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Obama Opposes Defense of Marriage Act

Posted by TheChair on Wednesday, August 19, 2009 10:54:08 AM
As we predicted here, a vote for Obama is a vote against traditional marriage. Newsmax reports that Obama's DOJ just filed a half-hearted, technical defense of DOMA. Such briefs signal to the courts that the administration doesn't really mean its ostensible argument. Sometimes, such briefs even clandestinely provide the courts with rationale for ruling against the filing party.
In a statement Monday about the latest DOJ brief, he [Obama] said it “makes clear that my Administration believes that the Act is discriminatory and should be repealed by Congress. I have long held that DOMA prevents LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) couples from being granted equal rights and benefits.

“While we work with Congress to repeal DOMA, my Administration will continue to examine and implement measures that will help extend rights and benefits to LGBT couples under existing law."

As for the Justice Department, its brief reads: "This Administration does not support DOMA as a matter of policy, believes that it is discriminatory, and supports its repeal."
Repeal of DOMA by court decision or by legislation will set up the forced recognition by one state of homosexual marriage performed in another state.

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Ronald Reagan Stands Athwart Socialized Medicine

Posted by TheChair on Saturday, August 15, 2009 2:41:01 AM
In 1961, Ronald Reagan warned America against the perils of socialized medicine. Almost 50 years later, during the 2009 health care debates, his prescient voice resurfaced and made its way around the internet. How marvelous it is when the legacies of our great men bestir us to act again upon our ancient faith--to preserve that very faith. Liberals and progressives cannot parry, for it is impossible for mere ideology to raise up such an eloquent champion.

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Give Me Carbon or Give Me Death!

Posted by TheChair on Saturday, June 27, 2009 2:09:46 AM
Because carbon emissions are a sign of life, liberty and happiness, conservatives should make a point of enjoying more carbon emissions on the 4th of July. More bar-b-ques, more fireworks, more motorized sports, more fun, more liberty. I have never had a 4th of July like the one I'm going to have this year. Conservatives should videotape as much liberty-loving carbon emissions as possible and make sure the Senate gets the message before voting on H.R. 2454.
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Ask Veterans About Government Health Care Rationing

Posted by TheChair on Wednesday, June 17, 2009 1:47:09 AM
The Desert Dispatch (Victorville, CA) just ran this letter to the editor. A nameless, faceless bureaucrat blithely denied crucial pain medication to the wife of a Vietnam veteran with a rare disease, and for whom no other medication was effective.
In order for my wife to receive this medication through Tri-Care, she had to get special authorization from the government overseer of this government-run health care program. The doctors at Loma Linda sent in a four page letter requesting that Tri-Care cover this pain medication. An unknown person at Tri-Care, who isn’t a doctor and has never seen my wife and probably doesn’t know anything about this rare brain disease, rejected the request from the doctors at Loma Linda. The government told these specialists at Loma Linda that they know better than they do when it came to prescribing a pain medication for my wife. The doctors at Loma Linda then went into greater detail in another letter to Tri-Care in an attempt to get this medication approved. This time the government returned the letter to the doctors with out even reading it. In their reply to the doctors, the government stated; we have already rejected one request from you for this medication and we will not accept any more requests from you on this matter.
This is what Obama, Pelosi and Reid want to do to all the rest of us.


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Canadian Doctor Admits Canadian System's Achilles Heel is Death by Rationing

Posted by TheChair on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 1:31:46 AM
Today's WSJ ran this editorial piece on Canadian health care. The system isn't too bad so long as you don't need a specialist or surgery. Or ER. Or an MRI. Or preventive screening.

My views changed in medical school. Yes, everyone in Canada is covered by a "single payer" -- the government. But Canadians wait for practically any procedure or diagnostic test or specialist consultation in the public system.

The author follows with a couple of typical patient-nearly-died anecdotes where they skipped over to the U.S and saved their own lives by paying an American doctor out of pocket. Canada is now using the U.S. system as a release valve, and is allowing--and relying on--more and more private clinics to pop up to rescue the waiting. A kind of glasnost and perestroika to save the core of the system. 

