RBIII's blog

Dr. Jeffrey S. Flier, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, gives ObamaCare a big fat F for not doing anything the Progressives / Statists (i.e. Obama and Co.) claim it will do.

I encourage you to read the whole article here.  But here's one part that hits the nail on the head:

Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern.

In effect, while the legislation would enhance access to insurance, the trade-off would be an accelerated crisis of health-care costs and perpetuation of the current dysfunctional system—now with many more participants. This will make an eventual solution even more difficult. Ultimately, our capacity to innovate and develop new therapies would suffer most of all.

The bottom line is that getting the government more involved in the Health Care industry is going to do what government involvement always does: Lower quality and increase costs.

Of course, Progressives don't care about that.  All they care about is government control.  Health Care is the lynchpin for Statist control of the populace.  There are some liberals who simply don't realize this.  When they do finally realize it, they usually become conservatives / libertarians.

A recent Gallup Poll showed that more people than ever before (since Gallup started tracking the question) are of the mindset that the Government doesn't belong in Health Care, so there's hope.  Let's hope that this enlightenment hasn't come too late to reverse all the damage that Progressives / Statists and the Progressive-lite Republicans have done over the last 100 years.

Today marks the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall. World leaders are gathering in Germany to celebrate the day when Communism was defeated.

The current President of the United States won't be there.  He's too busy.

He wasn't too busy to fly to Copenhagen to make a self-centered appeal to the International Olympic Committee to bring the Games to Obama's hometown, Chicago, though.  That little jaunt was easily squeezed in between all the "hard work" Obama was doing ignoring the urgent requests for troops to execute the strategy his hand-picked General had requested back in the summer.  His supporters claimed that he could work during the flight and he wasn't really taking any time off.  This is true.  So why is he suddenly too busy to go and mark a very important date in world history?

The answer is simple: Copenhagen and the Olympics would have been a PERSONAL victory for Obama if he were able to secure the games.  There is nothing more important than building our Narcissist in Chief's legacy.  Going to Berlin would do nothing for him on that level.  In fact, he would be celebrating the fall of an ideology that he was raised admiring (see Frank Marshall Davis).  It may very well be that Obama wouldn't be able to hide his grief over the day Communism failed and Freedom won yet another war.

If the event isn't about him, Obama has no time for it.  And I haven't even mentioned how the fall of the Berlin Wall is a triumph of American Foreign Policy and why that factors into Obama's decision not to attend, too.

Watching the circus that was the announcement of the "historic" Pelosi Health Care Reform Bill yesterday, I kept thinking about one thing:

All those people standing up there trumpeting the latest power grab by the Federal Government and not one of them could point to where Congress gets the authority to even write the bill, let alone pass it.

That's right, not ONE person there could do that because the plain and simple truth is that the authority doesn't exist in the Constitution. I've looked.  It's not in there.  Furthermore, I've read specific quotations from the Constitution's primary author, James Madison, and from his good friend, Thomas Jefferson, and you'd be hard-pressed to find where either of them even remotely hinted at the Federal Government having this kind of power over individuals.  You'd find quote after quote, essay after essay arguing how the Federal Government couldn't do something like take over the Health Care system, but nothing supporting the idea.  Not a word.

It is at this point in a conversation with a Progressive / Statist that we'd get into all the Judicial precedent, etc. where SCOTUS or lower courts ruled that the Federal Government was within its bounds under the Welfare or Commerce clauses to do this or that.  But you know what? That's their trick.  They think you're too dumb to know that those rulings were made by stacked or intimidated courts.  They fall back on the "well, we're already doing it" defense as if that makes it right.  It doesn't. Our founding document has been hijacked.

The debate we should be having is simple: Is Congress even authorized to do this?  And we, as conservatives, need to make the case over and over that they do not have this authority and pull the debate back to where it belongs.  This is about the expansion of government.  It is not about providing Health Care for all (since this bill STILL doesn't cover everyone).

