Senator Coburn recently remarked that the recent order by Obama, ordering all employers to offer health insurance that covers birth control, sterilizations and abortion pills, regardless of any religious objections….is not that big a deal:

“This is blown out of proportion,” he said. “It is an important point in terms of religious liberty, but it’s a consequence of having too big of a government.”

I don’t agree that it’s blown out of proportion but I do agree on the reasons why no one should be surprised.

This was what ObamaCare was about in the first place. To place every American under the power of the federal government. To rule every aspect of your life. It’s just another power grab by the federal government, and this Administration, at the expense of the States and the individual.

Daniel Henninger:

The Catholic Church has stumbled into the central battle of the 2012 presidential campaign: What are the limits to Barack Obama’s transformative presidency? The Catholic left has just learned one answer: When Mr. Obama says, “Everyone plays by the same set of rules,” it means they conform to his rules. What else could it mean?

This battle is to repeal ObamaCare, plain and simple.

Oh wait, Romney is going to be our nominee…

Nevermind.

Exit quote:

“We are all familiar with an individual mandate that was authorized by the U.S. Congress and notoriously upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court: the affirmative duty of persons of Japanese descent to report to a Civil Control Station. Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1943). The distinction between mere prohibition and command played a large role in the internment cases. . . . Korematsu is a perfectly fine precedent: it has never been overruled. Moreover, it is the feds’ best and only precedent. So why don’t they cite it?”

There is no way anyone can argue that the ObamaCare waiver process isn’t benefiting Obama’s crony’s and supporters:

Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama‘s signature legislation since June 17, 2011.

By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.

So it looks like most of the liberals who support Obama don’t want anything to do with ObamaCare.

Shocker!

So lets ask a few questions. If ObamaCare is so awesome, is so helpful and affordable, why are so many businesses, state and local governments, and labor unions seeking exemptions from it? And why did Obama grant the exemptions.

But with the newly released report from the Department of Health and Human Services revealing such a heavy tilting of waivers toward Big Labor, the Obama Administration’s move will give further ammunition to Republican presidential candidates like Gov. Mitt Romney who have labeled Mr. Obama a “crony capitalist.”

Hopefully the Supreme Court will issue us all waivers later this year

Click here to view the embedded video.

Who among us has not yet known fear?
up close heard the mighty grizzly roar
a child, trembling in the dark with tears
For our Fear itself has history and lore

Many of us fear the night
and stay so near the light
Fear stalks us in different ways
Master fear or cower all your days

Fear is real or created
Thus evil can be elated
Using fears to manipulate
Satan’s key to Hell’s gate

Skook 09

Irrational fear is one of our most dangerous enemies. H1N1 is an irrational fear, every year the seasonal flu kills 40,000 people with challenged immune systems and H1N1 is a more benign flu than the seasonal flu; yet, because of the Obama administration’s irresponsible hype over this flu, an unrealistic fear became a form of national hysteria.

I once saw irrational fear consume a friend, years ago; his name was Johnny or Barb Wire Johnny. He was one of the best horsemen, I’ve ever known. Johnny lived in the bush country of Northern British Columbia; he was an outfitter, trapper, and horse trainer. A small man with long black flowing hair, black locks of hair that the most beautiful women in the world can only dream about.

With a gentle heart and calm steady hands he could make the best ranch horses, mountain horses, pack horses, and driving horses I have ever seen. For all his abilities, Johnny had his personal demons; like many in the North he was part native and possessed a weakness for alcohol, a common affliction in the North Country.

Johnny also had a taste for high venison; most of us ate moose and moose hardly ever spoils, but Johnny liked to hang his venison until it started to spoil. It caused him to have a permanent case of dysentery and Johnny never quite made the connection.

Like many of the old timers, Johnny wore moose hide moccasins and leggins, in the winter he also wore a union suit beneath his moose hide clothes. That’s a pair of woolen long johns with a two button flap in the back for life’s necessaries.

Unfortunately, Johnny might be overtaken by his dietary problems at any moment, so he liked to stuff straw or hay in the back door of his union suit, just in case. Moose hide stretches and Johnny was always stretching his leather leggins from riding horses and stuffing the hind end with straw. It was funny to watch a little man with an oversized and sagging butt walking away, but I never said anything.

I was Johnny’s connection to the outside world, I brought the whiskey, horses for training, and cash paying hunters. I lived on a ranch with a phone, an asset that is considered a real advantage for a business man. There was usually at least a dozen people listening to every conversation, but it was a phone. I helped him with the hooves, shoes, and teeth, and he taught me of the mystical world of man and horse or the science of turning two critters into one, many of the same lessons I use in my business to this day.