Indeed, Canada's provincial governments themselves rely on American medicine. Between 2006 and 2008, Ontario sent more than 160 patients to New York and Michigan for emergency neurosurgery -- described by the Globe and Mail newspaper as "broken necks, burst aneurysms and other types of bleeding in or around the brain."

If Congress and Obama saddle us with a "government option" health care bill (what Hugh Hewitt calls single-payer on the installment plan), we will wind up like Canada inside of a few years. And then where will Canadians go to save themselves? Where will we?

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Resist Socialized Medicine

Posted by TheChair on Saturday, June 06, 2009 10:57:09 AM
Our government is about to finish the socialization of medicine. If it does this, it will degrade the national character even further, not to mention what's left of our monetary system and the public fisc. (Our posterity already are debt slaves for what our generation has done.) I'm going to be blogging on this issue because of its importance. It is incumbent upon all citizens to discern and resist imminent threats to their liberty. As with opposition to natural marriage, this threat rises to that level. Below is  a poem by Tarzana Joe, a frequent weekly guest on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. (See Hewitt's action plan against socialized medicine, here.) The verse's cadence is lighthearted, but its themes are very somber: a fascistic leader "with a plan," a plan that is fashioned "behind closed doors," a medical establishment scared into going along, corporations who once opposed socialized medicine now colluding with big government, a craven GOP content to trim rather than oppose, and the inevitable waiting lines and rationing that happen EVERYWHERE socialized medicine has been tried.

Poem for 5/15/09

I’ve seen the light
Now I can write
A bit of verse extolling
The many skills
And spending bills
Of he who topped the polling
 
So now this man
Has got a plan
And gives us his assurance
We can’t survive
Or stay alive
Without his health insurance
 
In threes and fours
Behind closed door
The bill has been assembled
Across the way
The A.M.A
And chiropractors trembled
 
While out at sea
The G.O.P.
Is huddled with advisers
I have a hunch
That this poor bunch
Is full of compromisers
 
They’ve tasted rout
And so I doubt
For all their public pledges
To some extent
They’ll be content
To trim around the edges
 
Those corporate thugs
Who make our drugs
Find their position weaker
But think they can
Affect the plan
By lobbying the Speaker
 
They disagree
With Nancy P
And hope their option’s saleable
If they agree
And guarantee
To keep Botox available
 
At set of sun
When all is done
I see a system fashioned
Where patients twist
On waiting lists
And Kayopectate’s rationed
 
Despite our wealth
The public health
Will not be any stronger
And I don’t see
How you and me
Can live lives that are longer
 
So here’s how our great leader
Has proved his fine credentials
He’s viewed the situation
And grasped the true essentials
And so proposed a system
Of vision, scope and purity
By screwing up our health care
He’ll save Social Security
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Political Science Professor Takes Down Iowa Supreme Court

Posted by TheChair on Saturday, April 11, 2009 1:10:22 PM
Political science professor Matthew Franck has written one of the best criticisms of any judicial opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. Specifically, the piece attacks the new Iowa Supreme Court decision, but most of its legal and all of moral reasoning expose any such opinion as tyranny and moral fraud. I was a poly sci. major and am now a lawyer. Lawyers and judges who make it to the lofty levels of Supreme Court justices often believe they have special qualifications and insights that equip them over legislators to decide moral issues. Such self-esteem is usually unjustified. This piece shows that a non-lawyer can reason legally more soundly than a lawyer, and more importantly, can interweave it with the moral philosophy that entirely escaped the court. Read the entire thing... it's worth it. My favorite paragraphs:
From this vantage point, the feelings individuals have for one another are the authoritative wellspring of moral principle. Now, only a great fool would deny the connection of love and marriage—they go together like a horse and carriage, as Frank Sinatra famously sang. But emotion and desire, without more, are a treacherous foundation for law and public policy. As Pascal remarked, the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing. From society’s vantage point, that’s not good enough. Marriage and family are a moral institution—the teacher of right conduct between the sexes, the school of morality for the young, the founding scene of our moral obligations, the refuge from a wider world where respect for those obligations is a much chancier proposition. These may sound like lofty ideals often unrealized, but that both is the point and is beside the point. Society has an interest—none of its interests is higher—in encouraging the successful formation of marriages and families that point by their nature toward the achievement of these ideals. Within the metes and bounds of the law that expresses society’s conclusions about these matters, the rest is up to us.

