andy, have been trying to tell our story so that other parents do not experience our tragedy.

Carlos grew up in a loving, church-going family. There’s a picture of Carlos at his high school graduation with a huge smile on his face, ready to go off to Tennessee State University for college. He looked forward to becoming a businessman and joining the family owned tour company in Memphis.

Switch to Islamism

But he did not get the education everyone expected. Instead, he became interested in Islamic extremism. At TSU, preachers from a radical Nashville mosque led courses in Islam. Eventually, Carlos began frequenting this mosque, converted, and took the name of the mosque’s imam. This imam taught worshipers that America “is the worst country on earth,” that the Christian faith is “the greatest lie ever told,” that this worldly life “is trash,” and that Muslims must seek death and the afterlife.

Carlos began to change his behavior: He abandoned his dog in the woods because he was told Muslims shouldn’t have dogs. He took Martin Luther King‘s picture off his bedroom wall. He was sent by another Nashville imam to a school in Yemen, which turned out to be an al-Qaeda front. Carlos then returned to America and planned his own jihad.

Andy grew up in a military family and decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He found out he was good at it; he enjoyed it. Before being deployed to South Korea, he volunteered to work as a recruiter in Little Rock near our home. His mother, Janet, went to visit him there on June 1, 2009.

Fateful day

That was the day Carlos decided to kill a soldier. He had already firebombed a rabbi’s house in Nashville and shot up another rabbi’s house in Little Rock. That morning, he fired three bullets at Andy. Quinton Ezeagwula, another soldier, was also shot but survived. Carlos eventually pleaded guilty to killing Andy, and was sentenced to life in prison without chance for parole.

Since that tragic day, we have been speaking out about the dangers of homegrown terrorists. We testified to Congress, with mixed results. Some congressmen dismissed us for not being experts. Nevertheless, following our testimony, Congress passed a provision, as part of the defense bill, to give the Purple Heart to Andy and the victims of a similar 2009 attack at Fort Hood, Texas. Now the administration is threatening to deny it.

The president, we believe, doesn’t want to admit the first successful al-Qaeda murder on U.S. soil since 9/11 happened on his watch or to acknowledge the problem of homegrown Islamic radicalization. This indirectly provides cover to extremists at the expense of moderate Muslims. To withhold the Purple Heart from U.S. soldiers for political reasons is to dishonor those who risk everything to protect us all.

We have pledged to our families and to ourselves that we will not be silent until America knows what happened to our sons. On June 1, 2009, it happened to Andy and Carlos. Tomorrow, it could be your children.

Melvin Bledsoe is the father of Carlos, who fatally shot Pvt. Andy Long, son of Daris Long. They have cooperated in producing a documentary that can be viewed at losingoursons.com.

MUST SEE: ObamaCare’s Impact on YOU (video)

You know that the elite media in the United States has failed us when Russia Today (AKA “RT”) – the mouthpiece for Vladimir Putin – gives the best analysis I have yet seen on a major network (granted RT isn’t huge in the United States, but around the world it is). Russia Today not only explains why the Roberts ruling is preposterous as a matter of law, and then explains several of the economic consequences of ObamaCare. This very writer has called out Russia Today as a mouthpiece for Putin before, but with that said, in this segment Russia Today displays one of the finest pieces of television journalism I have ever seen.

Russia Today has an agenda of showing the United States as authoritarian, silly, corrupt, willing to break its own laws, and anything but small government. Russia Today doesn’t have to make it up any more with the Obama Administration because all they have to do is highlight and accurately cover the stories the elite media will not to accomplish Putin’s goals.

Our friend Samantha Frederickson has a GREAT post explaining the consequences of ObamaCare that will impact you after the clip from Russia Today below. Start the video at the 2:00 mark:

Now consider this — the PPACA sets forth a “fine” (tax) of $2,000 per employee for a business that has 50 or more and does not provide “at least” the minimum “insurance” to all.