Johnny struggled for a long time trying to make spurs out of barb wire that would work with moccasins, no matter what he did he couldn’t get them to stay in place. Eventually, I made a pair of spurs in the forge that would work for tiny moccasin’ed feet, he was so grateful it was touching. Little did he know, I would use his knowledge and techniques to build a business that would take me all over the world.

On a cold October day, I was bringing in a couple of hunters from the States along with several green colts for Johnny to train, when darkness overtook us. Traveling in the dark is risky business, it’s easy to lose an eye or run a snag through yourself or your horse, so we made camp about twelve miles from Johnny’s cabin. The temperature dropped to 30 below, and the hunters suffered from the cold; but I didn’t want the hunters to ride in the dark, there are just too many accidents waiting to happen.

We rode into the yard in the grey light of a snowy morning and heard screaming like someone was torturing Johnny in the cabin. I drew my rifle from the scabbard and jumped off my horse and hit the ground on the run. The cabin door was latched from the inside, I kicked it open while listening to Johnny screaming in agony. I stepped into Johnny’s cabin expecting to put rounds through one or more bad guys.

Johnny saw me and yelled, “Shoot him Skook! Shoot him!”

I surveyed the scene in front of me, propped my rifle against the cabin wall, drew my knife and walked towards Johnny‘s bunk.

During the night the fire had gone out and Johnny’s moisture laden breath froze his beautiful black locks to the iron bedstead. While trapped by ice and his own hair, Johnny let his imagination run away with him, he dreamed or envisioned the devil holding him down by the hair; consequently, he promised to give up drinking when he saw his departed mother praying for him over the tongue of the wagon if only she could help him out of this fix.

I drew my knife through Johnny’s hair next to the iron rail, he jumped up and ran outside to collapse on the ice and snow in front of the two hunters who were still on their horses and probably thought they had ridden into an asylum.

I walked outside, knelt down and consoled Johnny, who was in his sweat soaked union suit and barefoot. “Skook, Skook you are the bravest man in the world. You threw down your rifle and took on the devil with your knife. There has never been a braver man than you.”

I smiled, all I had to do is let Johnny carry on with his delusion and I would be a legend in the Omineca Peace Region for a hundred years. I told him the truth, “No Johnny, the devil wasn’t in the cabin. Your hair was frozen to the iron rail on your bed.”

Johnny looked at me as if I were crazy. “I, I saw my mother on the tongue of the wagon praying for me.”

I shook my head, “No Johnny, it’s impossible to see your mother on the tongue of the wagon from your bed, that was your imagination.”

Johnny was slowly regaining his grasp of reality. “I swore if I could get loose from the devil, I would give up whiskey, but the devil didn’t really have me.”

“No Johnny, the devil wasn’t there,” I told him.

“Then I don’t have to give up drinking!”

I could see an advantage disappearing, I tried another direction, “It depends on how you look at it Johnny.”

Suddenly with an inner calm, Johnny asked, “Did you bring the whiskey?”

I couldn’t lie, “yes, I have whiskey.”

“Good, I need a drink, you talk to those hunters while I get ready and then we will take them out for a hunt.”

Johnny’s hysteria is not much different from the hysteria over H1N1 or the Global Warming Hoax; Johnny was duped by his own imagination and was on the verge of believing anything during his delusion, especially if I had taken sadistic pleasure in perpetuating the delusion.

Americans are proving to be a gullible people, following the pied piper-like images of Al Gore and Obama. Their delusion and vivid imagination is being used to ensnare them into the belief that the government will save them from destruction and death, if only they will trust the good intentions of the Socialist State or Obama’s omnipotence. Thus our lemming like public is being duped by the Obama administration.

A basic difference between me and the Obama administration is that I didn’t want to use a delusion to advance my agenda.

Epilogue: This article was written and published in ’09; since then, many of us have forgotten this attempt by Obama to seize control. It failed, thank goodness, but we should not forget these pathetic attempts of leadership and the acquisition of control. Don’t think for a minute we would not have heard how Obama, had saved us from a terrible disaster, if the vaccine would have been ready, and not to mention the tidy little profit for the select drug company. Incompetence in government can work to our advantage occasionally.

Liberalism Run Amuck

A seven year old boy takes the John Wayne image of manhood seriously, and is now in big trouble.

A 7-year-old boy is being investigated by his South Boston elementary school for possible sexual harassment after kicking another boy in the crotch.

A seven year old boy was being choked and robbed of his gloves, when he kicked his attacker in the nuts. Thus he ended the assault and prevented the theft.

The school system now claims that the response was an example of sexual assault and they are conducting an investigation.

The mother of first grader, Tasha Lynch:

“He’s 7 years old. He doesn’t know anything about sexual harassment.”

Mark Curran the perpetrator, said his attacker had been bullying him all week on the bus.

