This is the type of hard hitting journalism we need.
These DAMN JUSTICES, the same court that forced the winner of the 2000 presidential election to step aside so that W. Bush could be INSTALLED into office instead, and then destroy America, are NOW FORCING us to buy brocolli.
If they can force us to eat Brocalli and allow W Bush to steal the Whitehouse and destroy America, then they can FORCE us to allow anal probes up our assholes.
SUPREME COURT, STOP FORCING AMERICANS TO TAKE ANAL PROBES UP OUR ASSHOLES!
By: David Lyle For Media Matters For America
Justice Antonin Scalia has enjoyed a reputation as a deep thinker on legal issues, but by recycling right-wing talking points during oral argument on the Affordable Care Act — such as the “broccoli mandate” and “Cornhusker Kickback” long promoted by ‘Hate Talkers‘ Fox News and Rush Limbaugh — he may be gaining a new reputation: the Court’s first talk-radio justice.
At the very least, his channeling of right-wing media at oral argument lends credence to the charge by Charles Fried, President Reagan’s Solicitor General, that the five conservative justices’ opposition to the Affordable Care Act is about “politics, politics, politics.”
Fried has been “scaldingly critical” of Scalia and other conservative justices for their willingness to “traffic in some of the most well-worn Tea Party tropes about Obamacare” according to the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent.
Sargent quotes Fried:
I was appalled to see that at least a couple of them were repeating the most tendentious of the Tea Party type arguments …. I even heard about broccoli. The whole broccoli argument is beneath contempt. To hear it come from the bench was depressing.
Jonathan Chait likened Scalia to “an angry Fox News-watching grandfather,” and noted that the “Cornhusker Kickback” was “stripped out before the final bill, but Scalia seems not to know that.”
Indeed, Scalia’s rhetoric during oral arguments will sound familiar to Dittoheads and regular Fox viewers.
By Ken Blackwell
Bob Morrison
In Washington this week, a rare drama is unfolding in the U.S. Supreme Court. The momentous question that is before the court is this: Shall we be Citizens or Subjects?
The high court is considering a historic challenge by twenty-six states to the Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as ObamaCare. Hundreds of people have stood in line, some of them overnight in the chill March air, to get inside. Our colleague, Ken Klukowski, was one of those fortunate few. We are relying on Ken’s reporting and also on the impressions of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Ken Klukowski reports what was perhaps the critical exchange in the three-day oral arguments. Justice Anthony Kennedy is widely viewed as the pivotal figure in this case.
His vote is essential to any likely 5-4 ruling. Kennedy mildly said that this health care legislation “changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in a very fundamental way.” With this statement, Klukowski hopefully reports, “the individual mandate—the centerpiece of ObamaCare—is likely doomed.”
We agree, with Ken Klukowski and with Justice Kennedy. It is noteworthy that press reports already capitalize “Federal Government” and lower-case the word individual.
The next question, of course, is exactly how will ObamaCare change the relationship of the Federal Government and the individual?
Thomas Jefferson provided the answer. The National Archives announced with some excitement over the Independence Day weekend in 2010 that they had discovered an early draft of the Declaration of Independence. In it, young Mr. Jefferson scratched through the word Subjects and wrote in the word Citizens.
Archivists instructed us on the importance of the change. They invited us to go through that mental process with Thomas Jefferson as he and we became Citizens of a republic for the first time.
Was this amazing event on the nation’s birthday a portent? The National Archives made this announcement on the first Fourth of July after the passage of ObamaCare. It’s almost as if we were receiving a message from on high. Shall We Be Citizens or Subjects?
Why is this so? America is not like other countries. Ronald Reagan understood why America is exceptional. He offered these words in his Farewell Address to the nation in 1989.
Ours was the first revolution in the history of mankind that truly reversed the course of government, and with three little words: “We the People.” “We the people tell the government what to do; it doesn’t tell us.
But under ObamaCare, government not only tells us, it Mandates. We have seen a great controversy over the first Mandate from HHS . This first HHS Mandate would require religious hospitals, schools, colleges, and institutions provide drugs that can cause abortions, and orders them to further violate their consciences by covering sterilizations and contraceptives.
This is only the first of many Mandates that are coming under ObamaCare. There are literally hundreds of places in this ill-conceived legislation where “the Secretary” determines what is mandated. Life and death decisions for millions will be mandated by an unelected government bureaucrat in a distant city.
