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October 2nd, 2009Dear Liberty Activist, As you know, Chicago will not be hosting the 2016 Olympics. On September 28th, the NY Times reported that "with his close friend and senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, deeply involved in helping Chicago's bid, Mr. Obama was convinced that his presence could make a difference in balloting that analysts believe could turn on a few votes." Instead, Chicago--and Obama--were rejected on the world stage. Really, it was just a useless waste of political capital on Obama's part, and now leaves him with the sting of losing an important vote that he personally and politically invested in. Kind of like ObamaCare. He has made dozens of speeches pitching for the nationalization of what by 2018 will account for one-fifth of the nation's economy. And now he stands to lose the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, which would be nothing short of a crushing blow for the first term administration. So, let's keep the pressure on! Congress plans on adding some 26 to 45 million individuals to the government-run health care rolls at a cost of anywhere from $1.2 to $2.1 trillion over ten years. Let's get on CapWiz and tell them, "Heck no!" Enter your zip code and follow the steps. And we can keep calling out to the House and to the Senate. Of course, you can also reach them via the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121. And,
here's the
Target 92 list on the House side to all vulnerable and Blue Dog
Democrats. (You can really use this on any issue, whether
ObamaCare, defunding ACORN, etc.) Blue Dogs are in blue. Here's the .xls.pdf
versions. Of note, the first 40 on the list are the Blue Dogs
that signed the "deficit-neutral" letter mentioned above.
Everything you need to email their staff, write letters, make phone
calls and send faxes, both to their district and Capitol Hill offices. In today's Liberty Action Report, welcome to OPEC-Care, Mark Lloyd could have written a western, and Bill Ayers really did write Obama's book. Plus, the Overnights returns with ObamaCare still dominating the blogosphere. And, Newsweek's Daniel Lyons makes the case for letting newspapers die. Please send your letters to the editor at Robert@getliberty.org. We publish all points of view! Today, Rich Renevier writes, "The story of what is being done with Hannah disgusts on so many levels. First her being attacked personally for exposing ACORN for the corrupt organization that it is. Also, the message of INTIMIDATION intended to discourage anyone else that cares enough about what is right from speaking act or as Hannah did acting. Deep pockets alone cannot and should not be allowed to effectively silence Hannah or future 'Hannahs'." In constitutional law, it's called a "chilling effect." And ACORN will not get away with it. They don't have much of a case. Don't forget to show your support at DefendHannah.com. For Liberty, Robert Romano P.S. Want to help us keep fighting? Help us out with a small donation today! Or mail it to: Americans for Limited Government, 9900 Main Street, Suite 303, Fairfax, VA 22031.
Open Source & Copyright Free Welcome
to OPEC-Care The
Consolidators: A Western by Mark Lloyd Literary
Lion Obama Will Roar No More The
Overnights from NetRight Nation Too
Hot Not To Note: Don't Bail Out Newspapers—Let Them Die and Get Out of
the Way Welcome to OPEC-Care
What if the government taxed people just because they were living and breathing? Taxation already touches almost all aspects of life, from paychecks to cable bills. We can be sure our congressional representatives are experts at creating new pretenses for taxation. But a tax whose impact cannot be mitigated and is imposed solely for the act of breathing would surely be derided as un-American. Yet, rest assured, this "living and breathing" tax is on the table right now. It's called "Individual Mandate." It is part and parcel of the Obama health care plan. As Obama lectured George Stephanopoulos in his recent Sunday talk show marathon, "You've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance." And if you choose not to, government will force you to pay up anyway in through what may appropriately be called the Orwellian Prescribed Extortion Cartel (OPEC). OPEC Care is Orwellian because in order to force its will, the government will have access to some of the most intimate conversations one could possibly have--those protected by doctor-patient privilege. They also will have access to patients' bank accounts as a result of the bill. So, unlike the way Social Security direct deposits currently function, in which money is only deposited, this provision is a two-way affair--money can be taken out of accounts as well. This is a dangerous negation both of privacy – and of solvency. The term "individual mandate" is also a lie. It sounds like the individual is empowered, but, rest assured, he's certainly not the one doing any mandating. The government issues the mandates to the mandatee who is the individual. It's actually a government mandate. Under this bill, the individual is mandated to procure insurance from a de facto government-protected cartel of insurance companies. This system forces people to buy and guarantees these companies have a market and customers. And if someone dares to oppose OPEC-Care, he is penalized with a steep exise tax, though Obama claims this is not a tax despite the word being used in the bill. Its not designed to insure people as much as its designed to "ensure" companies have