His mother says the boy reported to her:

“He just all of a sudden came up to him, choked him. He wanted to take his gloves, and my son said, ‘I couldn’t breathe, so I kicked him in the testicles,’”

“He couldn’t breathe. He was trying to defend himself, I don’t find that sexual harassment. I find that defending himself.”

Ms Lynch says she received a phone call informing her that the incident will be treated as sexual harassment because of inappropriate touching.

“Your son kicked a little boy in the testicles. We call that sexual harassment.”

She is expected to attend a disciplinary hearing at the school on Monday.

Boston Public School System is investigating the incident, but refuses to comment.

The Boston Public School System may decide that girls can no longer kick rapists in the nuts or else they will face disciplinary action for improper touching and sexual harassment. So don’t teach your kids to defend themselves or send them to martial arts schools; let them be beat, robbed, and raped by someone who is disadvantaged, it is the Liberal Way, and remember to vote Democrat

Two weeks ago the Supreme Court agreed to decide the constitutionality of President Obama’s signature piece of legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

In a surprising act of courage, the Court agreed to decide the divisive case in the midst of what will certainly be one of the most viscerally contentious elections in a century. To their credit, when they could have easily kicked the can down the road and waited until after the election to take the case, they did not. Not only did they accept the case, but they allotted an unprecedented 5 ½ hours of oral argument for it. They fully recognize that their decision will have significant political implications. Not in the sense that it will sway voters one way or another (which it will certainly do) but in that it gives voters the opportunity to take into account the consequences of their 2008 votes when they walk into the booth in November.

However the Court decides, the consequences of that election will be laid bare. It’s not often that voters get such a clear, definitive beginning, middle and potentially end of such a consequential piece of legislation – at least from a legal perspective – within one election cycle.

The central question in the case is a relatively straightforward one: Does the federal government, under the Commerce Clause, have the power to force Americans to purchase health insurance?

Article I, Section 8, Clause 3

(Congress shall have Power) To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes;

The foundation for the administration’s argument that it does indeed have that power lay in a case handed down by the Supreme Court in 1942, Wickard v. Filburn. That case gave the stamp of approval to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which allowed the federal government to regulate economic activity:

In 1940 an Ohio farmer, Roscoe Filburn grew more wheat than the government allotment allowed. They fined him. He sued, stating that his wheat was for his own use on his farm and therefore was beyond Congressional reach. In a legal gerrymander that would put any politician to shame, the Court decided that as Filburn’s exceeding his quotas would result in him buying less wheat in the local markets, which in turn led to less wheat traded in those markets, he was impacting interstate commerce; therefore Congress did indeed have the power to limit his production.

Twisting Fillburn’s already tortured logic, the Obama administration has decided that now it can force all Americans to purchase healthcare. The why is that society has to pick up the tab when uninsured people go to the emergency room. The how is where Filburn comes in. By virtue of the fact that the money people spend on healthcare for the uninsured (through higher taxes and higher insurance premiums) cannot be spent to purchase goods and services they might otherwise purchase, healthcare therefore impacts interstate commerce. As such, Congress has the power to regulate healthcare and can compel people to purchase health insurance.

That is the logic the Democrats used as they force fed Obamacare down the throats of the American people.

If this logic is acceptable, the question becomes, is there literally anything the government cannot do? For example, perhaps a future Congress might want to ban premarital sex? What? No way! Really? How? Here’s how: The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars every year capturing, trying and keeping criminals locked up. Seventy percent of prisoners come from households without fathers. Given that the single biggest contributor of kids growing up without a father is out of wedlock births, the most straightforward way to ameliorate that problem is simply banning premarital sex. As the progeny of premarital sex drive expenses in the criminal justice system, which in turn reduces the amount that can be spent on airline tickets or pencils or hotel rooms, or bingo games, Congress can legislate it.

During the 2008 Presidential campaign, Barack Obama said that asthma was a condition which could be treated with a breathalyzer.

Click here to view the embedded video.

He has made good on that promise. And in so doing, drives up the cost of healthcare.

Asthma patients who rely on over-the-counter inhalers will need to switch to prescription-only alternatives as part of the federal government’s latest attempt to protect the Earth’s atmosphere.

The Food and Drug Administration said Thursday patients who use the epinephrine inhalers to treat mild asthma will need to switch by Dec. 31 to other types that do not contain chlorofluorocarbons, an aerosol substance once found in a variety of spray products.

The action is part of an agreement signed by the U.S. and other nations to stop using substances that deplete the ozone layer, a region in the atmosphere that helps block harmful ultraviolet rays from the Sun.

But the switch to a greener inhaler will cost consumers more. Epinephrine inhalers are available via online retailers for around $20, whereas the alternatives, which contain the drug albuterol, range from $30 to $60.

