Leave a commentWashington (CNN) – Sarah Palin will headline the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting in Charlotte, North Carolina in May, the gun rights group told CNN on Thursday.
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Despite the claims of some partisans to the contrary, the president’s plan is failing because it does not speak to the concerns of the majority of Americans. Instead of addressing the high and rising costs of care, it proposes mandates, invasive regulation, and unaffordable new entitlements. This will not bring health care costs down — it will only make this problem worse. Therefore, President Obama should scrap his health care plan and start over, say John F. Cogan, a senior fellow at Sanford University’s Hoover Institution; Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School; and Daniel Kessler, a professor of business and law at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. The plan’s key elements — mandates, heavy-handed insurance regulation and entitlement-based, middle-income subsidies — must go. None of them address health care’s fundamental problem: high and rising costs. Instead, the various versions of health reform put forth by the president and his party are based on expanding health-insurance coverage. The inevitable consequence will be to exacerbate the cost problem. And the American public knows it, say Cogan, Hubbard and Kessler.
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The Federal vs. the State GovernmentsIn recent years, the federal government has grown at a rapid rate, intruding into many areas that formerly were the sole domain of the states (e.g., education, transportation, health care, energy policy, etc.). Significantly, the Founding Fathers took great care to place limitations around federal powers and to preserve state and local powers. As Thomas Jefferson clearly explained:
Given the Framers’ clear vision of a small and limited federal government, how did it become so large and all-encompassing? The first reason had been foreseen by Founding Father Samuel Adams
The first step in losing control of the federal government was that it became easier and more convenient to “acquiesce” (i.e., give in) and let the federal government begin doing things never before permitted. The federal government then felt emboldened to enter additional areas – or to use a description provided by Thomas Jefferson, it began “working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.” This is the current situation, and citizens do not like it:
Some leaders (including both candidates and elected officials) are now advocating state nullification as a constitutional solution – that a state has the right to declare a federal law unconstitutional, thereby nullifying that law. State nullification But did the Founding Fathers – the Framers of our government – give states the constitutional power to nullify federal laws? Several elected officials have asked us that very question, and it is certainly one that is within our purview of research. After all, WallBuilders exists to “present Americans forgotten heroes and history, with an emphasis on our religious, moral, and constitut ional heritage.” We just finished the historical analysis of state nullification and have returned the finished report to those elected officials. I must confess that not only was it an interesting project but I was also surprised by the results; frankly, I was amazed at how often state nullification appeared throughout the decades. If you are interested in learning more about this piece of American history that directly relates to public policies currently being advocated, you can read or download the report. Enjoy! God Bless!
David Barton, Wallbuilders Attorney General Eric Holder says nine Obama appointees in the Justice Department have represented or advocated for terrorist detainees before joining the Justice Department. But he does not reveal any names beyond the two officials whose work has already been publicly reported. And all the lawyers, according to Holder, are eligible to work on general detainee matters, even if there are specific parts of some cases they cannot be involved in.
Over at NROnline’s The Corner, Daniel Foster wrote an interesting piece where he explained how Vice President Joe Biden could press the button to launch the Senate’s reconciliation Nuclear Option. This strategy is the only way the Democrats can get ObamaCare across the finish line and to the President’s desk in the next few weeks. The federal government has bailed out many industries, including banking, mortgage lenders, insurers, money market funds, automakers, credit card issuers, home builders, the states and so on. This invites ongoing gambling at public expense by any business or entity that can reasonably expect a bailout. Moreover, this is a prescription for fiscal insolvency, which could culminate in hyperinflation, says Laurence J. Kotlikoff, an economics professor at Boston University and a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis. AIG was effectively nationalized on September 16, 2008, at a cost of $85 billion to taxpayers. Since AIG’s nationalization, the government has engaged in a massive and potentially more expensive policy. The policy entails providing systemic risk insurance to the financial sector — that is, insurance against system-wide collapse. Indeed, the federal government has already handed out, or publicly committed to hand out, more than $12 trillion to the financial sector, says Kotlikoff. It is economic evening in America as our nation’s spending, government programs and deficits balloon. The federal deficit this fiscal year will be $1.6 trillion, or about 10.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). That is the largest deficit since World War II, and even President Obama’s optimistic estimates show our deficits will not return to sustainable levels for at least the next decade, says Pete du Pont, Chairman of the National Center for Policy Analysis and a former Governor of Delaware. I am hearing from multiple, prominent people that the Republicans in Washington are seriously thinking of caving and having an on camera sit down with Barack Obama even though their pre-conditions for a meeting will not be met. Continue reading article from Redstate.com Regular readers of this column will doubtless recall my recent column in which I reported on the new Council of Governors (CG) that President Barack Obama has created. See my column at: Well, Obama’s CG is quickly beginning to take shape. According to the Associated Press (AP), “President Barack Obama has selected Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon to serve on an advisory council for defense and national security issues. |
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We The People of Longview, TX is Stephen Fry proof thanks to caching by WP Super Cache |
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The capital and leading object of the Constitution was to leave with the states all authorities which respected their own citizens only, and to transfer to the United States those which respected citizens of foreign or other states….Can any good be effected by taking from the states the moral rule of their citizens and subordinating it to the general [federal] authority?…Such an intention was impossible and…[would] break up the foundations of the Union…. I believe the states can best govern our home concerns, and the general [federal] government our foreign ones. I wish, therefore…never to see all offices transferred to Washington, where, further withdrawn from the eyes of the people, they may more secretly be bought and sold as at market.
(“The Father of the American Revolution”), who cautioned:
certainly sounds like a silver bullet – a proverbial wooden stake that can be driven through the heart of what many see as a growing federal monster.