Thoughts From A Conservative Mom

It’s all supposed to be voluntary, those “home visits” that are tucked into the mammoth Obamacare bill. If you have a strong stomach, and a stronger bottom, you can find home visitation on pages 568-595. That’s Section 2951 of H.R. 3590, the Senate bill that Harry Reid brought down the chimney on Christmas Eve.

All voluntary, they say, but once you “volunteer” to have the oh-so-helpful folks from Social Services come in to help with your newborns, or with a number of other specified issues, will you ever be able to get rid of them?

The bill provides for federal funding and supervision for this vast expansion of government intrusion into family life. This is the Nanny State on steroids.

Do you spank your children? You should know that HHS bureaucrats think you are an abuser.

Do you support the Second Amendment? How would you like HHS bureaucrats asking your children if you maintain firearms in the home for family protection?

Do you home-school your kids? Take care. Members of Congress who have tried to abolish home-schooling are big backers of this health care bill. Do you wonder why?

Is your family being “targeted” for such home visitations? Let’s see if you fit into one of these very broad categories…

Read more at American Thinker

A small glimmer of hope!  Keep up the pressure!

The escalating battle among Democrats over abortion has grabbed headlines, but a few other intraparty disputes are endangering President Obama’s proposed health care overhaul.

From stemming rising health care costs and addressing regional disparities on Medicare rates to a general skepticism of the Senate, rank-and-file House Democrats are struggling to support Mr. Obama’s plan as they close in on midterm elections. Voters have become increasingly hostile to the effort.

Read more at the Washington Times

Under the terms of our Constitution, every individual has a right to care for their health, just as they have a right to eat. These rights are integral to our natural right to life—and it is government’s chief purpose to secure our natural rights. But the right to care for one’s health does not imply that government must provide health care, any more than our right to eat, in order to live, requires government to own the farms and raise the crops.

The current health care debate is not really about how we can most effectively bring down costs. It is a debate less about policy than about ideology. It is a debate over whether we should reform health care in a way compatible with our Constitution and our free society, or whether we should abandon our free market economic model for a full-fledged European-style social welfare state. This, I believe, is the true goal of those promoting government-run health care.

If we go down this path, creating entitlement after entitlement and promising benefits that can never be delivered, America will become like the European Union: a welfare state where most people pay few or no taxes while becoming dependent on government benefits; where tax reduction is impossible because more people have a stake in welfare than in producing wealth; where high unemployment is a way of life and the spirit of risk-taking is smothered by webs of regulation.

Read more at Imprimis

There is something way off balance in the character of Barack Obama. Something in the realm of zealotry, with a touch of megalomania, and perhaps an authoritarian impulse too. He combines  Alinskyite tactics and outlook with an air of self-assumed moral superiority in a way that fails to respect the usual, small ‘r’ republican limits on American presidents. All presidents, of course, think at some level that they know best about policy choices. But almost none of them (Woodrow Wilson perhaps excepted) were so willing to disdain, in pursuit of such radical policy upheavals, such intense and overwhelming public opinion as has been evident in the current health takeover attempt.

Grandiose plans are one thing. Most presidents fall prey to them. It’s another thing entirely, though, to refuse to accept the ordinary republican restraints on implementing grandiosities without public support, and furthermore to do so by A) bending existing rules; B) directly violating multiple personal pledges; C) ignoring constitutional limits; D) directly lying; and E) demanding that other politicians sacrifice their own political careers.

Read more at American Spectator

President Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and most Democratic representatives and senators are not liberals; they are leftists. And most Americans do not understand the difference between liberal and left. They do not realize, for example, that there is no major difference between the American Democratic Party and the leftist social democratic parties of Western Europe. They do not know that from Karl Marx to Obama, the left (as opposed to liberals) has never created wealth because it has never been interested in creating wealth; it is interested in redistributing wealth.

Therefore, unprecedented and unsustainable debt, a debt that will negatively affect most Americans’ quality of life, renders the dollar increasingly undesirable, and undermines America’s prestige and power in the world — these developments do not particularly disturb the left. They may trouble the president, the Democratic Party, and others on the left on some political level, but that pales in comparison to what the left really wants: a huge government overseeing a giant welfare state and a country with far fewer rich Americans.

Achieving those goals is far more important than preventing a decline in the American quality of life. The further left one goes, the more contempt one has for the present quality of American life in any event. The left regularly mocks many of the symbols of that life — from the three-bedroom suburban house surrounded by a white picket fence to owning an SUV (or almost any car) because Americans should be traveling on public buses, trains and bicycles.

Read more at the Patriot Post

We’re number #1!   Oh, wait…..

According to Bloomberg:

Portland Oregon
Overall rank: 1*
Depression rank: 1
Suicide rank: 12
Crime (property and violent) rank: 24
Divorce rate rank: 4
Cloudy days: 222
Unemployment rate (December 2008): 7.8%

The “People’s Republic of Portland” shouldn’t be so modest!   On the Left coast, we work really hard to chase evil, exploitive capitalist businesses out of our state, and can now proudly claim that our unemployment rate is at 10.7% at last count (a full point higher than the national average, 9.7%). 