Hemingway links to Andrea McArdle, who notes that “environmentally-friendly” alternatives are almost always worse:

Er, industry also knew how to make low-flow toilets, which is why every toilet in my recently renovated rental house clogs at least once a week. They knew how to make more energy efficient dryers, which is why even on high, I have to run every load through the dryer in said house twice. And they knew how to make inexpensive compact flourescent bulbs, which is why my head hurts from the glare emitting from my bedroom lamp. They also knew how to make asthma inhalers without CFCs, which is why I am hoarding old albuterol inhalers that, unlike the new ones, a) significantly improve my breathing and b) do not make me gag. Etc.

So take a deep breath now. While you can.

Charles Ponzi after being released from prison, 1935.

Part of FDR’s statement upon signing the Social Security Bill:

“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family …”

History will judge the Social Security Bill to be the grandest Ponzi scheme in all of history; unless, the government continues on with the Anthropogenic Global Warming regulations. These may sound like wild ambiguous statements to you the reader; however, you probably aren’t that familiar with the history of Ponzi schemes or understand how they function or the similarity would be painfully obvious. So obvious, that it is conceivable that the SS Bill used the genius of Charles Ponzi as the framework for the Social Security Bill.

The public wasn’t really familiar with the Ponzi scheme until Bernie Madoff pulled his now comedic rise to wealth by peddling his version of the Ponzi scheme to the wealthy. Concentrating on the extremely wealthy, he sold an exclusivity of influence for investors. Making a mockery of “the rich are so smart” parable, he had them clamoring for the opportunity to get close to Bernie and be bilked for millions.

The Ponzi scheme wasn’t invented by Charles Ponzi, but he had the name that was adopted by the public for the designation of an old confidence game called, “Rob Peter to pay Paul“. This fairly simple larceny involves promising huge returns on investments, so that you have a continuous flow of naive and simple minded investors who will believe the lies of the confidence man. The original investors are paid outrageous returns to entice new investors.

There is always a defining characteristic for confidence men, they have pleasing personalities that inspire confidence in the naive and weak minded.

The scam often continues on its own momentum and the lies of the perpetrator, until a point of critical mass is reached or until the carnival barker runs out of rubes to ante up fresh money for the scam. Once there is no longer funds to payout to the older investors the scam falls apart.

The Social Security Administration is approaching the critical mass phase. Adjustments will need to be made or the program will bankrupt itself, I have termed this phase critical mass. There is a major difference in the design of the Rob Peter to pay Paul scams and Social Security: the others are illegal, FDR had the genius to not only make Social Security legal, but he made dues paying membership required by law. Thus he assumed there will never be a tell tale line up of doubting Thomas’s wanting their money back. Another tragic, but humorous trait of the critical mass phase of a classic Ponzi Scheme.

However, there were some unforeseen problems that evolved in FDR’s Ponzi Scheme. People have begun to live longer and a changing demographic is upsetting the worker to retiree ratio. Obviously, FDR wasn’t a mercenary confidence man, but whether Social Security was set up with the Ponzi Scheme as a template or he just used the old Rob Peter To Pay Paul scenario is without doubt, a cold hard fact of American life. It fits the classic description or definition of this particular con game. The only reason it isn’t in the midst of critical mass is that participation is required by law. Once the public stops believing in a con man or a hoax, the jig is up. Requiring participation was a stroke of genius that delays the inevitable end of all Ponzi Schemes, this period known as critical mass or melt down.

Charles Ponzi started his scheme by buying older undervalued postal coupons in European currencies at fixed, outdated rates of exchange and trading them in the Us for dollars, generating a guaranteed profit. He promised investors a 50% return on investment in 45 days. The bank’s return on investments at this time was 5% per annum.

His early investors doubled and tripled their money. Many of his investors declined to redeem the coupons and preferred to let their money ride to get the exponential increases. His company, the Security Exchange Company or the SEC, yes, you read that correctly, received great reviews in the financial editorials of newspapers and new investors stood in line to become part of the scam. At his peak, Ponzi received one million dollars from investors in a three-hour period. In nine months his scam took in $15,000,000 during 1919 and 1920 (approximately $174 million in 2007 dollars). No one realized that there weren’t enough of these foreign exchange coupons to begin to equal the amount of money that was being invested. They were essentially a coupon that people sent to Europe from the US so that their relatives could afford a stamp to mail a return letter with a postage coupon redeemable for a certain amount of postage in a foreign country. Remember, this was the Great Depression.

Ponzi spent five years in federal prison, when his scam collapsed. The State of Massachusetts sentenced Ponzi to an additional nine years, but he left the country and settled in Brazil. He lived the rest of his life in poverty and was buried in a pauper’s grave.

