Why did Roberts cheat to save Obamacare?

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Chief Justice John Roberts rewrote the specific language of Congress by claiming in his ObamaCare ruling that the penalty that the lawmakers had clearly attached to the individual mandate was actually a tax. It was the only way in which the Affordable Care Act could be saved; for the Court rejected the Commerce and Necessary and Proper clause defenses as constitutional grounds for the existence of the law.

By “penciling in” the tax language necessary to satisfy his own requirement of constitutionality, Roberts behaved no differently from any liberal, activist judge so often criticized by conservatives for judicial malfeasance; that is, he cheated rather than rule against a personally favored piece of legislation.

The question is WHY? WHY did the Chief Justice defraud the Court and the American public rather than rule ObamaCare unconstitutional?

In the majority opinion, Roberts wrote: “The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A (the individual mandate) is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax.”

No, Mr. Chief Justice. Section 5000A may be reasonably re-written BY CONGRESS as a tax, but it may not be READ that way because that is NOT the way in which Congress WROTE it! A great many laws may be reasonably re-written into something they are not, thus bringing them into line with the personal views of justice, propriety, or constitutionality held by the judge preforming the artful edit. But that is not the proper role of a Supreme Court Justice.

Read more HERE.

Israeli Gov’t: Another Obama term, “nightmare” for Jewish State

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I am traveling through Israel with the Young Jewish Conservatives—an emerging organization that is breaking the stereotype that all Jews (especially young ones) lean to the left.

Tonight we had the opportunity to speak with someone who shall remain anonymous, and who is a very credible source. He told us that there are those at the “highest levels of the Israeli Government” (possibly including Prime Minister Netanyahu himself) who have recently said that 4 more years of an Obama Presidency would be a “nightmarish scenario” for the Jewish State.

This Israeli fear of a second Obama term should surprise no one that has been following the disintegration of the Israel/American relationship during the last few years. After all, with regards to Israel’s greatest fear, a nuclear armed Iran, Obama has totally dropped the ball.

The only way Iran will peacefully abandon its nuclear weapons program is if it fears a credible military threat from America or Israel. Obama has seriously undermined this threat by giving in to endless “talks” with Iran, and for spending the bulk of his energy convincing Israel not to take pre-emptive military action. As a retired Israeli soldier told us yesterday, “Iran is laughing all the way to the bomb.”

Read more HERE.

Feds retaliate against Texas’ 10th Amendment efforts

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry has spent much of the past three years loudly and defiantly fighting against what he views as Washington meddling in state affairs, often refusing to cooperate with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and becoming a leader in the battle against President Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Other Republican governors pursuing a similar tactic may want to take note of what’s happened in Texas amid Perry’s hard-fought battle: An obstinate refusal to cooperate has resulted in more, not less, federal oversight.

“We’re very conservative and we’re very stubborn,” said Bill Miller, a lobbyist in Austin for HillCo who has represented both Republicans and Democrats. He described the Texas mindset this way: “We’re not going to be smart. We’re going to be pure. It’s a point of pride and if there’s something else we’re proud of, it’s our pride.”

One area where Texas has fought ferociously with the feds has been on environmental regulations. Yet as the state challenged EPA rules in court over the past three years, the federal agency simply side-stepped the state to work directly with industry.

A similar scenario is playing out with Obama’s health care overhaul in Texas, where nearly a quarter of the population, or 6.2 million people, are uninsured. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given the law the green light, it’s highly likely that Texas won’t have time to build a key program, forcing the federal government to design and manage it until the Lone Star State steps up.

Read more HERE.

World’s First Genetically Modified Babies Born in US; have three Parents

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Last night’s disclosure that 30 healthy babies were born after a series of experiments in the United States provoked another furious debate about ethics.

So far, two of the babies have been tested and have been found to contain genes from three ‘parents’.

Fifteen of the children were born in the past three years as a result of one experimental programme at the Institute for Reproductive Medicine and Science of St Barnabas in New Jersey.

The babies were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor were inserted into their eggs before they were fertilised in an attempt to enable them to conceive.

Genetic fingerprint tests on two one-year- old children confirm that they have inherited DNA from three adults –two women and one man.

Read more HERE.

My Verdict: Obamacare UNCONSTITUTIONAL!

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Today’s shocking Obamacare decision caused me to reminisce about my time on the federal bench ten years ago.  When I was a United States Magistrate Judge, I took the same oath of office that every federal judge and justice in the country swears to.  I swore to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same. . .”

That oath is anchored to the phrase, “Constitution of the United States.”  If the Constitution changes over time by an activist majority of the Supreme Court, then my oath was essentially an oath to the Supreme Court, not to the Constitution.  Of course, that’s not what the Founders intended.  The Supreme Court was never designed to be the pinnacle of federal power.

But that’s where we are today.  Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by President George W. Bush in 2005, wrote the 5-4 opinion saving Obamacare and causing President Obama to declare “victory” and pundits to say that his administration has been “vindicated.”  Incredibly, Roberts determined that the government, under its taxing power, has the right to “impos[e] a tax on those who do not buy [a] product,” in this case, health insurance.*

From the bench today, Justice Kennedy issued a scathing denuciation of Robert’s reconstruction of Obamacare:  “The majority rewrites the statute Congress wrote … What Congress called a penalty, the court calls a tax.”  He concluded, “The law is “invalid in its entirety.”