....

Lost from view is the true ground of our common public morality: reasoned judgment about the natures of things and the good of human persons, families, and communities. About such matters, religion can be instructive (to say the least), while a mere desire to “affirm” our “relationships” cannot be. And so, in both its reductive approach to religion and its empty invocations of feelings, the Iowa Supreme Court has done an injustice to religion, to the possibility of lawful public morality, and—yes—to our relationships themselves.
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Who's Afraid of the Pipsqueak President?

Posted by TheChair on Saturday, April 11, 2009 10:43:07 AM
Would the whack job in North Korea have launched a missile while George W. Bush was traveling the world? Would the Somali pirates have taken a U.S.-flagged ship?
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Canadian Health Care Killed Natasha Richardson

Posted by TheChair on Wednesday, April 08, 2009 3:32:01 AM
Columnist Grace Marie Turner explains how actress Natasha Richardson was killed by the compromises inherent in Canada's socialized health care system. Note what she says about Medi Vac helicopters and CT Scanners.
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Laughing at the Pipsqueak

Posted by TheChair on Wednesday, April 08, 2009 2:51:44 AM
Abraham Lincoln knew the value of ridicule. If he could get a jury or voters laughing at his opponent, the battle was won. Rush Limbaugh reminds conservatives of this useful tool. The Pipsqueak president's inflated sense of himself carries with it this achilles heal... hypersensitivity to ridicule. Rush, on 4/6/09:
There's two ways of going at Obama, I think.  Or there's a choice of two ways.  I think it's a mistake to just pound policy.  People aren't going to listen to it.  They don't blame him.  They think everything Obama's doing is done to fix what's already wrong when he got there.  It's a waste of time.  It's educational, and it's informative, don't misunderstand, it's gotta be done, but the thing that irritates this White House the most and the way to really put them off stride is to laugh at them, to ridicule them, and to make fun of them.  To go just hands wringing and give people serious dissertations on the problems of Obama policy, yeah, I mean that has to be done, but at the same time, laughter, making fun of 'em, ridicule them, that's what they don't like.  He's supreme leader.  You don't do that.  That's what will take 'em off stride.

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Obama the Pipsqueak

Posted by TheChair on Wednesday, April 08, 2009 2:43:19 AM
Obama's preternatural self-confidence isn't justified by any knowledge, dedication to principle or talent other than delivering a speech-by-teleprompter. This grossly lopsided confidence-to-ability ratio gives him narcissistic enlarged-head syndrome. In simpler terms, he's a Pipsqueak. Big, big head, supported by little inside. When I was a boy, there was this line of little plastic dolls with big soft heads that squeaked when you pinched them. They were literally called Pipsqueaks. I've been unable so far to find photos of them in vintage toy catalogues online, but they existed. My family had two, including the policeman, and I think, the fireman. Obama is just like them. Big head, with little of substance inside. A Pipsqueak. The pipsqueak president.

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Prop. 8, While We Wait

Posted by TheChair on Tuesday, April 07, 2009 2:17:37 AM
It's been months since the '08 election. Prop. 8 has been argued and Californians await a decision by the state Supreme Court. We expect it to be published by the first week of June. The best analysis concludes that the court will uphold Prop. 8 while also permitting the preexisting same-sex marriages to survive. But the court will do what it will.

Assume the court upholds Prop. 8. The next stage of this conflict will be at the federal level--during the Obama administration. One worrisome scenario is where the California Supreme Court upholds Prop. 8 on state constitutional grounds, but plants in its opinion a weakness that can be leveraged in federal courts by same-sex marriage proponents.

