CBS: Justice Roberts switched views to uphold health care law

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Chief Justice John Roberts initially sided with the Supreme Court’s four conservative justices to strike down the heart of President Obama’s health care reform law, the Affordable Care Act, but later changed his position and formed an alliance with liberals to uphold the bulk of the law, according to two sources with specific knowledge of the deliberations.

Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy – believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law – led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.

“He was relentless,” one source said of Kennedy’s efforts. “He was very engaged in this.”

But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, “You’re on your own.”

The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.

Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts’ decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.

The inner-workings of the Supreme Court are almost impossible to penetrate. The Court’s private conferences, when the justices discuss cases and cast their initial votes, include only the nine members – no law clerks or secretaries are permitted. The justices are notoriously close-lipped, and their law clerks must agree to keep matters completely confidential.

But in this closely-watched case, word of Roberts’ unusual shift has spread widely within the Court, and is known among law clerks, chambers’ aides and secretaries. It also has stirred the ire of the conservative justices, who believed Roberts was standing with them.

Continue reading on the CBS News website…

PHOTO CREDIT: Getty Images

Harm to Your Privacy and Medical Freedom Lie Ahead

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By Elizabeth Lee Vliet, M.D. for AAPS

The Supreme Court has ruled that Obamacare is constitutional and has upheld the law – a victory for those who want the Federal government to micromanage your life and medical care. This is a tragic defeat, however, for those who support our Founder’s vision of liberty and privacy and the right to control our private property, such as our medical records, and our medical decisions in the privacy of personal consultations without government intrusion.

So what happens now? What does it really mean for patients and their doctors and their privacy and their freedom to choose their medical care?

With Obamacare upheld, dangerous threats lie ahead for patients and their healthcare professionals, both from ObamaCare and from the “stimulus” bill passed in 2009.

This President’s campaign promises—no new taxes, lower insurance premiums, the ability to keep your doctor and your insurance if you liked it—were shredded in the secret back room deals of the single-party bill, which Congress did not read before its frantic midnight passage.

Now that people have read the law over the past two years, we see that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) is neither protective of patients, nor affordable.

Continue reading on the AAPS website here…

Feds want to force O-B-E-S-E Americans into Counseling

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If you’re a US citizen, there’s a one-in-three chance that you’re also obese. Now after failed attempt after failed attempt at slimming down citizens, a federal panel is pushing to force overweight Americans into counseling.

The US Preventative Services Task Force (USPSTF) introduced their latest plans to help push down the obesity rate in America this week, and their newest effort calls for more than just urging people to exercise. The federal panel of medical experts is asking primary care physicians to put obese Americans into intensive counseling programs in order to combat the epidemic.

“Obesity is a very serious health problem in the United States, and in the past 30 years, obesity rates have dramatically increased,” Task Force member Dr. David Grossman, a pediatrician at Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, says in the USPSTF press release put out on Monday. “The good news is that is that even modest weight loss can reduce health risks for people who are obese. And, there is strong scientific evidence that shows that intensive programs with 12 to 26 sessions in the first year can help people manage their weight.”

While experts have long argued for urging obese Americans into specialized programs to push healthier habits on them, the USPSTF is asking physicians to place any patient with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or more into counseling. Currently more than one-third of adults meet that criterion, with non-Hispanic black adults more than 44 percent likely to be considered obese.

According to a report compiled earlier this year by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42 percent of the US population will be obese within the next two decades. At the time of that publishing, the Institute of Medicine’s Shiriki Kumanyika told Reuters that “People have heard the advice to eat less and move more for years, and during that time a large number of Americans have become obese.” Advice, many argue, hasn’t been enough, though.

Read more HERE.

Why GOP Might Accommodate Obama Yet Again

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Barack Obama’s invocation of executive privilege to keep subpoenaed documents from congressional committees investigating Fast and Furious came as rather a shock to many DC observers. It wasn’t that pundits were surprised the “most transparent administration in history” had chosen to OFFICIALLY cover up the Fast and Furious affair.  After all, no one actually believed Obama’s phony openness claims in the first place.

