“Right now, Sarah Palin is on a highly publicized, nationwide book tour, attacking President Obama and his plan for health reform at every turn,” “It’s dangerous. Remember, this is the person who coined the term ‘Death Panels’ — and opened the flood gates for months of false attacks by special interests and partisan extremists.”

An international terrorist responsible for the death of thousands of American civilians? Have no fear, give them their public forum from which to preach his hate, and Justice will be served. A soccer mom who disgarees with President Obama’s domestic agenda? DANGER!!

Hat Tip Hot Air

So profound is such a belief that the British courts this month accorded believers in climate change all of the rights the law extends to practitioners of any religion. Ruling in a case in which a man claims he was dismissed as “head of sustainability” for a real estate firm because of his ecological beliefs, the court held, “A belief in man-made climate change and the alleged moral imperatives is capable, if genuinely held, of being a -philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Beliefs Regulations.”

Be sure to read the whole article.

Stone: Do you think it’s fair to send people to jail who don’t buy health insurance?
Pelosi: … The legislation is very fair in this respect.

Video Via Ed Morrissey who reminds us that statism always comes with handcuffs.

Update: Democratic Senator Daniel Akaka says he is not “aware” of how the Constitution gives Congress the power to make such mandates:

When CNSNews.com asked whether the Constitution gives Congress the authority to make Americans buy health insurance, Sen. Akaka said: “I’m not aware of that, let me put it that way. But what we’re trying to do is to provide for people who have needs and that’s where the accessibility comes in, and one of the goals that we’re trying to present here is to make it accessible.”

Well as long as your trying to “provide” for me, I’ll ignore the fact that you lack the Constitutional authority to do so. On that note, CNS News reminds us of what the Congressional Budget Office said about such a mandate when Clinton tried it in ‘94:

“A mandate requiring all individuals to purchase health insurance would be an unprecedented form of federal action,” said the CBO. “The government has never required people to buy any good or service as a condition of lawful residence in the United States.”

Precedent schmedecent! We don’t need no stinkin precedent, America wanted change remember? So what if that change falls outside the scope of the Constitution, because all change is good right?

WHAT IS A VET

Some veterans bear visible signs of their service: a missing limb, a jagged scar,
a certain look in the eye. Others may carry the evidence inside them: a pin
holding a bone together, a piece of shrapnel in the leg – or perhaps another sort
of inner steel: the soul’s ally forged in the refinery of adversity. Except in
parades, however, the men and women who have kept America safe wear no badge or
emblem. You can’t tell a vet just by looking.

What is a vet?

He is the cop on the beat who spent six months in Saudi Arabia sweating two gallons
a day making sure the armored personnel carriers didn’t run out of fuel.

He is the barroom loudmouth, dumber than five wooden planks, whose overgrown
frat-boy behavior is outweighed a hundred times in the cosmic scales by four hours
of exquisite bravery near the 38th parallel.

She or he—is the nurse who fought against futility and went to sleep sobbing every
night for two solid years in Da Nang.

He is the POW who went away one person and came back another—or didn’t come back
AT ALL.

He is the Quantico drill instructor who has never seen combat—but has saved
countless lives by turning slouchy, no-account rednecks and gang members into
Marines, and teaching them to watch each other’s backs.

He is the parade—riding Legionnaire who pins on his ribbons and medals with a
prosthetic hand.

He is the career quartermaster who watches the ribbons and medals pass him by.

He is the three anonymous heroes in The Tomb Of The Unknowns, whose presence at
the Arlington National Cemetery must forever preserve the memory of all the
anonymous heroes whose valor dies unrecognized with them on the battlefield or in
the ocean’s sunless deep.

He is the old guy bagging groceries at the supermarket—palsied now and
aggravatingly slow—who helped liberate a Nazi death camp and who wishes all day
long that his wife were still alive to hold him when the nightmares come.

He is an ordinary and yet an extraordinary human being—a person who offered some
of his life’s most vital years in the service of his country, and who sacrificed
his ambitions so others would not have to sacrifice theirs.