In his last interview he came clean about his scam:

“My business is simple. It was the old game of robbing Peter to pay Paul. You would give me one hundred dollars and I would give you a note to pay you one-hundred-and-fifty dollars in three months. Usually I would redeem my note in 45 days. My notes became more valuable than American money … Then came trouble. The whole thing was broken.” (Zuckoff, Mitchell, Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend, p. 313)

Ponzi didn’t possess the killer instinct of the true confidence man; the goal of the confidence man is to take the money and run; he was trying up until the end to make his scheme into a legitimate business. Whether he was aware that there was not enough postal coupons on the planet to cover his customers’ investments is open to debate, but if he could have become Ponzi International Shipping, he could have avoided prison and retired a wealthy man.

Al Gore, one of the biggest confidence men of the modern age seems to have reached the point of no return, he has lost credibility and his sanctimonious pleas to make money and save the earth are falling on deaf ears more and more.

Obama is possibly the greatest hoax in history. He is the first undocumented president in the history of the country. His “Hope and Change” jingoism, seems to only benefit campaign contributors; but his days as a confidence man are nearly over, the Son of Stimulus will tell the tale of whether the country has lost faith in the Obama Magic. Obama also has numerous incidents of corruption nipping at his anles, Fast and Furious, Gunwalker, Solyndra, Operation Castaway in Tampa, Gangwalker and Lightsquared have compromised his confidence game. But he hasn’t promoted a Ponzi Scheme.

Bernie Madoff’s scheme was another deal entirely. He “Made Off” (the correct pronunciation of his name, BTW) with $50 Billion. It is the largest (money involved) Ponzi scheme in history: investigators found his larceny stretched back the 1970′s. Madoff had a head start with his position as Chairman of NASDAQ, a prominent and influential position on Wall Street. His victims were arguably the most financially savvy and wealthiest in the world; he required a minimum of twenty-million to invest with him. His literature was meant to convey “Confidence” among potential investors.

Ponzi was a Democratic conman in that he reached out to the masses and gave them a chance to accrue wealth. In a manner of speaking Madoff was also a Democratic swindler; although, he serviced the Elites or Limousine Liberals of Wall Street and Palm Beach, he serviced their hunger for wealth and greed. You had to be in the upper echelons of society and wealth to be accepted into Madoff’s select group of suckers.

In an era of faceless organizations owned by other equally faceless organizations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner’s name is on the door. Clients know that Bernard Madoff had a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm’s hallmark.

Of course, when the veil was lifted on the nefarious nature of Madoff’s investment scheme, there was pandemonium as the world’s elite tried to recover their investments like starving peasants. No more were they interested in having access to the genius Bernie Madoff; it was time to scratch and claw to the front of the line to get their money; unfortunately, Bernie had squandered the funds by living the profligate lifestyle that had attracted those same affluent investors. The so-called smart rich people were played for fools and morons by Bernie Madoff, the charismatic conman, the guy who didn’t know when to quit.

Madoff offered little more than his word. There have been scams with real value and legitimate businesses with a practical product.

On the other side of the world, Wang Fengyou founded Yilishen Tisnxi an ant farm conglomerate that had farmers maintaining ant farms on a precise feeding regimen so that they could later convert dead ants into an aphrodisiac. A million Chinese developed a passion for farming ants. They saw the financial rewards of a simple enterprise and were happy to be involved in improving life for people with deflated egos.

Poor farmers bought into the scheme for 10,000 yuan (approx. $1,500) and they were given a box of special ants. The insects were fed the a sugar and honey solution twice a day at 9 am and 4 pm and they were to be fed a cake and egg yolk solution every three to five days. They were never to open the box and after 74 days the boxes were picked up. The farmer received 13,500 yuan every 14 months, an excellent return on investment.

The ants were ground to a pulp and sold as an aphrodisiac, did the product work? Yes indeed, it worked like no other traditional medicine in the history of the world! The powdered ants put extra lead into the pencils of tens of millions of Chinese men!

Wang became a very wealthy man, his aphrodisiacs were sold in 80,000 pharmacies across China. He is reported to have had over one million farmers raising his ants. His company had a yearly turn over of 15 Billion yuan or $2 billion US. In October 2007, he reached critical mass and his company missed farmer payouts and collapsed, he was soon arrested.

Although, the ants were traditionally considered to be an aphrodisiac in traditional Chinese Medicine, Weng hedged his bets by including sildenafil with his crushed ants to give them a little extra boost. Sildenafil is the main active ingredient in Viagra.

In 1935, while the country was under the yoke of poverty and depression, Roosevelt signed into law “Social Insurance” to alleviate the cruelty of abject poverty imposed upon retirees and the unemployed, it was considered a part of the New Deal. The benefits paid to retirees and the unemployed were paid by taxes from the wages of employed workers.