What really confounded Administration friends and foes alike was the fact that Obama invoked the privilege in the face of such an extensive body of disapproving legal precedent. “Where there is reason to believe…documents sought may shed light on government misconduct, ‘the privilege is routinely denied…’” wrote the DC District Court of Appeals in the Clinton era US v Espy case. How could a former instructor of law make such an obvious and fundamental legal “error?”

It’s a safe bet that Eric Holder and Barack Obama worked out the executive privilege idea well in advance of the Attorney General’s scheduled meeting with Darrell Issa. It was, after all, a worst case, fallback scheme the pair undoubtedly agreed must be implemented should Oversight Committee chair Issa refuse Holder’s last-minute attempt to buffalo the Congressman and Republican leaders into accepting the AG’s testimony in lieu of subpoenaed documents.

In fact, the privilege claim was only invoked after a year of stonewalling had failed, threatening to result in an embarrassing contempt charge that even the 90% of national media types who had buried the Fast and Furious story would eventually be forced to report. Yet, although political fallout resulting from the contempt vote and the illegally advanced privilege claim would be swift, it would be NOTHING compared to the nuclear blast resulting from a release of documents that proved Obama and Holder had been in on the implementation and ensuing cover-up of the Fast and Furious debacle from the very beginning. Documents yielding such a revelation obviously had to be denied the Committee and the American public at all costs, as a loss in November might be accompanied by a stretch in Leavenworth.

Though Barack Obama knew a political firestorm would accompany his claim of executive privilege, it was a decision he was forced to make.

 Read More at Western Journalism. By Doug Book.

Has the Day of the Islamist Arrived?

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Sixteen months after the United States abandoned its loyal satrap of 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak, to champion democracy in Egypt, the returns are in.

Mohammed Morsi, candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood, is president of Egypt, while the military has dissolved the elected parliament that was dominated by the Brotherhood, and curbed his powers.

The military and the mullahs will fight for the future of a country that is home to one in four Arabs. The soldiers who have dominated Egypt since the ouster of King Farouk in 1952 show no willingness to surrender what they have long controlled of the state and economy.

Yet in the long run, the Brotherhood—whose claim to guide the nation’s destiny is rooted in a faith 1,400 years old—is likely to prevail.

In Syria, the uprising against Bashar Assad appears headed for civil war, with atrocities on both sides. Some 10,000 are estimated to have died, a far bloodier affair than Egypt. And here, too, the day of the Brotherhood, massacred in the thousands by Bashar’s father in Hama, seems not far off.

Read more at takimag.com. By Patrick J. Buchanan.

Photo Credit: Jonathan Rashad (Creative Commons)

Schlafly: Grassley Asks the Right Questions

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Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a good friend of the Constitution and We the People, has sent President Obama a powerful letter co-signed by 20 senators. The letter spells out many unlawful aspects of Obama’s recent announcement that he will not enforce U.S. laws against young illegal aliens and will reward their illegal status with residency and work permits.

Grassley doesn’t mince words in his letter. He accuses Obama of taking an action for which he lacks legal authority, is contrary to his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed,” is an affront to representative government and the legislative process in bypassing Congress, and is an inappropriate use of executive power.

Grassley points out that Obama has full knowledge that his action was unlawful. Just last year, Obama stated, “This notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is just not true. … We live in a democracy. You have to pass bills through the legislature, and then I can sign it.”

Here are a few of the 29 questions, slightly paraphrased and condensed, which Grassley asked the president to answer.

Why has your position on your legal authority changed? Did you consult with attorneys about this and get a legal opinion and, if so, please provide copies of those legal opinions and emails? How will you treat the parents and others who deliberately violated federal immigration law by illegally bringing these young people into the U.S.?

Read More at GOPUSA. By Phyllis Schlafly.

Welfare Spending Up 41% Under Obama

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I thought the era of “Big Government” was over. Bill Clinton said so. But apparently, throwing gobs of money at social problems is very popular among Democrats and the Obama White House.