customers. Obamacare's "public option" was not market-based choice and nor is OPEC-Care's "individual mandate". Proponents claim that buying health care from OPEC-Care is somehow supposed to magically reduce the price of health care. But a cartel by definition does nothing to lower prices. Cartels control prices by dominating supply. Most people comparison shop when they buy most things, but no more with OPEC-Care should this "compromise" bill pass. Doctors also lose big because OPEC-Care is the only game in town. Right now, if an insurance company is slow to pay on claims, a doctor can choose not to deal with that insurance company in favor of others. Many car dealers are near bankruptcy from the Cash for Clunkers scam--now comes the government with another dysfunctional solution. OPEC-Care amounts to a compulsory tax for living and breathing. People can't opt out until they're dead, so how else could it be characterized? Rather than depriving people of choices by establishing a cartel, the government should expand the horizons. Allowing the thousands of insurance companies currently in business to compete across state lines is a great start. But that would promote freedom instead of restrict it. And that's not the Obama OPEC-Care way. Government protecting companies from their clients by making it illegal not to buy from them is precisely the wrong direction. Only genuinely increasing market influences and competition will lower costs. Anything else is an insult to the 85% of Americans who are currently satisfied with their health care. And taxing the life and breath out of them adds lethal injury to that insult. Keya Dash is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer for Americans for Limited Government. http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1620 The Consolidators: A Western by Mark Lloyd
There can be little doubt about who wears the black hats in the new, myopically focused, socialistically inspired drama of the Old West by, and starring, FCC Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd. The villains in Lloyd's saga are the commercial owners of radio stations, like Clear Channel Communications, who typically have "stations in multiple markets or more than three stations in a single market." Portrayed by him as being analogous to the cattle barons of the Old West, who greedily come into town and gobble up scarce resources and leave the local population in the lurch, these corporate station owners are represented as doing the same with the limited broadcast resources throughout the land. And it just so happens, Lloyd's research tells him, that the stations in the possession of these group owners "were statistically more likely to air conservative talk." Furthermore, he claims that, in markets where there is "a clear demand and proven success of progressive talk" these dastardly bullies "still elect to stack the airwaves with one-sided broadcasting." In short, the game plan of these feckless capitalists is to go broke. These are just some of the inane conclusions reached in Mr. Lloyd's much discussed article, "The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio." Elsewhere, Lloyd claims to take the side of his much maligned townsfolk in a piece called "Local Media Diversity Matters." Ostensibly defending their "Constitutional rights of free speech" he claims, "Americans' ability to learn about and debate local, state and national issues and to monitor our representatives depends upon our exposure to news and discussion that is not controlled by a small group of mostly like-minded corporations." Leaving aside that he somehow forgot to add the obligatory word "evil" before "corporations," it seemingly never occurs to him that this "small group" may, in fact, express the free-market friendly views of the many ordinary Americans who choose to listen to their radio programming. He seems to ascribe to the Marxist illusion that views supportive of free-markets can't be the real beliefs of ordinary people. Meanwhile, back in town, some of the citizens, meeting at the local courthouse, are calling on Marshall Lloyd to save the day by making the FCC reinstitute the "Fairness Doctrine." Lloyd declines, explaining that he does not believe that repeal of the "Fairness Doctrine" in 1987 caused conservative radio to dominate the airwaves. So, simply reinstating it will not fix the "problem." What he thinks really caused the consolidation of ownership in radio stations, and the explosion in numbers of conservative talk radio stations nationwide, was an action by the FCC in 2003 "that substantially relaxed a wide range of media ownership regulations," in part by the creation of a new Diversity Index. Now Lloyd intends to rectify the situation by applying a newly developed, anti-free-enterprise formula for measuring media diversity in local communities. He holds that it will, "measure media diversity according to democratic values, not market values" (Exactly which democratic values are diametrically opposed to market values he doesn't make clear.) And exactly what anti-democratic values will his diversity formula overcome. Well, in an article entitled "Forget the Fairness Doctrine" he observes that, even in its heyday in the 1960s, it did not address the fact that the mainstream media was "middle-class, anti-communist, Protestant, male and white." His earlier research tells him, that "stations owned by women, minorities, or local owners are statistically less likely to air conservative hosts or shows." So, he wishes to use the power of government, as embodied