Trans-Pacific Partnership: Obama’s Dangerous International Deal Surrendering U.S. Sovereignty

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Photo Credit: WikicommonsWhile the Obama Administration appears to be growing ever-more-limp domestically, the president is still making a vigorous international push that has the potential to shift economic power dynamics, rewrite intellectual property laws, establish new labor and environmental regulations, and reduce the authority of Congress. And, the White House hopes to have all this sorted out by the end of this year.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP), considered the “cornerstone of the Obama Administration’s economic policy in the Asia Pacific,” has been quietly negotiated since since the president’s first term began. The U.S. Trade Representative Office (USTR) presents the agreement as a means for the United States and other 11 other Pacific-rim countries to be the leaders of a technology-fueled future by trading with each other free of government tariffs. For all this, it has received a ringing endorsement from the New York Times.

However, as documents from negotiations have been leaked, a growing number of politicians and policy groups across political ideologies have found disconcerting features of the TPP that point not at all toward free trade, but bigger government, stricter laws, and less accountability.

Too Much Secrecy

Perhaps the most widely discussed aspects of the ongoing TPP negotiations is the apparent secrecy. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) have spoken out against the lack of transparency for such a massive agreement. Warren even wrote a letter to Obama, goading him that the Bush administration conducted more democratic, transparent trade negotiations.

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You Can’t Fix Stupid… Or Crazy

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Photo Credit: Townhall Let’s get this out of the way right now—there is no Obamacare fix.

Repeat after me—there is no Obamacare fix.

Obamacare is not an epic failure simply because of its incompetent implementation best symbolized by a $94 million website that doesn’t work. Rather, Obamacare’s incompetent implementation is a symptom of its real disease.

That real disease is this: Obamacare cannot possibly work because it operates outside the natural laws of economics, and it’s another ham-fisted attempt by government to do something that is outside of its God-given (or Constitutional) jurisdiction.

In other words, Obamacare is magical thinking. It’s tilting at windmills, or the legislative equivalent of howling at the moon. It’s an attempt to ignore reality, which is to say its sheer lunacy. And you can’t fix crazy anymore than you can fix stupid. This was never going to work. It was always going to start and end like this, and therefore any earnest or well-intentioned attempts to put lipstick on this turd will just make the foul stench surrounding it all the worse.

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Obama’s Lawlessness

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Photo Credit: National Review By Andrew C. McCarthy.

Obama claims a power to enforce laws selectively under the doctrine of “prosecutorial discretion.” This is merely an allocation doctrine, however: a commonsense acknowledgment that finite resources make it impossible to enforce every law equally. An administration, for example, might say, “DEA has finite resources, so we’re going to focus on heroin trafficking rather than marijuana possession.” This does not mean the administration is saying marijuana possession is no longer a crime; just that it has higher enforcement priorities and a limited budget. To the contrary, Obama has distorted the doctrine to claim, in effect, that illegalities he unilaterally chooses not to police are somehow no longer illegal — at least until the “waivers” he grants expire. (I would call the waivers capricious, but there really is a rigor to them — they expire after Election Day to protect Democrats from political accountability.)

Prosecutorial discretion is the fig leaf Obama uses to rationalize his noxious decision to relieve corporations, political cronies, and members of Congress from their Obamacare burdens while the rest of us are crushed under ours. It is also the hocus-pocus behind his latest fix. Panicked by millions who’ve lost coverage, sinking poll numbers, and jittery Democrats, the president is now purporting to allow insurance companies to ignore the law and reissue the policies Obamacare’s mandates forced them to terminate.

But here is the problem: This “waiver” is irrelevant. Even if it were constitutionally proper for a president to flout Congress in the executive branch’s enforcement practices, all that means is that the Obama administration will give insurers a pass until 2014. The Obama “waiver” does not change what Congress’s law actually says, and therefore it has no bearing on the legal obligations attendant to the relationship between the insurer and the insured.