All talk is just that, talk, until the opinion is published.

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Jerry "Judas" Brown Betrays California Voters on Prop. 8

Posted by TheChair on Tuesday, December 23, 2008 10:16:12 AM
California Attorney General Jerry Brown once again betrays California voters. His brief "in favor" of preserving Prop. 8 (normal marriage) actually tries to kill it off. It does defend against the silly argument that Prop. 8 is an unlawful constitutional "revision" rather than a permitted "amendment." But it Brown's brief goes on to call the marriage amendment unconstitutional on the old Progressive ground that fundamental rights can only expand in history. The People have no legitimate power to curtail them. National Review Online has a good summary:
Here is how Brown summarizes his argument in his press release: “The amendment process cannot be used to extinguish fundamental constitutional rights without compelling justification.” Brown invents this argument out of whole cloth: Further, how is it that a “right” to same-sex marriage that the state supreme court invented just months ago, and that even Brown’s brief concedes was not something “the Framers [of the state constitution] contemplated,” should suddenly be deemed a “fundamental” constitutional right?

Brown’s answer is judicial activism on stilts: Any right that the state supreme court has found to be protected as (in Brown’s phrase) “part of fundamental human liberty” under the state constitution is ipso facto a “fundamental” right. And, further, the fact that the court found such a right means there is no “compelling justification” for its abrogation. In Brown’s theory, there is no popular check on the judicial-activist invention of rights.
With defenders of the people's will like Brown, we need no enemies.


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Prop. 8's Victory Margin and California's Budget Trouble

Posted by TheChair on Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:05:21 AM
The final tally came in last Saturday... Prop. 8 won by 599,602 votes, a 52.3 to 47.7 spread. It prevailed in 43 of 58 counties.

We're in a holding pattern concerning the legal briefs. There was an initial flurry of filings, resulting in the California Supreme Court deciding to hear the Prop. 8 challenges on review. Now we wait for those substantive briefs on review.

Meanwhile, California's state budget has gone into the crapper. I see no reasonable hope of it being fixed any time soon. Right now the deficit is at least $18 billion and in two years' time it will be over $42 billion. Here's how the majority democrat state legislature intends to deal with it:
Democrats would justify implementing the taxes with a simple majority by calling some of the revenues "fees" that pay for particular programs. Such fees can be put into effect without GOP support. They are also planning to take money from existing fee accounts, use it to balance the budget and then replenish the accounts with higher fees.
They're going to fix things by calling taxes "fees," and by stealing from current fee accounts while leaving worthless IOU's in them... with circus music playing on the calliope. I have news for you. If you think those accounts aren't already empty, you're stupid. And the fee increases won't hold up in court. In California, 2/3 of the legislature must sign off on tax increases, and calling them something else isn't a winning legal argument.

County Sheriff's are routinely releasing early crooks simply because of budget trouble. Federal judges are about to order a population cap on state prisons... because of the inadequate and underfunded prison medical care. The state legislature is about to hike taxes in the midst of a major recession. And the budget bomb is starting to explode. We won't feel all the shrapnel until next spring and summer, but we feel some now. It's going to get real ugly.

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Cheating Generation is the Pro-Gay Marriage Generation

Posted by TheChair on Friday, December 05, 2008 2:38:42 AM
This study confirms my observations, suspicions and first-hand witness reports from my oldest daughter. Cheating in school is an epidemic amongst teens, even and especially including A-Students. About a third of 30,000 surveyed students admitted to cheating. Over 80% of students admitted they lie to parents. 30% admit to stealing.

There is a cultural fault line between this teenage and early-20's generation and their parents' generation. I see it as no surprise that from this young generation arose the most militant opponents of California's Proposition 8 (to restore traditional marriage). Debauchery and dishonesty have always gone hand in hand. Pessimists may say civilization will soon be over, but that fails to account for the many, many good and excellent young people alive today. I believe that right will ultimately prevail because there are enough good people to pass the tablets to.

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