in his new diversity formula as a tool for wresting the licenses, and station ownership, of groups now supporting conservative talk radio so that he may redistribute them to those he considers worthy of his largesse. What a fine example of the Marxist principle of the redistribution of wealth from someone who praised Chavez' Communist takeover of Venezuela as an "incredible revolution" and who has voiced the view that Chavez had it right when he shrewdly took over 200 stations owned by land-owners who represented his political opposition. Mark Lloyd has, it seems, learned well from his de facto mentor. And does anyone with one iota of common sense really think that Lloyd's planned move to squelch the Left's conservative talk radio opposition, no matter what its ostensible justification, is anything other than the same sort of stark political power grab that Chavez master-minded in Venezuela---under the guise, of course, of helping the people? Conservative talk radio virtually saved the entire medium of AM radio from oblivion in the 1980s. If anything, its proponents are heroes for doing so. And I don't therefore have a very good review to write of Lloyd's western portraying them as the villains. I also don't view him as wearing a white hat either. It is extremely alarming that someone whose core views are so obviously antagonistic to free-market capitalism has been given such a place of prominence in the increasingly bizarre Obama Administration. Victor Morawski, a professor at Coppin State University, is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer. http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1619 Literary Lion Obama Will Roar No More
Originally published at American Thinker. The major media will not likely tackle the emerging evidence of Obama's stunning literary fraud, but the days of Obama's boasting about his writing skills are just as likely over. The immediate cause of concern at the White House is Christopher Andersen's largely benign new book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage. Andersen contends that the ambitious Obama, unaware of JFK's own literary fraud, hoped to launch his own political career with a book as did John Kennedy with the discreetly ghost-written Profiles In Courage. Despite a large advance, Obama found himself "hopelessly blocked." After four futile years of trying to finish, Obama "sought advice from his friend and Hyde Park neighbor Bill Ayers." This he did "at Michelle's urging," she being the more pragmatic half of the couple. What attracted the Obamas were "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the fluid novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. This he hoped to emulate for his own family history. In fact, he had already taped interviews with many of his relatives, both African and American. The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows: "These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers." Adds Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Book." The manuscript in question would become Obama's 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, what Joe Klein of Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician." From textual sleuthing, I had come to a comparable conclusion more than a year ago, namely that Obama had "turned the framework of his life over to terrorist emeritus Bill Ayers who roughed it in with his own darker sentiments and experiences." Embedded here is a visual summary of this research, produced by Chris Kusnell. (Part I) (Part II) As one example of Ayers' involvement, I had argued that Dreams' tale of Obama's year-long relationship with a rich, green-eyed lovely seemed to have mined the details of Ayers' own relationship to the late Weatherwoman Diana Oughton. From a close reading, I doubted there was such a girl in Obama's life. So does Andersen. "No one," he writes, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence." It did not matter, however, how accurate was my analysis. From the perspective of Obama's literary defenders, I was a barbarian who could effectively be kept in check outside the gates. Andersen writes from within the gates. He has no agenda. His book is dispassionate, softly liberal and largely sympathetic to the Obamas, particularly to Michelle and her family. A popular celebrity journalist, he interviewed some 200 people for the book, many of them close to the Obama family. The Obamas had likely given at least their tacit blessing to the project. Given that the natural audience for his book skews female and left, Andersen had no reason to invent facts that would alienate his base. He has no track record of doing the same. Although Andersen cites me on textual comparisons, I was clearly not the source for the personal details of Obama's life. His retelling of the story was based on what he had been told by someone very close to the action. He had access to people who would never have talked to me, quite possibly Michelle herself or even Bill Ayers. Clearly shaken, the Obama-centric media find themselves in a fix not unlike that of medieval astronomers upon discovery of a new planet. Every time this happened, these geocentrists had to figure out a convoluted new loop to describe the planet's rotation around the earth. So it is with challenges to the Obama myth, even unwitting ones like Andersen's. Obama's acolytes must find some convoluted new explanation to account for each unexpected deviance from the mythic overview. Defenses mustered in the last few days include a lack of attribution by