As a practical matter, it is nearly inconceivable that insurance companies would be able to reissue the canceled health-care plans. The process, as Avik Roy expertly explains, is too extensive and complex to complete in the few weeks between now and Obamacare’s coverage deadline — something that an administration that can’t, after three years, get a functioning website running should know. But even if it could be done, the insurance companies would be insane to offer plans that failed to comply with the letter of the Obamacare statute. Similarly, the state insurance commissioners would be insane to permit them, and Americans would be insane to buy them. The policies would be legally unenforceable.

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Man Tased, Arrested Over Leash-Law Violation

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Photo Credit: Opposing Views California resident Gary Hesterberg was running the trails with his two dogs at Rancho Corral de Tierra in San Mateo County last year when he was stopped by a park ranger for not leashing his terrier (his other dog, a beagle, was on a leash). When the ranger, Sarah Cavallaro, would not let Hesterberg walk away after a verbal warning, he accused her of unlawful detainment and attempted to leave anyway. She tased him, and he collapsed to the ground. Then police came to arrest him, and detained him for eight hours.

Hesterberg is suing for violation of his Fourth Amendment rights as well as battery. The 9th Circuit could not decide his case in a summary judgment , so the plaintiff is now headed for trial.

Witness John Bartlett described the scene to the San Francisco Chronicle: “He said something about ‘are you going to arrest me,’ something like that, and the next thing I heard was a shot and a scream of agony from him as he fell on his back. He seemed to be out for two or three minutes.”

Bartlett also said, “It did rattle me. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m 77 years old, never had such an emotional reaction to something. I didn’t know if the guy was dying. For a leash on a dog…”

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The U.S. May be Hitting its Ethanol Limit. So EPA Wants to Relax its Biofuels Goals.

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Photo Credit: Chuck Olson / FlickrWhen it comes to ethanol, the United States may have reached its limit — at least for now.

Back in 2007, Congress passed a law that would require the nation to use more and more ethanol and other biofuels each year. But for reasons of chemistry and economics, those targets are becoming increasingly difficult to fulfill.

That helps explain why, on Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency took the unusual step of proposing to cut its biofuels targets for next year. The agency will require gasoline refiners to use just 15.2 billion gallons of biofuels in 2014 — down from 16.55 billion gallons this year. The new target is 14 percent lower than the original goal envisioned by Congress.

The EPA’s move is a victory for gasoline refineries, which have long argued that the original targets were unworkable. And it’s a fairly big setback for the biofuels industry, at least for the time being.

Here’s the back story: In 2007, Congress updated its Renewable Fuel Standard, which set rough targets for the amount of ethanol and other biofuels that had to be blended into the nation’s gasoline supply each year. By 2013, that target rose to 16.55 billion gallons — and it was supposed to keep rising until it hit 36 billion gallons in 2022.

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The 23 Most Revealing Words Obama Spoke

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Photo Credit: art_es_annaPresident Obama uttered a surprisingly revealing 23-word sentence Thursday that reveals so much about his thinking and why his second-term is shaping up as worse than Jimmy Carter’s last.

But, first, let’s get this straight right off the bat: President Obama is not a dummy.

He acts like a dummy, an arrogant one at that. The chief executive of the United States tries to convince the world he’s a dummy, bizarrely claiming he didn’t know so many stupid, illegal, corrupt, partisan, lying things were going on in his administration lo these past 1,760 divisive days.

He naively expected Iran to cave to the kind of political muscle that works back home in the Windy City. Obama painted himself into a red-lined corner on Syria, only to have his south side saved humiliatingly by Russia’s shirtless President Putin.

And apparently the White House did not pay its cable bill this fall. Because according to Kathleen Sebelius, the president was unaware the ObamaCare rollout was an utter disaster for days after the Oct. 1 limp launch. Does anyone ever talk to anyone else on Obama’s team?

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Where’s the Outrage?! MSNBC Host Martin Bashir Encourages Defecation, Urination on Sarah Palin

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Photo Credit: MSNBCIn yet another outrageous example of the duplicity of the nation’s leftwing media, MSNBC commentator, Britain Martin Bashir, viciously attacked Sarah Palin during the close of his Friday show, calling her “America’s resident dunce” and then encouraging someone to commit horrific acts against her.