There is no health care plan I’m aware of that a business can buy today that costs less than $2,000 per employee per year, and which also meets the requirements in the law.  None.  That was almost impossible to meet back in 1995 for a healthy, 18 year old insured single male.  It’s flatly impossible now and it’s doubly-so if your workforce has other than 18-year old single, healthy males in it.  I know this to be factual because I was responsible for buying it for our employees as a CEO of a company.

Therefore the incentive is for all businesses to drop health care.

Period.

Second, your choice is to either (1) buy and have said plan (whether through employment or individually) or pay a “fine” (tax) of 1% of income (increasing to 2.5% of AGI in 2016.)  The minimum “fine” is $95 starting in 2013, rising to $695 in 2016.  The average family income is about $50,000/year, which means that the fine (tax) will be $1,250 in 2016.  It’s less now.

You cannot buy health insurance at their “minimum level” for anything approaching $1,250 a year no matter how healthy you are at any age. 

The law prohibits insurance companies from charging you more if you’re sick, or refusing to cover you at all.  They must accept everyone on equal terms.

Therefore:

  • Businesses will drop coverage; it’s cheaper (by far) for them to pay the fine and, for those under 133% of the federal poverty level, those employees can go onto Medicaid.  This is a “family of four” income of $31,900 (as of today; it will go up of course.)  That’s roughly the second quintile.
  • Individuals will drop coverage and pay the fine, since it’s far cheaper than to buy the “insurance.”

Both will buy the “insurance” only when they get sick, since they cannot be upcharged.

The cost of “insurance” will thus skyrocket to 10x or more what it costs now, just as it would if you bought auto insurance only after you wrecked or homeowners insurance only after you had a fire.

At the higher price nobody will be able to afford to buy the insurance at all, since that will be indistinguishable from just paying for whatever is wrong with you, plus the insurance company markup.

In very short order the entire medical system and health insurance scheme will collapse, leaving only two choices — either a return to free market principles (including all I’ve argued for since this debate began) or a single-payer, fully-socialized system ala Canada.

You can bet the government will continue to try to change the terms of the deal — including ramping up the tax/fine and other games, to prevent this outcome, but they will fail.

Now the question becomes this:

Which Presidential political candidates have told you the above, and what are their answers to this dilemma?

Let’s go down the list.

  • We know what Obama’s is — he passed it.  You will lose your private health care under Obama.  Period.  We are headed for a fully-socialized medical system and a collapse of the current medical paradigm under Obama.
  • We know what Gary Johnson’s position is — he wants to “block grant” all Medicare and Medicaid to the states, cut the amount of money in the budget (all line items) 43% and repeal Obamacare (including the mandate.)  But he refuses to demand an end to the cost-shifting where Juanita the illegal Mexican immigrant who is 7-1/2 months pregnant while drug and alcohol dependent shows up in the hospital, in labor, and foists off a $2.5 million NICU and birth expense bill on you!  He also refuses to stop the drug companies from effectively forcing Americans to bear the cost of all drug and device development and he has refused to put a stop to differential billing.  The latter two only exist because of explicit federal laws that make lawful in the health industry market behaviors that are illegal in virtually every other line of work (see The Sherman Act, The Clayton Act, and Robinson-Patman for starters.)  All of these facts are why the costs are ramping in the first place, which means his plan will simply force the States into bankruptcy and continue screwing you at the same time.
  • We don’t know what Romney’s plan is in detail.  He’s been oddly silent in that regard.  He says “Obamacare is not the answer” but he passed it as Governor on a state basis!  He too advocates nothing to put a stop to the cost-shifting and anti-competitive acts of drug and device makers nor hospitals and other medical providers.  He too wants to block grant Medicaid but that does nothing to address the problem and will simply bankrupt the state budgets (as noted for Johnson.)   Conspicuously absent from Romney’s plan (as is true for Johnson) is (1) a repeal of EMTALA, (2) a demand for level, consistent pricing irrespective of how one pays for a service (3) and a demand to remove anti-competitive laws protecting differential billing across state and national boundaries (e.g. Viagra for $2 in Canada .vs. $20 here) so that Americans are not forced to subsdize everyone else in the world and you pay the same price as the guy next to you in the hospital for the same product or service, instead of 2x, 3x, 5x, or even 100x as much.