Over the years the rules and regulations have changed, but we still have the basic premise of Charles Ponzi: the new investors (workers) pays in the form of taxes to support the older investors (retirees). This is the first and primary premise of the Rob Peter to Pay Paul confidence game or the Ponzi Scheme.

Between 1937 and 2005, Social Security took in $10.7 trillion in taxes and other revenue: during that same period it paid out more than $8.9 trillion.

Currently Social Security runs a surplus (it invests the money in Treasurys, thus complicating the issue, because the government is essentially giving itself an IOU). It is expected to run a surplus until 2018. The baby boomers will then be retired and drawing benefits; the Social Security program will have theoretically reached critical mass. Unless the system is altered, it will be bankrupt by 2040. Taxed income will need to be increased and the retirement age will need to be increased; these are two of the obvious possible partial adjustments that will need to be made.

Even though FDR mandated participation by law, he hedged his bets by making the retirement age 65 when the average lifespan was 62. He was such a kind hearted man. No one figured the lifespan would be increased to approximately 80 in 75 years. People are sticking around far too long as far as the Rob Peter to Pay Paul confidence scheme is concerned. Now the young people in their thirties are complaining that there won’t be any money left for them when they retire: ha! they just don’t realize there was never any stockpile of money in the lock box, it has been a Ponzi Scheme since day one. They must rely on the younger generations to support them in the greatest Ponzi Scheme of all time. Have faith young people, we older people believed the conmen, why can’t you follow the government in blind obedience like your grandparents and great grandparents? Why should you not have faith in the great Liberal Ponzi Scheme?

Young Americans should remember Ernest Ackerman and Ida May Fuller before they worry themselves into an early grave over the prospect of paying into the Social Security version of a Ponzi Scheme. Like the traditional Ponzi Scheme, the early investors have the best chance to make money. Ernest worked for one day under the Social Security before he retired. His total involuntary contribution was $.05. The government decided to pay him a lump payment of $.17 for his retirement. Ida May Fuller, of Ludlow, Virginia, was the first person to receive monthly retirement checks in 1940 at the age of 65. She paid $24.75 and received $22,888.92 until her death at 100 years of age.

FDR was truly the most Democratic of all the conmen of Ponzi Scheme history, he offered the helping hand of government to the retired workers in a show of humanism; of course, you were supposed to be dead according to the statisticians and odds makers before you could start dipping into the kitty. Now, that was a fantastic idea for a con game; until, the parameters changed and people began to live healthier lifestyles and longer lives.

Social Security started paying benefits in 1940, there was only one beneficiary for 160 workers. In 1950, there were 16.5 workers for every beneficiary. Presently, we have three workers for every beneficiary. In twenty years, we are projected to have only two workers for every beneficiary.

The average retiree receives approximately a third of what the average worker earns. In 1940, the worker paid .02% of his income to support a retiree. In 1950, he was required to pay 2% of his income towards Social Security. Today he must pay 11% to support the system. In twenty years, it will require 17% of a paycheck to keep the system viable. With the increasing costs of Medicare, the costs to the taxpayer will be astronomical.

The Treasury is borrowing money to pay the deficit in Social Security revenue to meet the payouts to seniors and this deficit will only increase as the ratio of workers to retirees continues to invert.

Yes, my friends, Social Security is the greatest Ponzi scheme ever devised, but it is an institutionalized and integral confidence game of Rob Peter to pay Paul, within our society and our economy. It is imperative that we alter the plan by increasing the retirement age and we will surely need to raise the taxes for Social Security; unless, someone can figure out a way to avoid the inevitable. We can’t throw our seniors into the street. It is not who we are and besides they have already paid into our grand Ponzi Scheme for 50 years.

Researchers are now claiming that watching too much TV is as bad for your health as smoking and being overweight. Perhaps government should regulate our viewing habits as well?

Anyone who spends six hours a day in front of the box is at risk of dying five years sooner than those who enjoy more active pastimes, it is claimed.

Researchers say that watching too much TV is as dangerous as smoking or being overweight, and that the “ubiquitous sedentary behaviour” should be seen as a “public health problem”.

Experts from the University of Queensland, Australia, write: “TV viewing time may have adverse health consequences that rival those of lack of physical activity, obesity and smoking; every single hour of TV viewed may shorten life by as much as 22 minutes.”

Good to know….but isn’t this basically stating the obvious? That a sedentary lifestyle (whether from too much Oprah, Xbox, or Daily Kos reading on the computer) is detrimental to your health?

Referring to Australian and American guidelines that suggest children should spend no more than two hours a day in front of a screen, the academics conclude: “With further corroborative evidence, a public health case could be made that adults also need to limit the time spent watching TV.”

Although health campaigners – and parents – have long warned of the dangers of watching too much television, its effects on life expectancy have never before been calculated.