For a few weeks now, Democrats have been fighting attempts to post the "Baucus Bill" online so that we, The People, can see what they have in store for us.  It's been called a "Vapor Bill" since it contains nearly no legislative language and, in essence, is a conceptual document.  In other words, the Senate is actually debating and voting on a bill that will be finalized at some point under the cover of darkness, if they get their way.

That alone should raise gigantic red flags for every freedom-loving American.  But wait, there's more!  They've even convinced the CBO to "score" this conceptual document and wouldn't you know, it is going to allegedly trim $81 Billion from the budget over 10 years.  I'd laugh if I didn't know that the completely-in-the-tank-for-Democrats-media will run with this one juicy detail at full speed to rally public support for the plan.

As always, The Heritage Foundation is out front calling out this nonsense for what it is:

Indeed, the CBO went to great pains to emphasize this fact in their letter to Congress: “CBO and JCT’s analysis is preliminary in large part because the Chairman’s mark, as amended, has not yet been embodied in legislative language.” But this isn’t even the most deceptive part of what the left in Congress is trying to pull on the American people. Not only does the Baucus bill not even really exist, just a Vapor Bill filled with conceptual language, it is about to be completely thrown out the window when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) merges it with the deficit busting HELP bill to move it to the Senate floor.

You'd almost think that Congress hasn't yet gotten the message that people are on to them.  Have they not seen the constant stream of polls showing that people, across the entire political spectrum, don't trust them and overwhelmingly disapprove of their performance?

When you see this latest example of the utter contempt Congress has for us, and you recall how Pelosi once claimed this would be the most transparent / corruption-free Congress ever, there's only one conclusion anyone with half a brain could come up with:

They think we're stupid.

UPDATE: Reid didn't waste any time, did he?

Nevada Democratic Sen. Harry Reid said the Finance Committee will vote at that time on a 10-year, $829 billion proposal that covers 94 percent of eligible Americans while reducing the deficit. The positive estimate by the Congressional Budget Office was a breakthtrough for Montana Sen. Max Baucus, the plan's author.

Reading the blogs and op-eds out on the net it is clear that we are reaching a point where the Conservative message is at a crossroads.  A lot of the talk has been about a leadership vacuum.  In my opinion, the Right is currently undergoing a massive manhunt to find the one person (or perhaps a handfull of people) who can clearly articulate that Conservative message.

This begs an obvious question:  What is the Conservative Message?

People are throwing around the usual catch-phrases:  "Limited Government" or "States Rights" or "Fiscal Responsibility".  All well and good, but the problem is that there doesn't seem to be anyone out there who can articulate this message AND survive the attacks on their record which the Progressive / Statist left will undoubtedly unleash in order to discredit them.

Another problem is that way too many of the "conservative" pundits out there are really just watered-down Progressives.  Neo-Statists or Progressive-lite commentators who have accepted that government intervention (vs regulation) is the solution to the majority of the problems we face.  I don't think there are many true Conservatives who would argue for outright anarchy.  Of course there's a need for government.  The question is how much do we need? Are the solutions to be found utilizing the power of the Federal Government, the State Governments, or the Private sector (The People).  Better yet... What is the right mix? The Federalist system our founders handed to us seems to be disappearing before our eyes.  It has taken nearly a century to get to this point, but it is disappearling.  Progressives have successfully framed the debate.  We, as a country, don't even blink when presented with a problem.  We immediately run to the Federal Government.  This wasn't how it was originally intended to work, but that's an argument for a different time.

Back to the question of message. We on the Right need to rally around a single message.  The idea of Limited Government is my personal favorite because it really encompasses what Conservatism is all about.  But we must also remember that "Limited Government" doesn't mean "No Government".  It means going back and checking the playbook (The Constitution) to see which entity should be the force behind implementing a solution.

Where are the leaders who have consistently approached a problem from this perspective?  Who are they?  Who looks at a problem and doesn't immediately think, "Let's create a Federal Program around it"?  Where is the politician who can consistently make the case that nearly every problem we face today is a direct result of Progressive policies that have slowly erroded our Federalist foundation?

Or is there a larger question?  Are we on the Right sure if we really believe that anymore?

I know my answer.  What's yours?