Justice Scalia asked Obama administration attorneys: “If the government can do this, what can it not do?” Attorney Mike Carvin represents the National Federation of Independent Businesses, suing the Obama administration. Carvin said: If a person enters the market simply by being born, “that…means they can regulate every human activity from cradle to grave.”
Death and taxes. Benjamin Franklin said those were the only certainties on earth. This truth was reaffirmed in the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, as Ken Cuccinelli reports:
Somewhat amusingly, Justice Alito noted that burial costs were expensive and could hit one unexpectedly as well. He further noted that if he was too poor to pay his own costs and hadn’t prepared for his burial, he would still certainly be buried, and those costs would in turn be shifted to others either by raising everyone else’s burial costs if the buriers had to absorb those costs, or we’d all pay higher taxes if the government bore these costs.
Before our liberal readers generously take up a collection for Justice Alito’s burial costs, it is time for all of us to step back and consider very carefully the question that is really before the U.S. Supreme Court this week.
If the Supreme Court upholds ObamaCare, columnist George Will notes, then government’s “power to compel contractual relations would have no logical stopping point.” Which is why, Will says, the case the high court hears this week is “the last exit ramp on the road to unlimited government.”
Which will it be: Citizens or Subjects?
Equality or Inequality
Rick Santorum's speech at the Detroit Economic Club stirred a bit of controversy when he said: "I'm not about equality of result when it comes to income inequality. There is income inequality in America. There always has been, and hopefully — and I do say that — there always will be."
That kind of statement, though having merit, should not be made to people who have little or no understanding. Let's look at inequality.
Kay S. Hymowitz's article "Why the Gender Gap Won't Go Away. Ever," in City Journal (Summer 2011), shows that female doctors earn only 64 percent of the income that male doctors earn. What should be done about that? It turns out that only 16 percent of surgeons are women but 50 percent of pediatricians are women. Even though surgeons have many more years of education and training than do pediatricians, should Congress equalize their salaries or make pediatricians become surgeons?
Wage inequality is everywhere. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Asian men and women earn more than white men and women. Female cafeteria attendants earn more than their male counterparts. Females who are younger than 30 and have never been married earn salaries 8 percent higher than males of the same description. Among women who graduated from college during 1992-93, by 2003 more than one-fifth were no longer in the workforce, and another 17 percent were working part time.
That's to be compared with only 2 percent of men in either category. Hymowitz cites several studies showing significant career choice and lifestyle differences between men and women that result in income inequality.
There are other inequalities that ought to be addressed. With all of the excitement about New York Knick Jeremy Lin's rising stardom, nobody questions league domination by blacks, who are a mere 13 percent of our population but constitute 80 percent of NBA players and are the highest-paid ones. It's not much better in the NFL, with blacks being 65 percent of its players.
Colleges have made diversity their primary calling, but watch any basketball game and you'd be hard-put to find white players in roles other than bench warming. Worse than that, Japanese, Chinese and American Indian players aren't even recruited for bench warming.
There's inequality in most jobs. According to 2010 BLS data, the following jobs contain 1 percent female workers or less: boilermaking, brickmasonry, stonemasonry, septic tank servicing, sewer pipe cleaning and working with reinforcing iron and rebar. Maybe the reason female workers aren't in these occupations is that too many are in other occupations.
Females are 97 percent of preschool and kindergarten teachers, 80 percent of social workers, 82 percent of librarians and 92 percent of dietitians and nutritionists and registered nurses.
Anyone with one ounce of brains can see the problem and solution. Congress has permitted — and even fostered — a misallocation of people by race, sex and ethnicity. Courts have consistently concluded that "gross" disparities are probative of a pattern and practice of discrimination. So what to do?
One remedy that Congress might consider is to require females, who are overrepresented in fields such as preschool and kindergarten teaching, to become boilermakers and brickmasons and mandate that male boilermakers and brickmasons become preschool and kindergarten teachers until both of their percentages are equal to their percentages in the population.
You say, "Williams, that would be totalitarianism!" But if Americans accept that Congress can make us buy health insurance whether we want to or not, how much more totalitarian would it be for Congress to allocate jobs in the name of social equality and the good of our nation?
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman said: "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both." Equality before the general rules of law is the only kind of equality conducive to liberty that can be secured without destroying liberty.
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