In a paper published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Dr J Lennert Veerman and colleagues looked at the results of a survey of 11,247 Australians taken in 1999-2000, which asked about time spent watching TV, and also mortality figures for the country.

They constructed a model in which they compared life expectancy for adults who watch TV to those who did not, and worked out that every hour spent glued to the screen shortened life by 21.8 minutes.

What are the effects of 6 hrs of sedentary living so long as one is still getting in adequate amounts of exercise to counteract the couch potato syndrome? I’m sure there are those of us who lead active lifestyles and get proper exercise who also find ourselves in front of the TV set and especially the computer screen (what’s the difference?) for more than a couple of hours each day. And what of those who lead 9-5 jobs sitting all day in a cubicle, in front of a computer?

The researchers say that watching TV is among the most common forms of sedentary behaviour, along with sitting in cars.

England’s Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, said: “Physical activity offers huge benefits and these studies back what we already know – that doing a little bit of physical activity each day brings health benefits and a sedentary lifestyle carries additional risks.

Well…isn’t this simply duh science? Nothing really new under the sun here, is there but confirming the obvious? Physical activity = good. Physical inactivity = bad. And all good things taken in moderation:

Maureen Talbot, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, said: “Sedentary behaviour such as vegging in front of the TV is practically a cultural institution these days and it’s good to relax for a while, but this study supports the view that too much of it can be bad for our health.

I don’t see how it’s the tv-viewing itself that’s at fault: It’s the vegging around, leading inactive lifestyle that creates obesity that results in health issues that takes away from quality of life and a reduction in life expectancy.

Next, scientists should examine how viewing even 5 minutes of FOX News or reading a Flopping Aces post causes high blood pressure and heart conditions amongst liberal idealogues and Obama faithfuls.

British Journal of Sports Medicine article here.

The 11th Circuit has struck down the individual mandate of ObamaCare: [PDF]

We first conclude that the Act’s Medicaid expansion is constitutional. Existing Supreme Court precedent does not establish that Congress’s inducements are unconstitutionally coercive, especially when the federal government will bear nearly all the costs of the program’s amplified enrollments.

Next, the individual mandate was enacted as a regulatory penalty, not a revenue-raising tax, and cannot be sustained as an exercise of Congress’s power under the Taxing and Spending Clause. The mandate is denominated as a penalty in the Act itself, and the legislative history and relevant case law confirm this reading of its function.

Further, the individual mandate exceeds Congress’s enumerated commerce power and is unconstitutional. This economic mandate represents a wholly novel and potentially unbounded assertion of congressional authority: the ability to compel Americans to purchase an expensive health insurance product they have elected not to buy, and to make them re-purchase that insurance product every month for their entire lives. We have not found any generally applicable, judicially enforceable limiting principle that would permit us to uphold the mandate without obliterating the boundaries inherent in the system of enumerated congressional powers. “Uniqueness” is not a constitutional principle in any antecedent Supreme Court decision. The individual mandate also finds no refuge in the aggregation doctrine, for decisions to abstain from the purchase of a product or service, whatever their cumulative effect, lack a sufficient nexus to commerce. [fn omitted]

The individual mandate, however, can be severed from the remainder of the Act’s myriad reforms. The presumption of severability is rooted in notions of judicial restraint and respect for the separation of powers in our constitutional system. The Act’s other provisions remain legally operative after the mandate’s excision, and the high burden needed under Supreme Court precedent to rebut the presumption of severability has not been met.

This is the case that involves 26 States and it appears they affirmed the lower court in some parts but also stated the individual mandate can be cut out of the act.

On to the Supreme Court

It’s perplexing. When unemployment is high, and the rich are getting richer, you would think that voters of average means would flock to progressives, who are supposed to have their interests in mind — and who historically have delivered for them.

…Just a quarter of the country is optimistic about our system of government — the lowest since polls by ABC and others began asking this question in 1974. But a crisis of government legitimacy is a crisis of liberalism. It doesn’t hurt Republicans. If government is seen as useless, what is the point of electing Democrats who aim to use government to advance some public end?

So how does he propose to fix this problem?

The Democrats have to start detoxifying politics by proposing to severely limit or bar individual and corporate campaign contributions, which would mean a fight with the Supreme Court. They must make the case for public financing of campaigns and force the broadcast and cable networks to provide free time for candidate ads. And they must become the strongest advocates for transparency in campaign donations and in the lobbying of elected officials.

Can’t argue with the transparency angle but as for the rest…you have to be kidding me.

His fix to a world in which unicorns and candy canes abound is to get the same government bureaucrats that the public distrusts to write laws to limit campaign contributions.