And don’t worry.  More conservative states like Nevada and Idaho are eager to take these greedy job creators off our hands. 

The Oregonian reports, “Idaho governor pursuing Oregon businesses in light of measures 66 and 67”

Gov. C.L. “Butch” Otter is getting fresh with Oregon businesses, in what the Republican chief executive is calling a “love letter to Idaho’s neighbors.”

In it, Otter argues Idaho’s predictable tax and regulatory policies make it a good place for companies that may be considering relocating because their own states are balancing their budgets by increasing taxes.

It’s a direct message to businesses in Oregon, where voters in January approved measures 66 and 67, which are tax hikes on some businesses and the wealthy.

In Washington state, some majority Democrats also want voters to weigh in on an income tax on high earners.

Idaho’s dominant GOP Legislature and Otter have rejected similar moves.

In his letter, Otter writes that after Oregon voters backed the hike, “My phone started ringing — and so did phones over at our Department of Commerce.”

Rationing: it’s not just for health care!

On the list of insane public policy moves we have come to expect from the current administration, Cap and Tax, Obamacare and Union Card Check, a fourth has garnered relatively little attention, although the implications for all Americans may be among the most far-reaching.  The recurring theme is centralized control.

On Monday, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California will host a rare Congressional “Field Hearing“.  A Congressional delegation will venture out of the beltway and actually devote time to a problem in our country.  Better yet, they will be listening to real citizens.  Sort of.

At issue is what residents are calling a government-made drought in the Central and San Joaquin Valleys of California.   Legal and environmental regulations in the Endangered Species Act has resulted in the diversion of 200 billion gallons of water from the agricultural heartland of California into the Ocean.  According to California farmer Rose Corona,

“Potentially over $20 billion of California’s $43 billion of agricultural revenue could be decimated in America’s greatest breadbasket as farmers lose their farms and residents are forced to import food from China. While the solutions are not simple, local government officials are not even able to attempt them.”

Two thirds of California’s water is in Northern California, but two thirds of the people live in Southern California.  Over the last generation, a series of aquaducts and canals was built to divert some of the plentiful water in the North so that instead of raising the sea level (as Al Gore warns us is imminent) the fresh water will irrigate incredibly productive land.  The five counties effected provide tens of thousands of jobs and a stunning $20 billion of food output.

Read more at Big Government

Václav Klaus, former president of the Czech Republic, outlines how “Green” is the new “Red”:

In 1989, communism collapsed and we were finally free. To my great surprise, the environmentalist doctrine was still alive and even flourishing in its new incarnation called global warming doctrine. In 1992, the Rio Earth Summit endorsed the doctrine of global warming and climate change as a leading ideology of our times. I expected that the ideology of the free world would be based on freedom, parliamentary democracy and market economy – concepts that were absolutely crucial for us in the former communist countries in the moment of our radical and revolutionary transition from communism to free society. Life under communism made us extremely sensitive, if not oversensitive to all possible symptoms of violation and erosion of our freedom. That is the reason why I feel endangered now. The subtitle of the above mentioned book asks “What is endangered: Climate or Freedom?” My answer is resolute: climate is ok, what is under threat is freedom.

The reason is that environmentalism and its most extreme version, global warming alarmism, asks for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion and intervention into our lives and of government control over us. We are forced to accept rules about how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel and many other things. Some of us had experienced similar examples of such manipulation with ourselves in the communist era and feel obliged to do everything we can to avoid similar developments in the future.

Read more here.

Too bad he’s not American.  We could use a president who understands the tyranny of Socialism and is “sensitive”, as he puts it, towards ANY erosion of liberty!

Where is the outrage from the feminist radicals? They’re so concerned with promoting abortion and contraception to prevent the “oppression” of motherhood in these countries, they completely ignore REAL oppression!

Asia is “missing” about 96 million women — the vast majority in China and India — who died from discriminatory health care and neglect or who were never born at all, the UN estimated on Monday.

Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion have caused a severe gender imbalance in Asia, and the problem is worsening despite rapid economic growth in the region, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report said.

“The old mindset with its preference for male children has now combined with modern medical technology” that makes it easier to predict and abort unborn girls, said Anuradha Rajivan, the report’s lead author.

“It is not just female infanticide but sex-selective abortion of unborn girls that cause so-called ‘missing’ females,” she said, contrasting the issue with recent improvements in female life expectancy and education.

The UNDP report found that East Asia had the world’s highest male-female sex ratio at birth, with 119 boys born for every 100 girls.

Read more at the Himalayan Times

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal

Your tax dollars hard at work!

Red State opines:

The Census has sent me a letter telling me that they’re going to send me a letter.  Brilliant!

I’m having a difficult time deciding if this letter is:

1. Supposed to be helpful or informative in some way.
2. A joke.
3. Some sort of Obama stimulus plan for the postal workers
4. My imagination.

I’m betting on option 3.