So we have three Presidential candidates, none of which will do a damn thing to fix what’s wrong with health care.  All three are promoting a path that will bankrupt the States, bankrupt the Federal Government, bankrupt you or all three.

All three are promoting mathematical impossibilities.  All three are protecting monopolistic behavior and refusing to address specific laws that were passed to protect that behavior and special government-granted privilege; without those protections that monopolistic behavior would immediately collapse.

And worse, none of them has proposed a damn thing to deal with what the Supreme Court just did, which is grant a permanent ability to the Federal Government to compel any behavior by linking it to a tax.  Some examples of where this can (and might in the near future!) go include:

  • You make cars.  You’re told to sell a car to anyone who makes under $25,000 a year for $5,000.  This is of course under your cost of production.  If you refuse, every car you make is subject to a $5,000 tax.  This is now Constitutional, as of this last week.
  • You would like to have three kids.  The government decides that you may have only two.  If you have get pregnant with a third and refuse to have an abortion you must pay $10,000 a year in additional tax forever.  This is now Constitutional, as of last week.
  • You may have all the abortions you want, but each costs $10,000 in tax.  This is Constitutional, as of last week.
  • You must eat Broccoli and submit receipts with your 1040 proving you bought 1lb of Broccoli per person in your household per week.  If you do not, you must pay $5,000 in additional tax.  This is Constitutional, as of last week.
  • If you are more than 10lbs overweight you must pay $2,000 of additional tax for every 10lbs overweight you are, with no cap.  This is Constitutional, as of last week.

You probably think I’m kidding on this.  I’m not.  This is what the Roberts Court held.  There is literally nothing that Congress cannot mandate that you do, or not do, under penalty of paying a tax.  All that was unconstitutional before the ruling now is explicitly constitutional if the only “compulsion” to do (or not do) a given thing is that you will be taxed if you refuse.  The court promised to review “reasonableness” of any such taxes in the future, but note that at the same time the court ignored two other problems with the Health Care law, making a lie of their claim of “future reasonableness” tests right up front:

  • Direct taxes are unconstitutional without being apportioned.  This is clearly a direct tax and it is not apportioned.  It is therefore unconstitutional, but the USSC simply ignored this. (The 16th Amendment was required to make income taxes constitutional for this reason.)
  • The Anti-Injunction Act prohibits suing the government over a tax until you have actually paid it.  This means that if the PPACA “penalty” is a tax then the entire lawsuit that went to the USSC is moot as it’s not yet “ripe” (since nobody has yet paid the tax.)  If they were going to find that this was a tax they were thus bound to dismiss the entire complaint as unripe.  They ignored that too.

In short the USSC has become no more legitimate than the North Korean government and is unworthy of your respect.

Prof. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to Tax

The case against Roberts’ preposterous ruling just keeps building.

Law Professor Paul Moreno:

The Supreme Court has long distinguished the regulatory from the taxing power.

In 1935, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins was fretting about finding a constitutional basis for the Social Security Act. Supreme Court Justice Harlan Fiske Stone advised her, “The taxing power, my dear, the taxing power. You can do anything under the taxing power.”

Last week, in his ObamaCare opinion, NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts gave Congress the same advice—just enact regulatory legislation and tack on a financial penalty, as in failure to comply with the individual insurance mandate. So how did the power to tax under the Constitution become unbounded?

The first enumerated power that the Constitution grants to Congress is the “power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States.” The text indicates that the taxing power is not plenary, but can be used only for defined ends and objects—since a comma, not a semicolon, separated the clauses on means (taxes) and ends (debts, defense, welfare).

This punctuation was no small matter. In 1798, Pennsylvania Rep. Albert Gallatin said that fellow Pennsylvania Rep. Gouverneur Morris, chairman of the Committee on Style at the Constitutional Convention, had smuggled in the semicolon in order to make Congress’s taxing power limitless, but that the alert Roger Sherman had the comma restored. The altered punctuation, Gallatin said, would have turned “words [that] had originally been inserted in the Constitution as a limitation to the power of levying taxes” into “a distinct power.” Thirty years later, Virginia Rep. Mark Alexander accused Secretary of State John Quincy Adams of doing the same thing after Congress instructed the administration to print copies of the Constitution.