Andersen, his ignorance of an imagined "computerized analysis" by an Oxford professor, the citation of me as source and/or a reliance upon me as source. Each of these explanations implies that Andersen is a fraud and a liar and that he contrived the story he told. Andersen's highly successful career as a celebrity journalist argues strongly against such an interpretation. What impresses the reader about these defenses is how easily their architects satisfy themselves and presumably the Obama faithful with their soundness. The Washington Independent's David Weigel, for instance, is among those who dismiss Andersen's claim because he credits me as a source. To trivialize my contribution, Weigel cites one point of comparison between Obama and Ayers -- their mutual use of the phrase "behind enemy lines" to establish their place in capitalist America -- as though I had not also listed hundreds of other such comparisons, many much more compelling. Had he read Andersen's book, which he does not appear to have, Weigel would have seen that Andersen's retelling of the story was based not on what I had written but on what Andersen had been told by someone who was on the scene. A close reading of the book, however, might have shaken Weigel's faith in his Milli Vanilli of messiahs. "I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of students and teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself." The media should be able to protect his reputation among the willfully blind but don't expect to hear Obama make comparable boasts in the near future. Jack Cashill is a writer, producer, and executive editor of Ingram's, a midwestern business magazine. He has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue. Among his seven books is "Hoodwinked," a study of intellectual and literary fraud. http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1618
The Overnights: Three Weeks out From Government CareBy Adam Bitely Health Care has been the top issue for political bloggers since the Summer began. And interestingly, it seems like we have always heard that we are three weeks out from a Health Care vote since July began. So where are we in this debate? Are we really three weeks out from socialized medicine? If you have been following the debate in the blogosphere the answer would be that a truly socialized system of health care will not exist in the immediate future. The blogosphere is the canary in the mine on most issues, and has been especially during the Health Care debate. And to note, bloggers have been steering the debate. Congress and Obama have not. Elected officials involved in the Health Care debate are getting involved in the blogosphere to help steer the discussion. Yesterday, Rep. John Shadegg posted on NetRight Nation about the cancer survival rate in government-run systems. Whether you agree with Mr. Shadegg or not, when our elected representatives contribute to the discussion where it counts—in the blogosphere—everyone comes out further ahead. Obama and Pelosi have been trumpeting proclamations of being three weeks out from a vote for three months. The blogosphere has been a good barometer to see what will happen next. And if that remains true, we are nowhere near having a Health Care bill pass. http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1617
ALG Editor's Note: In the following featured commentary, Daniel Lyons from Newsweek's Techonic Shifts explains why newspapers should just "die and get out of the way."
Don't Bail Out Newspapers--Let Them Die and Get Out of the WayDaniel Lyons Nobody in their right mind believes the future of the news business involves paper and ink rather than pixels on a screen. We all know where the news business is headed, and what's more, we've known it for at least a decade. So why on earth are people talking about a bailout for newspapers? Why is President Obama saying he'd consider it? Why is Congress holding hearings and considering "The Newspaper Revitalization Act" in a bid to save these ailing old rags with tax breaks and other handouts? It's like introducing legislation to save horse-drawn carriages, or steam engines, or black-and-white TV. It's stupid. It's pointless. It won't work. The fact is, all this hysteria has nothing to do with saving the news, or saving jobs. Nor is it about saving democracy, which is what the red-in-the-face newspaper lovers always get themselves huffed about, as if newspapers and democracy were inextricably linked. Democracy existed long before newspapers did, and it will survive without them. And plenty of countries that don't have democracy do have newspapers. Nor would a bailout help readers. In fact, it would only slow down our shift to the Internet, which is a far better medium for delivering information. The only beneficiaries of a bailout would be a handful of big newspaper companies that used to be profitable and powerful and now, well, aren't. Those companies saw the Internet charging toward them like a freight train, and they just stood there on the tracks. They didn't adapt. Why? Because for decades these companies enjoyed virtual monopolies, and as often happens to monopolists, they got lazy. They invested their resources in protecting their monopolies, using bully tactics to keep new competitors from entering their markets. They dished up an inferior product and failed to believe that anything or anyone could ever take their little gold mines away from them. Continue reading here. http://blog.getliberty.org/default.asp?Display=1616 |
By Keya Dash
by Victor Morawski
By Jack Cashill