The chief justice’s rescue of the individual mandate is a massive expansion of federal power, now permitting the federal government to regulate, by taxation, its citizens’ “failure to act” or passivity.  I challenge you to go back to the first 150 years of U.S. jurisprudence and find any Supreme Court opinion that would suggest such a construction of Congress’s power to tax and spend under Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution.

In his powerful dissent, Justice Scalia agreed that this power grab was unconstitutional:

What is absolutely clear, affirmed by the text of the 1789 Constitution, by the Tenth Amendment ratified in 1791, and by innumerable cases of ours in the 220 years since, is that there are structural limits upon federal power—upon what it can prescribe with respect to private conduct, and upon what it can impose upon the sovereign States.

And then the zinger:

Whatever may be the conceptual limits upon the Commerce Clause and upon the power to tax and spend, they cannot be such as will enable the Federal  Government to regulate all private conduct and to compel the States to function as administrators of federal programs.

In other words, when the federal government is allowed to tax non-activity, what powers are left to the states and the people under the Ninth and Tenth Amendments?  Not much.

But even more basically, Roberts and the four more liberal members of the bench are all starting with the assumption that the federal government can tax and spend for things outside of its enumerated powers, misconstruing the “general welfare” clause of the Constitution.  James Madison apparently disagreed, suggesting the clause “amounted to no more than a reference to the other powers enumerated in the subsequent clauses of the same section.”

Not anchoring the general welfare clause to the enumerated powers enables virtually unlimited federal spending/taxation power and is completely contrary to the whole nature of the Constitution: a document designed to restrain the federal government, retaining all unspecified powers to the states and people.

The Roberts decision reflects that any faith in the Supreme Court to solve our nation’s problems is misplaced.  We must engage like never before.  Reject the LSM, rely on solid Internet news sources, support a Tea Party congressional candidate, engage in vote integrity efforts, and reflect upon the moral crisis we’re facing.   A massive victory in November will put today’s defeat in the proper dustbin of history.  But unless we rapidly correct the downward spiral, there won’t be much left for future generations.

***

Author’s note:  To his credit, Chief Justice Roberts did reject the Commerce Clause as constitutional authority for Obamacare.

PHOTO CREDIT: DonkeyHokey

Is the Country Unraveling?

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The Thrill Is Gone

The last thirty days have made it clear that Barack Obama is not going to win the 2012 election by a substantial margin. The polls still show the race near dead even with over five months, and all sorts of unforeseen events, to come. But after the Obama meltdown of April and May, I don’t think he in any way resembles the mysterious Pied Piper figure of 2008, who mesmerized and then marched the American people over the cliff. Polls change daily; gaffes and wars may come aplenty. But Barack Obama has lost the American center and now he is reduced to the argument that Mitt Romney would be even worse than he has been, as he tries to cobble together an us-versus-them 51% majority from identity groups through cancelling the Keystone Pipeline, granting blanket amnesty, ginning up the “war on women,” and flipping on gay marriage.

Mythographer in Chief

The Obama memoir is revealed not really to be a memoir at all. Most of his intimate friends and past dalliances that we read about in Dreams From My Father were, we learn, just made up (“composites”); the problem, we also discover, with the president’s autobiography is not what is actually false, but whether anything much at all is really true in it. If a writer will fabricate the details about his own mother’s terminal illness and quest for insurance, then he will probably fudge on anything. For months the president fought the Birthers who insist that he was born in Kenya, only to have it revealed that he himself for over a decade wrote just that fact in his own literary biography. Is Barack Obama then a birther?

Has any major public figure (57 states, Austrian language, corpse-men, Maldives for Falklands, private sector “doing fine,” etc.) been a more underwhelming advertisement for the quality of a Harvard education or a Chicago Law School part-time billet? Has any presidential candidate or president set a partisan crowd to laughing by rubbing his chin with his middle finger as he derides an opponent, or made a joke about killing potential suitors of his daughters with deadly Predator drones, or recited a double entendre “go-down” joke about a sex act?

From Recession to Recovery to Stasis

As we see in New Jersey, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin, the cure for the present economic malaise is not rocket science — a curbing of the size of government, a revision of the tax code, a modest rollback of regulation, reform of public employment, and holding the line on new taxes. Do that and public confidence returns, businesses start hiring, and finances settle down. Do the opposite — as we see in Mediterranean Europe, California, or Illinois over the last decade — and chaos ensues.

Obama took a budding recovery in June 2009, and through massive borrowing, the federal takeover of health care, new expansions of food stamps and unemployment insurance, the curtailing of oil and gas leasing on public lands, new regulations, and non-stop demagoguery of the private sector slowed the economy to a crawl. His goal seems not to restore economic growth per se but to seek an equality of result, even if that means higher unemployment and less net wealth for the poor and middle classes. Obama hinted at that in 2008 when he said he would raise capital gains taxes even if it meant less revenue, given the need for “fairness.” Indeed, equality is best achieved by bringing the top down rather than the bottom up. Nowhere is the Obama model of massive borrowing, vast increases in the size of the state, more regulations, and class warfare successful — not in California or Illinois, not in Greece, Spain, or Italy, not anywhere.