The punctuation debate simply reinforced James Madison’s point in Federalist No. 41 that Congress could tax and spend only for those objects enumerated, primarily in Article I, Section 8.

Congress enacted very few taxes up to the end of the Civil War, and none that was a pretext for regulating things that the Constitution gave it no power to regulate. True, the purpose of tariffs was to protect domestic industry from foreign competition, not raise revenue. But the Constitution grants Congress a plenary power to regulate commerce with other nations.

Congress also enacted a tax to destroy state bank notes in 1866, but this could be seen as a “necessary and proper” means to stop the states from usurping Congress’s monetary or currency power. It was upheld in Veazie Bank v. Fenno (1869).

The first unabashed use of the taxing power for regulatory purposes came when Congress enacted a tax on “oleomargarine” in 1886. Dairy farmers tried to drive this cheaper butter substitute from the market but could only get Congress to adopt a mild tax, based on the claim that margarine was often artificially colored and fraudulently sold as butter. President Grover Cleveland reluctantly signed the bill, saying that if he were convinced the revenue aspect was simply a pretext “to destroy . . . one industry of our people for the protection and benefit of another,” he would have vetoed it.

Congress imposed another tax on margarine in 1902, which the Supreme Court upheld (U.S. v. McCray, 1904). Three justices dissented, but without writing an opinion.

Then, in 1914, Congress imposed taxes on druggists’ sales of opiates as a way to regulate their use. Five years later, in U.S. v. Doremus , the Supreme Court upheld the levy under Congress’s express power to impose excise taxes.

Then, in 1922, the court rejected Congress’s attempt to prohibit child labor by imposing a tax on companies that employed children. An earlier attempt to accomplish this, by prohibiting the interstate shipment of goods made by child labor, was struck down as unconstitutional—since it was understood since the earliest days of the republic that Congress had the power to regulate commerce but not manufacturing. “A Court must be blind not to see that the so-called tax is imposed to stop the employment of children within the age limits prescribed,” Chief Justice William Howard Taft wrote in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co. “Its prohibitory and regulatory effect and purpose are palpable.” Even liberal justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis D. Brandeis concurred in Taft’s opinion.

Things came to a head in the New Deal, when Congress imposed a tax on food and fiber processors and used those tax dollars to provide benefits to farmers. Though in U.S. v. Butler (1936) the court adopted a more expansive view of the taxing power—allowing Congress to tax and spend for the “general welfare” beyond the powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution—it still held the ends had to be “general” and not transfer payments from one group to another. After President Franklin D. Roosevelt threatened to “pack” the Supreme Court in 1937, it accepted such transfer payments in Mulford v. Smith (1939), so long as the taxes were paid into the general treasury and not earmarked for farmers.

And now, in 2012, Justice Roberts has confirmed that there are no limits to regulatory taxation as long as the revenue is deposited in the U.S. Treasury.

Are there any other limits? Article I, Section 2 says that “direct taxes shall be apportioned among the states” according to population. This is repeated in Article I, Section 9, which says that “no capitation, or other direct tax, shall be laid,” unless apportioned.

The Supreme Court struck down income taxes in 1895 (Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co.), on the ground that they were “direct” taxes but not apportioned by population. Apportioning an income tax would defeat the purpose of the relatively poorer Southern and Western states, who wanted the relatively richer states of the Northeast to pay the bulk of the tax. The 16th Amendment gave Congress the power to tax incomes without apportionment.

Other direct taxes should presumably have to be apportioned according to the Constitution. Justice Roberts quickly dismissed the notion that the individual mandate penalty-tax is not a direct tax “under this Court’s precedents.” To any sentient adult, it looks like a “capitation” or head tax, imposed upon individuals directly. Unfortunately, having plenty of other reasons to object to ObamaCare, the four dissenting justices in NFIB v. Sebelius did not explore this point.