How any news organization could continue to employ someone who made such incredibly unjustified and outrageous statements about any person, let alone Mrs. Palin, is a testament to its moral bankruptcy.

Here’s the shameful exchange (the written transcript follows the video):

MARTIN BASHIR: It’s time now to clear the air. And we end this week in the way it began, with America’s resident dunce, Sarah Palin, scraping the barrel of her long deceased mind and using her all-time favorite analogy in an attempt to sound intelligent about the national debt.

SARAH PALIN: Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that note comes due … and this isn’t racist, so yeah, try it, try it anyway. This isn’t racist. But it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due.

BASHIR: It’ll be like slavery. Given her well-established reputation as a world class idiot, it’s hardly surprising that she should choose to mention slavery in a way that is abominable to anyone who knows anything about its barbaric history. So here’s an example.

One of the most comprehensive first person accounts of slavery comes from the personal diary of a man called Thomas Thistlewood, who kept copious notes for 39 years. Thistlewood was the son of a tenant farmer who arrived on the island of Jamaica in April 1750, and assumed the position of overseer at a major plantation. What is most shocking about Thistlewood’s diary is not simply the fact that he assumes the right to own and possess other human beings, but is the sheer cruelty and brutality of his regime.

In 1756, he records that, “A slave named Darby catched eating canes. Had him well-flogged and pickled. Then made Hector, another slave, s-h-i-t in his mouth.” This became known as Darby’s dose, a punishment invented by Thistlewood that spoke only of the slave owner’s savagery and inhumanity.

And he mentions a similar incident again in 1756, this time in relation to a man he refers to as “Punch.” “Flogged Punch well, and then washed and rubbed salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper. Made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.” I could go on, but you get the point.

When Mrs. Palin invoked slavery, she doesn’t just prove her rank ignorance. She confirms that if anyone truly qualified for a dose of discipline from Thomas Thistlewood, then she would be the outstanding candidate.

White House Defends Obama’s Executive Authority to Act on Health Insurance Without Congress

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Photo Credit: AP/ Evan VucciWhite House press secretary Jay Carney defended President Barack Obama’s authority to take unilateral action on health insurance plans – even comparing it to the administration’s action last year not to prosecute certain illegal immigrants.

Carney also reiterated the pledge to veto House bill to allow people to keep their insurance plans cancelled as a result of Obamacare, even after 39 Democrats joined the House Republican majority to support the bill.

The House bill, sponsored by Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) would allow anyone who had a health insurance policy cancellation, or would get a cancellation, to keep their plan, thus keeping Obama’s broken promise that if you like your health care, you can keep it. The administration objects because it would allow new policies that do not comply with Obamacare to still be sold.

Thus Obama unveiled his own plan on Thursday, to preempt the House vote, that would administratively waive insurance companies from having to comply with Obamacare standards for one year, but also require those insurance companies inform consumers that tax credits and other benefits of the Affordable Care Act plans.

But some have questioned Obama’s ability to take such an action without Congressional authorization. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney took a question about the president’s authority, and said that the health care law defers certain discretion to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

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Miller: I Cannot In Good Conscience Stand By and Do Nothing

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Dear Friend of Liberty,

Democrat Senator Mark Begich is scared. Following the President’s ObamaCare press conference yesterday, Begich announced his support for delaying implementation of the law’s so-called “grandfather rule” for two years rather than one.

The provision has already caused thousands of Alaskans and millions of Americans to lose their healthcare coverage. This fits a pattern for the vulnerable first term senator, who also wants to delay the employer mandate for another two years.
 
The reason is perfectly clear: he does not want the bad news of cancelled policy notices, dropped employer coverage and lost jobs to be hitting Alaskans as they head to the polls next fall. This is the DC establishment at its self-absorbed worst.