W…T…F

Walter Russell Meade tears this apart in short order, with a lot of words:

In any case, any new campaign finance laws would have to be written by legislators who got their seats under the old system. Wouldn’t the same vested interests who, Greenberg tells us, control the way Congress writes laws also control drafting of new the campaign finance laws? If all the other bureaucracies have been perverted into special interest fiefdoms and incumbent protection agencies why wouldn’t a campaign finance regulatory system be equally if not more perverse and corrupt? Or will the special interests be so stupid and obliging as not to notice that its bought and paid for legislators are plotting to kill their power?

Greenberg is telling voters who deeply distrust the nexus of power and money swirling around Washington to give that nexus even more power: power to regulate and control the process of competition for office. They would be fools to take him up on it; I don’t think they are that stupid and forty years of well funded efforts to get effective campaign finance reform have abysmally failed.

The campaign finance system Greenberg envisions has to come about by immaculate conception: born without taint even though its parents were mired in corruption and sin. The Catholic Church teaches that this is what happened to the Virgin Mary; few would suggest that the possibility is open to an Act of Congress. The election law and the election regulatory system will be written under the same crummy conditions that Greenberg believes are responsible for the comprehensive crisis of liberalism.

Meade doesn’t agree with Greenberg’s assertion that it’s the “special interests”, as Greenberg defines them, that are killing the progressive agenda…no, he explains, it’s because the public sees “the professional classes who staff the bureaucracies, foundations and policy institutes in and around government are themselves a special interest.” And they don’t trust them. I don’t blame them:

It is not that evil plutocrats control innocent bureaucrats; many voters believe that the progressive administrative class is a social order that has its own special interests. Bureaucrats, think these voters, are like oil companies and Enron executives: they act only to protect their turf and fatten their purses.

The problem goes even deeper than hostility toward perceived featherbedding and life tenure for government workers. The professionals and administrators who make up the progressive state are seen as a hostile power with an agenda of their own that they seek to impose on the nation.

This perception, also, is rooted in truth. The progressive state has never seen its job as simply to check the excesses of the rich. It has also sought to correct the vices of the poor and to uplift the masses. From the Prohibition and eugenics movements of the early twentieth century to various improvement and uplift projects in our own day, well educated people have seen it as their simple duty to use the powers of government to make the people do what is right: to express the correct racial ideas, to eschew bad child rearing technique like corporal punishment, to eat nutritionally appropriate foods, to quit smoking, to use the right light bulbs and so on and so on.

Progressives want and need to believe that the voters are tuning them out because they aren’t progressive enough. But it’s impossible to grasp the crisis of the progressive enterprise unless one grasps the degree to which voters resent the condescension and arrogance of know-it-all progressive intellectuals and administrators. They don’t just distrust and fear the bureaucratic state because of its failure to live up to progressive ideals (thanks to the power of corporate special interests); they fear and resent upper middle class ideology. Progressives scare off many voters most precisely when they are least restrained by special interests. Many voters feel that special interests can be a healthy restraint on the idealism and will to power of the upper middle class.

The progressive ideal of administrative cadres leading the masses toward the light has its roots in a time when many Americans had an eighth grade education or less. It always had its down side, and the arrogance and tin-eared obtuseness of self assured American liberal progressives has infuriated generations of Americans and foreigners who for one reason or another have the misfortune to fall under the power of a class still in the grip of a secularized version of the Puritan ideal.

The progressive belief that Government can solve all the ills of the world is one that was always doomed to fail, because at some point that government will have to grow so large, so all-encompassing, so overbearing, that no one will trust it and people will rebel.

But still the progressive believes if we just add more regulations, more boards staffed with more bureaucrats, somehow someway people will trust them again.

I’ll say it again….

W…T…F

Ace is in one of those WTF moods too:

You can ask your average person: Do you wish people would exercise more? Take more of an interest in their health? Stop eating too much? Stop smoking? Stop drinking so much? Stop gambling away their kids’ college funds?

Of course the answer is “yes” to all of these (for most respondents).

But again that’s just the sales pitch, not the actual offer.

Give them the actual offer and most will say No. Because the actual offer is:

Do you wish to empower a cadre of busybody bureaucrats, who frankly are largely mediocrities at best, but believe themselves to be chosen for greatness, to boss you around your whole life, in order to make sure some other people aren’t eating french fries and having a cigarette?

The real answer is “NO!,” because the real answer is, “Look, sure I want other people to live better lives, but frankly, I don’t care very much about that and I’m sure not paying for my own personal censor to scold me for making “bad” choices.”

See, that’s the cost. And if you ignore the cost, you’re not talking about business, or sales, or politics, or anything.

You’re just talking about fantasy wish-lists with no connection to any physical reality.

No connection to any physical reality describes progressives to a T. They want to FORCE people to become a perfect human being, and THEY get to decide how to force you.