Some conservatives have cheered that part of Justice Roberts’s decision that limits Congress’s Commerce Clause power. But an unlimited taxing power is equally dangerous to constitutional government.

Mr. Moreno is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of “The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal,”

Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legal

Mark Steyn:

Three months ago, I quoted George Jonas on the 30th anniversary of Canada’s ghastly “Charter of Rights and Freedoms”: “There seems to be an inverse relationship between written instruments of freedom, such as a Charter, and freedom itself,” wrote Jonas. “It’s as if freedom were too fragile to be put into words: If you write down your rights and freedoms, you lose them.”

For longer than one might have expected, the U.S. Constitution was a happy exception to that general rule – until, that is, the contortions required to reconcile a republic of limited government with the ambitions of statism rendered U.S. constitutionalism increasingly absurd. As I also wrote three months ago (yes, yes, don’t worry, there’s a couple of sentences of new material in amongst all the I-told-you-so stuff), “The United States is the only Western nation in which our rulers invoke the Constitution for the purpose of overriding it – or, at any rate, torturing its language beyond repair.”

Thus, the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision. No one could seriously argue that the Framers’ vision of the Constitution intended to provide philosophical license for a national government (“federal” hardly seems le mot juste) whose treasury could fine you for declining to make provision for a chest infection that meets the approval of the Commissar of Ailments. Yet on Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts did just that. And conservatives are supposed to be encouraged that he did so by appeal to the Constitution’s taxing authority rather than by a massive expansion of the Commerce Clause. Indeed, several respected commentators portrayed the Chief Justice’s majority vote as a finely calibrated act of constitutional seemliness.

Great. That and $4.95 will get you a decaf macchiato in the Supreme Court snack bar. There’s nothing constitutionally seemly about a court decision that says this law is only legal because the people’s representatives flat-out lied to the people when they passed it. Throughout the Obamacare debates, Democrats explicitly denied it was a massive tax hike: “You reject that it’s a tax increase?” George Stephanopoulos demanded to know on ABC. “I absolutely reject that notion,” replied the President. Yet “that notion” is the only one that would fly at the Supreme Court. The jurists found the individual mandate constitutional by declining to recognize it as a mandate at all. For Roberts’ defenders on the right, this is apparently a daring rout of Big Government: Like Nelson contemplating the Danish fleet at the Battle of Copenhagen, the Chief Justice held the telescope to his blind eye and declared, “I see no ships.”

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but a handful of judges rule that it’s a rare breed of elk, then all’s well. The Chief Justice, on the other hand, looks, quacks and walks like the Queen in Alice In Wonderland: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” The Obama administration sentences you to a $695 fine, and a couple of years later the queens of the Supreme Court explain what it is you’re guilty of. A. V. Dicey’s famous antipathy to written constitutions and preference for what he called (in a then-largely unfamiliar coinage) the “rule of law” has never looked better.

Instead, constitutionalists argue that Chief Justice Roberts has won a Nelson-like victory over the ever-expanding Commerce Clause. Big deal – for is his new, approved, enhanced taxing power not equally expandable? And, in attempting to pass off a confiscatory penalty as a legitimate tax, Roberts inflicts damage on the most basic legal principles.

Bingo on that last line. To read the rest of Mark Steyn’s excellent column click HERE.

Roberts Joins Leftists: The government has the power to force you to buy anything…

Critical UPDATE – ObamaCare Panel Targeting Women’s Health Screenings…Again – LINK

Critical UPDATE – Megyn Kelly calls out Obama: Your lawyer called it a tax in court and now your campaign people are lying about it (video) – LINK

Critical UPDATE – ObamaCare promises access to “coverage” for those with existing conditions, but over time limits health care access… – LINK

Critical UPDATE – Are Your Dollars Going to Doctors or Paper Pushers? – LINK

Critical UPDATE – Dr. Jill Vecchio: ObamaCare forces doctors to violate the Hippocratic Oath (video) – LINK