Rather than truly fixing the problem by repealing ObamaCare, Mark Begich stands by his 60th and deciding vote and seeks to delay some of its gravest consequences just long enough to somehow get re-elected. We know if he is successful, he will spend six more years whole-heartedly supporting liberal policies that rob our freedom and take this nation inexorably down the road to financial catastrophe. 
 
These are perilous times for our country. Nothing else could induce me to venture back onto a battlefield that I know is bound to exact a high personal price, not just for me, but also for my family. But I cannot in good conscience stand by and do nothing while the political establishment puts their own self interest above the best interest of the American people.

 
You know where I stand. Constitutional government is the only answer to the challenges we face as a nation. It is time to stand up and fight for the things we hold dear: individual liberty, private property, free enterprise, and self-determination.
 
Alaskans also know that we are a unique state with boundless resources, but we have a high level of dependency on the federal government. It is time to move away from centralized power, and back toward the model of federalism envisioned by our founders.  
 
The dysfunction of the central government – evidenced by the unmitigated Obamacare disaster, out-of-control deficit spending, and near-total disregard for the Bill of Rights – makes a return of power to the states not just a good idea, but one that could be necessary to our very survival as a free and prosperous society.
 
With the balance of power in the US Senate at stake, Alaska has become a battleground state in the 2014 election cycle. 
 
Already corporate and special interests are spending big bucks to help Democrat Senator Mark Begich retain his seat, and outside groups are organizing on the ground in an effort to gain a strategic advantage.
 
While this is a matter of some concern, it is not a reason for panic. We have no intention of playing the traditional establishment game, or allowing our opponents to dictate our mode of operation.
 
We have the most extensive grassroots network in the state of Alaska, but we need your help to mobilize and spread our message of reform.
 
While we have not yet announced our official campaign kick-off date, I can assure you that we are already hard at work, and meeting with key allies from around the state and the nation to lay the necessary groundwork for a successful run. And in the meantime, we will continue to provide accountability for our sitting senator.
 
Let’s keep our eye on the ball. This isn’t a race merely about partisan advantage, it’s about saving the country we love.
 
Without a doubt, we are already watching candidates posture for political advantage. This week Mark Begich engaged in political theatrics playing the part of the outraged Senator who is shocked to learn that Obamacare is causing thousands of Alaskans to lose their healthcare plans and thousands more to see their premiums increased significantly. But we know it is not about what this or that candidate has to say during an election cycle that matters. We have heard that song and seen that dance before.
 
The question before the voters of Alaska will be one of who can be trusted to confront this lawless administration and to advocate for real reform in Washington. 
 
My positions haven’t changed. I will fight tirelessly to dismantle the Washington bureaucracy and return government to the people.
 
Please help make reform a reality by making a generous donation today! I cannot win this battle without your generous financial help.
 
Together, we can return American values to our nation’s Capitol, and return power to the people.
 
Thanks for your friendship and support!
 
Yours for Liberty,

Joe

Bill Gates Backing Gun Control Measure

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Photo Credit: Brian Ach/Getty Images for The Lasker FoundationKPLU reported Wednesday that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda have contributed $25,000 apiece to the Initiative 594 campaign, joining a growing list of wealthy Seattle-area supporters of the 15-page gun control measure, as confirmed by Public Disclosure Commission documents obtained yesterday by Examiner and The GunMag.com.

Gates and his wife made the donations Oct. 29, according to filings with the PDC.

The PDC documents reveal a curious array of contributions from people who list their occupations as “retired” or “not employed” along with others whose occupations range from “venture capitalist” to “volunteer,” with attorneys, doctors, investors and other professionals, along with housewives and homemakers. Their contributions range upwards to the $165,000 donated by Nick Hanauer and the $50,000 from Lenore Hanauer. Many of the contributions were for $1,000 or more.

The overwhelming majority of contributors list their addresses in Seattle, with a smattering located in Medina, Woodinvile, Mercer Island, Sammamish, Kirkland, Shoreline, Bellevue, Normandy Park, Lake Forest Park and Issaquah.

KPLU said the donor list, which stretches to about 135 pages, “reads like a who’s who list.”

Read more from this story HERE.