I think the gubmint probably figures that us rubes out here in the hinterlands will just say to ourselves “hey, it’s just funny money – the U.S. Census is a gubmint entity, and the USPS is kinda sorta part of the gubmint, too, so it probably didn’t cost them anything”  Well, except for the time that the mail dudette had to spend sticking all those envelopes in mail boxes and the gas it took to run the mail truck, the trees they had to kill for all of those letters and envelopes, etc.

I suppose the environmental aspects of this never occurred to anyone.  A letter, telling me I’m going to get a letter.  I hope the enviro-wackos are having fun with this.

I think I’ll send them a letter telling them I got their letter about their letter.

Bob from Say Anything Blog observes:

That $52 million number is a calculation I did based on the reported 120 million letters that were reportedly sent out at a cost of $0.44/letter. Now, granted, the Census folks no doubt used bulk mailing and paid a lower price for postage. But there’s also the expense of the paper and the envelope and the time it took to compose the letter through the bureaucratic process and actually, you know, mail it.

But even if my calculation is way off, the idea that millions were spent on this is appalling.

And were are the environmentalists on this wanton waste of paper? We live in an age where the EPA is declaring the air that we exhale to be a dangerous pollutant, and proposing big new taxes and regulations making our lives more expensive and limiting our freedoms, and the government is sending us letters telling us we’re going to get another letter?

But don’t worry, ladies and gentleman. These idiots can totally run your health care for you better than you can.

Trying to have it both ways?

President Obama and Democrats launched a campaign to vilify insurance companies in the final stretch of their health reform effort.

Republicans, meanwhile, pointed out that those very same insurance companies would get huge checks from the government if health reform is enacted.

“(Health Insurers) will keep on doing this for as long as they can get away with it. This is no secret,” the president said. “They’re telling their investors this – ‘We are in the money.  We are going to keep on making big profits even though a lot of folks are going to be put under hardship,’” the President told supporters at a stop in Pennsylvania today.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, meanwhile, wrote to insurance company executives demanding that they justify premium hikes.

Neither mentioned that the Senate health reform bill, which is the basis for Democrats’ last best chance at comprehensive reform, would give the insurance companies millions of new customers required by law to buy health insurance. It would also require insurers to cover everyone, regardless of age, gender or pre-existing condition.

To help pay for the new insurance requirements the government would give to people money to buy insurance – $336 billion over the next ten years. That money, ultimately, would have to go to… drum roll… insurance companies.

Read more at ABC News

PLEASE FORWARD THIS TO AS MANY PEOPLE AS POSSIBLE!

THIS IS A “CONDITION RED” CONGRESSIONAL ALERT FROM THE NATIONAL RIGHT TO LIFE COMMITTEE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ISSUED MONDAY, MARCH 8, 2010
 
PLEASE ACT IMMEDIATELY ON THIS ALERT. 
 
President Obama, Speaker Pelosi pull out all stops to pass massive pro-abortion health care bill — the days immediately ahead will decide the issue!

Time is short. Most political observers agree that if Speaker Pelosi does not succeed in ramming the Senate bill through the House by the time Congress goes into recess for Easter on March 26, the bill is effectively dead. Pelosi wants to force the vote by March 19. But, she does not yet have the votes. “I think we can get there, but I’m going to need help from any place I can get it,” Pelosi told one group, according to the Los Angeles Times (March 8).

Whether she succeeds or not depends on what House members hear from their constituents during the next two weeks.

Please immediately TELEPHONE the Washington, D.C. office of your U.S. House member.

THIS is why the Left wants a new healthcare entitlement so badly: it cements their stranglehold on unconstitutional power!

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture.

It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible.

In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect. (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative.”) The result is a kind of two-party one-party state:

Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

Republicans seem to have difficulty grasping this basic dynamic.

Read more at Investors Business Daily

President Obama is close to completing his socialist revolution. Since coming to power last year, he has sought relentlessly to transform America. From his days as a student radical, Mr. Obama has been obsessed with smashing the traditional free-market system. Like most leftists, he thinks capitalism is the enemy.

Rather than being a pragmatic centrist – as the mainstream media insists on portraying him – Mr. Obama is the very opposite: an ideologue who is pursuing his political project even at the risk of badly damaging the Democratic Party.

Mr. Obama is engaged in an abuse of power. He is thwarting the will of the majority of the American people who do not want socialized medicine. They rightly fear that the proposal’s massive $1 trillion price tag will add to our skyrocketing national debt, which has brought us to the brink of ruin. They understand it will stifle medical innovation and reduce the quality of care, leading to rationing and longer waiting lines. It represents the greatest expansion of entitlement spending since the 1960s.

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s actions are undermining the traditional system of checks and balances established by the Founding Fathers. The institutional role of the Senate is to serve as a bulwark against raw majority rule. By circumventing the filibuster, Mr. Obama is not only thumbing his nose at the voters – including those in Massachusetts who elected Republican Sen. Scott Brown – but the very constitutional safeguards meant to prevent this kind of usurpation of power.

Read more at The Washtington Times

H/T Barbara Curtis