He is a soldier and a savior and a sword against the darkness, and he is nothing
more than the finest, greatest testimony on behalf of the finest, greatest nation
ever known.

So remember, each time you see someone who has served our country, just lean over
and say Thank You. That’s all most people need, and in most cases it will mean
more than any medals they could have been awarded or were awarded.

Two little words that mean a lot, “THANK YOU.”

Remember November 11th is Veterans Day.

“It is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us freedom of the press. It
is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the
soldier, not the campus organizer, who has given us the freedom to demonstrate.
It is the soldier, who salutes the flag, who serves beneath the flag, and whose
coffin is draped by the flag, who allows the protester to burn the flag.”

Father Dennis Edward O’Brien, USMC

Police busted Lionel McIntyre, 59, for assault yesterday after his bruised victim, Camille Davis, filed charges.

McIntyre and Davis, who works as a production manager in the school’s theater department, are both regulars at Toast, a popular university bar on Broadway and 125th Street, sources said.

The professor, who is black, had been engaged in a fiery discussion about “white privilege” with Davis, who is white, and another male regular, who is also white, Friday night at 10:30 when fists started flying, patrons said.

The other patron involved in the dispute said McIntyre then took a swing at him after he yelled, “You don’t hit a woman!”

“He knocked the glasses right off my face,” said the man, who would only give his first name as “Shannon.” “The punch came out of nowhere. Mac was talking to us about white privilege and what I was doing about it — apparently I wasn’t doing enough.”

A white police officer arresting a black Harvard professor attracted huge media attention, resulting in the President of the United States inviting the two men involved to the White House for a beer in order to talk about it. Somehow I doubt a black Professor punching a white woman, while arguing about white privelage will garner the same attention from either the President, or the Media.

According to Representative Earl Blumenauer of Oregon, who supports the health care bill, the president asked, “Does anybody think that the teabag, anti-government people are going to support them if they bring down health care? All it will do is confuse and dispirit” Democratic voters “and it will encourage the extremists.”

This is the same President who when referring the the murder of 13 American soldiers by an American Muslim said “We don’t know all the answers yet, and I would caution against jumping to conclusions until we have all the facts”. Yet here is the President of the United States of America referring to patriotic Americans as “extremists” for having the audacity to oppose his agenda. Memo to President Obama, holding rallys opposing new entitlements to some Americans and new taxes for others is not an “etremist” position. The murder of 13 American soldiers to express your unhappiness with the American military, and American foreign policy in general, is. It would serve America well if the Commander in Chief of our armed forces learned this very simple lesson, prior to lecturing Americans on the need to get “all the facts”.

Having read Krugman’s Op-Ed’s for years, this was something I have long feared, however this mornings Op-Ed entitled “Paranoia Strikes Deep” has now confirmed my belief:

What all this shows is that the G.O.P. has been taken over by the people it used to exploit.

The state of mind visible at recent right-wing demonstrations is nothing new. Back in 1964 the historian Richard Hofstadter published an essay titled, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” which reads as if it were based on today’s headlines: Americans on the far right, he wrote, feel that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.” Sound familiar?

But while the paranoid style isn’t new, its role within the G.O.P. is.

Paranoia, as it turns out, is nothing new to Krugman himself. In fact you would be hard pressed to find any political issue in which Krugman didn’t declare a “catastrophe” would occur unless we followed the progressive agenda.

Krugman on the climate:

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it.

Krugman on Health Care:

…the United States is the only wealthy country in which the economic catastrophe will also be a health care catastrophe — in which millions of people will lose their health insurance along with their jobs, and therefore lose access to essential care.

Krugman on the economy:

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

It would serve Krugman well to read the essay he cited by Richard Hofstadter who says:

The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms….

If that doesn’t describe Paul Krugman, I don’t know what does!

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail. The JCT letter makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said: “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail. It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

This is Nanny State politics at its worst. Think back to when your parents sent you to your room for not doing your homework, it was because they loved you they would say. It appears that Democrats love the American people so much, they are willing to send us to jail to prove it.