CNS:

Despite an unprecedented increase in federal anti-poverty spending, the national poverty rate has not declined, the study finds.

“[S]ince President Obama took office [in January 2009], federal welfare spending has increased by 41 percent, more than $193 billion per year,” the study says.

Federal welfare spending in fiscal year 2011 totaled $668 billion, spread out over 126 programs, while the poverty rate that remains high at 15.1 percent, roughly where it was in 1965, when President Johnson declared a federal War on Poverty.

In 1966, the first year after Johnson declared war on poverty, the national poverty rate was 14.7 percent, according to Census Bureau figures. Over time, the poverty rate has fluctuated in a narrow range between 11 and 15 percent, only falling into the 11 percent range for a few years in the late 1970’s.

Read More at American Thinker. By Rick Moran.

Supreme Court insults America With Latest Decision

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This morning, we have once again been reminded that our system of checks and balances no longer functions for the good of the American people.

Nine lawyers in the Supreme Court, hiding behind legalese written by other lawyers, have decided that Americans, through our various states, have no right to either enforce the sovereignty and security of our borders or demand that the federal government’s lawyers do so.

We don’t count in the cynical view of the lawyers who have wormed their way into controlling our lives essentially “because WE say so.” Oh, they claim the United States Constitution sanctions and supports their denial of our rights of self-defense, but the truth is they have stolen away the power of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution by bowing to claims that what is abundantly obvious is not at all obvious. In effect, the Supreme Court has cynically asked us: “Who are you going to believe: us or your lying eyes?”

To say this was not a political interpretation of law twisted to favor those who would erase our borders and open the floodgates of the world to our midst is the type of infuriating insult we have to take with us as we vote to correct what has happened to our government from top to bottom. This decision ought to be carried like a “bloody shirt” by every American who is alarmed by the ever-quickening pace of the destruction of our freedoms.

Read More at Western Journalism. By Kevin “Coach” Collins.

Photo Credit: Laura Padgett (Creative Commons)

The Economic Views of the Newly Elected Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt

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Mohamed Morsi, of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been declared the new president of Egypt today in an announcement that triggered massive cheers in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

What should Egyptians expect from their new president? Economic moves in the direction of central planning that will result in more suffering and poverty in the country.

Morsi doesn’t understand the importance of free markets and holds the naive belief that, through central planning, he his going to manage the country toward prosperity. Boy, is this dude in for a surprise.

Here are some of his views on economics as he delivered them in a speech on January 6, 2012.

He starts off by mouthing platitudes about freedom:
..the FJP emphasizes that it seeks to grant citizens the freedoms they deserve, to safeguard the fundamental rights of every Egyptian, and change all practices or legislation that challenge or restrict these freedoms or violate these rights. Freedom is one of Islam’s duties. “Indeed We have honoured the Descendants of Adam” (Quran, 17:70).

Read More at economicpolicyjournal.com. By Robert Wenzel.

Photo Credit: forwardstl (Creative Commons)

Fascinating new graph shows the ‘economic history of the world since Jesus’

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A stunning chart that shows the entire economic history of the world’s most powerful countries over the past 2,000 years has been released by investment bank JP Morgan.

Viewed as a whole, the graph shows the creeping restoration of Asian economic supremacy as the rest-of-the-world catches up to the West and surpasses its levels of industrialisation.

Charting the globe’s 10 major powers since the time of Jesus, the graph can be broken down by simply applying a cut off point at around the 1800 AD mark.

That was the birth of the Industrial Revolution in the UK and when taken into account, everything to the left of that mark can bee seen as economic power through sheer size of population and to the right is the effect of mass production on a country’s economic output.

One feature of the simple graph is to show that up until around 1500 AD India and China accounted for between 50 and 60 percent of the world’s economy until the late 18th century when the Industrial Revolution rendered countries with large populations, just countries with the largest populations.

Read More at dailymail.co.uk. By James Nye.