Critical UPDATE – Do You Qualify for the New ObamaCare Tax/Penalty? – LINK

Critical UPDATE – CBO: ObamaCare Will Leave 30 Million Uninsured – LINK

Only in America does “health care reform” start with the hiring of 16,500 new IRS agents, who will decide whether or not your insurance policy merits a fine –  Barry L. Camp

Sowell on affordable care


UPDATE – Political Arena Analysis: Why Roberts is full of it – LINK

UPDATE II –  After the Supreme Court Ruling on ObamaCare What is Next? – LINK

UPDATE III – Internet On Fire Over Roberts’ ObamaCare Ruling – LINK

UPDATE IV – Curt Levey: Top 10 Lessons from the Roberts ObamaCare Ruling – LINK

UPDATE V – Libs on Twitter call Justice Thomas “N-Word” After Ruling; Call Sarah Palin Slut and Attack Her Kids – LINK

UPDATE VI – The Truth About Pre-Existing Conditions Will Surprise You – LINK

UPDATE VII – Why Are Health Insurance Premiums Increasing Faster After ObamaCare Passed? – LINK

UPDATE VIII – At least 7 new ObamaCare taxes directly impact the poor, middle class, and the disabled – LINK

UPDATE IX – WSJ Chief Economist: 75% of all ObamaCare taxes impact those who make less than $120,000 a year (video) – LINK

UPDATE X – IBD: 21 ObamaCare Taxes Already Causing Job Losses – LINK

UPDATE XI – British Socialized Health Service Kills Off 130,000 Elderly Every Year – LINK

UPDATE XII – “The Lemon” – Why Canada Is Now Reforming Their Socialized Health Care System (video) – LINK

UPDATE XIII – Forbes: ObamaCare Responsible for Health Insurance Premium Increases that Tripled in 2011 – LINK

UPDATE XIV – Obama Denies Waiver for Innovative Cost Saving Indiana Medicaid Program – LINK

UPDATE XV – Flashback 2008: Obama Trashed Hillary for Proposing Health Care “Penalty” (video) – LINK

UPDATE XVI – Mark Levin and Megyn Kelly on the Supreme Court: There is no silver lining (video) – LINK

UPDATE XVII – Five major ObamaCare taxes that will impact you in 2013 – LINK

UPDATE XVIII – Explanation of the ObamaCare Ruling for the Non-lawyerLINK

UPDATE XIX Mark Steyn: A lie makes Obamacare legalLINK

UPDATE XXProf. Paul Moreno: A Short History of Congress’s Power to TaxLINK

UPDATE XXIAllen West on new outrageous federal regulations and the Roberts’ ruling (video)LINK

UPDATE XXII MUST SEE: ObamaCare’s Impact on YOU (video) & Even Russia Today Shreds the Roberts RulingLINK

UPDATE XXIII – ObamaCare creates 13,000 pages of new regulations and they aren’t done yet… LINK

UPDATE XXIV83% of American physicians have considered leaving the profession over ObamaCareLINK

UPDATE XXV46,159 had to flee Canada to get health care in 2011LINK

UPDATE XXVI – Broken Promises in ObamaCare. More New Taxes.LINK

UPDATE XXVII – Survey: Nearly one in 10 employers to drop health coverage… – LINK  LINK

UPDATE XXVIII – CBO: Employers to be hit with $4 billion more in ObamaCare taxes than expected – LINK

UPDATE XXIX – Must See: ObamaCare and Health Insurance Expert C. Steven Tucker in Extended Interview (video) – LINK

UPDATE XXX – Dr. Jill Vecchio Explains ObamaCare in Detail (video) – LINK

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-393c3a2.pdf

Justice Roberts joined the leftists in the court saying that the ObamaCare mandate is just a tax and is constitutional on those grounds. This of course is silly on its face because those who wrote the taxing and commerce clauses are the same ones who rebelled against the Stamp Act and a 2% tea tax. Literally, according to five Justices the government can force you to buy anything or pay a fine in the form of a tax. The ruling takes the entire idea of “limited government” and tosses it out the window. Aside from repealing the ACA after the election, it is time for a Constitutional Amendment limiting the taxing power and defines the limits of the Commerce Clause.