Read more at PJ Media HERE.

VIDEO: Muslims, shouting “Allahu Akbar” Stone, Curse Christians

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You’ve got to see this video. It’s long, but you cannot believe that this happened in the U.S. Problems start at :54 and “stoning” begins at 9:00.

Feds Cut Law Enforcement Ties with Arizona

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The Department of Homeland Security has announced changes to its relationship with Arizona’s local law enforcement following Monday’s Supreme Court ruling.

Just hours after the Supreme Court released its decision on SB1070, the Obama Administration made a big move by ending existing agreements with Arizona police agencies.

DHS officials will no longer respond to the scene of a state or local traffic stop when those agencies request help enforcing immigration law.

They will respond over the phone to help verify someone’s immigration status, but they will not go to the scene unless the person is a convicted criminal, has previously been removed from the country, or is a recent border crosser.

Responding to the move, Gov. Jan Brewer said she was not surprised President Barack Obama has “once again abandoned the citizens of Arizona.”

“The Obama administration has fought the people of Arizona at every turn – downplaying the threat that a porous border poses to our citizens, filing suit in order to block our state from protecting itself, unilaterally granting immunity to tens of thousands of illegal aliens living in our midst, and now this.”

Read more at ABC15.com HERE.

US Going Bankrupt & Americans Don’t Care?

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America is on track to go bankrupt. Just like Greece. The signs are all around us. We’ve lost our AAA credit rating. Trillion dollar deficits are the new normal. The Fed is buying 61% of our own debt. Barack Obama’s 10 year budget will leave Americans with “more debt than has been accumulated by all previous Presidents in American history combined.” Nobody on the Left or Right seems to believe we’ll ever pay off all of the money we owe. Life as we know it is very close to ending and yet Americans seem to be infected with a tragic stoicism. Like turkeys being led to the slaughter, most Americans seem content to put their necks down on the butcher’s block and wait for the ax to fall. There are reasons for this puzzling inactivity in the face of an avertable catastrophe.

1) They’re being misled by people with bad motives: What do you think would happen to Paul Krugman if he were to tell everyone that he is still a liberal, but the Tea Party and Paul Ryan are right about the deficit and Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are wrong? His column at the New York Times would be gone within six months. Do you think Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid would continue leading their caucuses after 2012 if they insist on serious deficit reduction? Not a chance. What about a Democrat running in a liberal district who talks like Jim DeMint on deficits in a primary up against another Democrat who wants more spending? Who do you think would win? The big spender, right? Unfortunately, there are a lot of people in this country whose personal welfare depends on encouraging as much government spending as possible and even if the country goes bust in the process, they’re hoping to have enough money in the bank to be able to move somewhere else by then anyway.

2) They think it’s far off in the future: Most people think bankruptcy is a problem we’ll be leaving to our kids after most of the people reading this column are dead and gone. That’s not so at all. If you were a betting man, 5-15 years would be the likely timeframe on a default with it practically guaranteed to happen within 25 years without major changes — although that may be far too optimistic. America is already stretched to the breaking point and who knows what sort of unexpected event could push us over the edge in the next few years? Maybe the crack-up of the EU, a European bank collapse, an organized effort to keep other nations from buying our debt, another, even more devastating 9/11 style attack, a dramatic surge in oil prices caused by an Israeli/Iranian war, etc., etc. Just as the mortgage crisis caught us flat footed and caused much more damage than we expected, a new crisis that occurs while America’s economy is still puttering along as it has been during the Obama years could lead to a much deeper economic spiral than we anticipate.

3) Crisis fatigue is rampant: This is the most important election ever! Tune in at 6:00 P.M. to find out which ordinary product you use will kill you! George Bush is Hitler! Republicans want you to die! Racism today is as bad as the sixties! If you oppose gay marriage, you want to drag homosexuals to death behind your truck! If you disagree with Obama, you’re a racist! Your freedom is at stake! Global warming is going to kill us all! Modern Americans are deluged with phony crises and ginned-up outrages all day long. That’s why it’s not a surprise when a real crisis as serious as anything we’ve ever faced in our nation’s history comes along, many people have trouble distinguishing it from the fake dangers they hear about on a daily basis.

4) It’s too confusing to comprehend: Most Americans don’t even remotely understand the scope of the problem. They think we can raise taxes on the rich, cut a few bucks off foreign aid, and everything will take care of itself. When you start talking about unfunded liabilities, GDP, and trillions in debt to people who don’t know much about economics and don’t follow politics very closely — which probably describes more than half of the American electorate — you might as well be explaining the ins-and-outs of heart surgery. In other words, they may get it in the most general sense, but they don’t really understand it, and they probably aren’t going to opt for it unless they become convinced they’re going to die otherwise.

Read more at Townhall.com HERE.