Dissenting – Scalia, Thomas, KENNEDY, Alito – This Act “exceeds federal power”

Of course, President Obama said time and time again that the mandate was not a tax – http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2009/09/obama-mandate-is-not-a-tax/ .

Obama now has to run on passing the largest tax increase in history after promising not to raise taxes on those who make under $200,000. This election just became about ObamaCare.

A tax for THEE and not for ME – Democrats will now have to explain how they can pass a tax and a mandate on you but it doesn’t apply to members of Congress or their staff.

Democratic National Committee tweets:

IT’S CONSTITUTIONAL BITCHES!

DNC DELETED TWEET: ‘TAKE THAT MOTHER******S!’

Sen. McConnell:

The Supreme Court has spoken: this law is a tax. The bill sold to the American people was a deception.

Rep. Tim Huelskamp:

When they look back on the American system of once-limited government, June 28, 2012 will stand as a definitive date in the advance of government tyranny.  Today, a slim majority of the Supreme Court turned our Constitution on its head, and ruled that the federal government, in effect, can force upon the American people anything it damn well pleases – as long as it is called a tax.  Unlimited federal power, combined with judicial activism, has crafted a new regime that has destroyed our Founders’ vision.

Not only are individual liberties destroyed as a result of ObamaCare, but taxpayers are on the hook for a non-workable, ineffective, and outrageously expensive health care program. ObamaCare will drive America into bankruptcy, as the law is already radically exceeding original cost estimates.  The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that millions of Americans will likely lose their health insurance plan as employers are driven out of business or are unable to meet massive new mandates and costs of Washington.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli:

This decision goes against the very principle that America has a federal government of limited powers; a principle that the Founding Fathers clearly wrote into the Constitution, the supreme law of the land. The Constitution was meant to restrict the power of government precisely for the purpose of protecting your liberty and mine from the overreaching hand of the federal government. This unprecedented decision says that Congress has the authority to force citizens to buy private goods or face fines – a power it has never had in American history, and a power King George III and Parliament didn’t have over us when we were mere subjects of Great Britain. Since the federal government itself could never articulate to the court a constitutional limit to this power, Congress has gained an unlimited power to force citizens to buy anything.

Senator Rand Paul:

Just because a couple people on the Supreme Court declare something to be ‘constitutional’ does not make it so. The whole thing remains unconstitutional. While the court may have erroneously come to the conclusion that the law is allowable, it certainly does nothing to make this mandate or government takeover of our health care right. ObamaCare is wrong for Americans. It will destroy our health care system. This now means we fight every hour, every day until November to elect a new President and a new Senate to repeal ObamaCare.

Sen. Marco Rubio:

If you don’t buy government approved insurance the IRS will be on your back.

Ann Coulter:

I was right about Roberts. Thank God we at least got Alito on the Court, instead of Bush’s secretary. Only the very rich will survive this decision. Healthcare the new Gulfstream jet. Opin: We will call mandate a “penalty” to survive anti-injunction act, but a “tax” for the power to tax.

Carrie Ann Towne:

Only an idiot thinks this somehow helps the poor. The government is essentially saying that if poor people cannot afford to buy insurance, which is outrageously expensive in part due to state and federal taxation of hospital beds, etc., and regulation, then they must pay a penalty for being too poor to pay for a service the cost of which the government has artificially inflated.

Political Arena Editor Chuck Norton:

They can tax you on the CO2 that you exhale. They can make me buy cranberries. I hate cranberries.

Roberts says it is not a mandate it is just a small tax if you don’t comply…”. How nice, and yes it isn’t 100% bad, but since the power to tax is the power to destroy, it is a mandate because the amount of the tax can be changed at the stroke of a pen. Also the Sec HHS is given wide power way beyond the (limited) commerce clause to rewrite regulations at her pleasure…. and that is way more than just taxing. The dissenters are correct and obviously so IMO.