Today, instead of being the one doing the talking, I’ll leave it to two others, one a well known columnist, the other a fellow blogger.

The first one, which caught my eye (actually, both of ‘em) this morning, is by David Limbaugh, in which he delivers an adroitly thought out yet brief synapsis of why the socialism being forced on us by Obama and his leftist cronies hasn’t worked, isn’t working and –surprise — never will work.

Liberals have a learning disability when it comes to the impracticability of socialism. They are so steeped in the seductive lies of false compassion that no amount of logic, history or everyday experience registers. Thus, they continue to burden the market system to an unsustainable level.

Liberals have always denied they intend to unduly shackle the free market. They say America is exceptionally prosperous — though it never occurs to them why — and can afford robust entitlement and redistributive schemes. But in no way would they favor anything extreme that would push the market to the tipping point.

Well, now that they are completely in charge, we’ve seen what they will do. Obama liberals believe not in America’s promise (and Martin Luther King Jr.’s hope) of equality of opportunity, but in equality of outcomes. Truth be told, Obama probably believes in a wholesale reversal of wealth distribution: not just equalizing it, but making the wealthy poor and the poor wealthy. But I’ll leave the psychoanalysis to others.

Jumping a ways…

…It’s not that Obama has not focused enough on the economy because he’s been preoccupied with his agenda. It’s that his agenda is incompatible with fixing the economy because it is destroying the human spirit and its capacity for productivity, not to mention that it, and his method of implementing it, are wholly inconsistent with any powers the framers’ contemplated for the federal government.

Like Seth’s always saying: The greatest flaw in liberals’ agendas is that they never fail to go against the grain of Human Nature.

Read David Limbaugh’s entire column here.

The second one comes from Michael at Flight Pundit, and was his last post to date, from back in February (I hope he hasn’t decided to hang up his spurs). I found the blog while surfing this site’s blogroll, but anyway:

Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democratic Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases. For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, passing continuing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009. Let’s remember what the deficits looked like during that period:

The chart that follows within and the post in its entirety are here.

We hear more and more about the pushing of the Value Added Tax by the kommies in our midst, who thing every working (or spending) American is a mere cash sponge to be wrung out without mercy in order to finance the ever-increasing monetary demands of a socialist country.

Recently, progressives have made noise about introducing a value-added tax (VAT) in the United States. The VAT is an indirect tax — that is, Americans wouldn’t pay the tax directly to government, but would pay it to businesses as part of the retail price of things we buy, and businesses would then remit the tax to Uncle Sam.

A VAT is set at a fixed rate — say, 10 or 15 percent — added to the price of a good at every step of production, with a deduction allowed for the amount of VAT paid during earlier stages of production. The more steps there are in transforming raw materials into complex consumer goods, the higher the resulting consumer price as a result of those multiple layers of taxation.

Many countries have VATs, including Canada, Mexico, and the European Union. One might say that a VAT is an emblem signifying that a country’s government consumes a large percentage of its GDP, for VATs seem to go hand-in-hand with big-budget nanny states.

The reason for this phenomenon is simple: Any government that seeks to be all things to all people, and therefore seeks to spend ubiquitously, must inevitably seek to tax ubiquitously. Such governments have insatiable appetites for revenue. Because VATs are cash cows, diverting huge sums of money from consumers to government, they are favorites of big-spending governments.

Unfortunately, though, VATs have significant negative economic consequences.

Because they inflate consumer prices, quantities demanded fall. Most often, the marginal buyers who can no longer afford to pay the higher price are poorer citizens. When government policy raises
prices, the first victims are poor people.

The second victims of a VAT are the workers who will lose their jobs as a result of falling demand for the newly higher-priced goods.

Many affluent Americans may not curtail their consumption, but because more of their money is diverted to the government treasury, their savings must correspondingly decline. This results in decreased capital accumulation, which, in turn, slows business expansion, development, and formation. It also slows the growth rate of labor productivity, hence retarding economic progress for workers.

Read on.

These leftists, who have no respect for the Constitution nor for the intentions of our founding fathers, and who certainly despise the very principles that define the United States of America, would love to watch our nation come apart, sinking into an abyss of socialism…

…and as a bit of lagniappe, let’s finish with an excellent and unrelated column by Wesley Pruden.

…I was watching Obama Hatchetwoman Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius give her spiel on C-Span this morning and was struck by the wideness of the spectrum encompassed by Obama’s “Health” Care program.

Unsurprisingly, the thin lipped, angular featured (I don’t want to make disparaging remarks about anyone’s appearance, but she did kinda’ sorta remind me of a hatchet, come to think of it) cabinet member managed to incorporate education, “acceptable” foods, corporate salaries and a few other items in there that I simply couldn’t relate to health care, per se, but maybe that was just me.

My own impression was that she was laying the groundwork for the mega-agenda distribution of the soon-to-be voluminously increased taxes we will behold as the Obama Administration and its Pelosi led, Congressional marxist contingent do their unconstitutional best, under the blanket misnomer of “health care”, to strip us of our liberty and as much of our hard earned money as they possibly can.

Depends upon what you mean by “care”, here.

Wolf here.

I ran across an interesting article by retired constitutional attorney Michael Connelly, who writes:

Well, I have done it! I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200: The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009. I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law. I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional. What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying. The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals. Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.

However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface. In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices. Instead it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated. If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn’t have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with. I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

I hope all the mulletheads who voted in both the lefty congressional majority and Obama, the traitor and enemy of the state in POTUS’ clothing, read and enjoy reading herein what they are responsible for.

The entire article is here.

…what if there was a revolution? I mean, what if Americans flatly refused to acknowledge laws stemming from the ObamaCare debacle and started cleaning their weapons, so to speak?

How could anyone call it treason, or otherwise condemn it, when all that these rebels would be doing was emulating our nation’s founders?

The American Revolution was fought, after all, to gain freedom from a kind of tyranny that, in truth, was not much different from what we are experiencing now under the Obama regime — yes, I said regime, not administration.

We, The People, are being ruled by officials elected, according to the Constitution, to govern according to the will of the people, not the other way around.

Yet here we are, having come full circle, so in the spirit of America, it seems to me that if there were a revolution, it should ideally be a short one — it would be an act of treason, in my opinion, for any U.S. serviceman, Law Enforcement officer or other American citizen in a position to do so to take up arms against the people if we got it into our heads to do exactly as our founding fathers did in the 1770s, taking our country away from those who would tax us into oblivion and dictate to us.

These politicians have violated the Constitution which is, given their oaths of office and the nature of their jobs, a federal crime in itself.

So, the Obama Administration and the Democrats in the House and Senate, those who voted for the “HealthCare” bill, are technically all felons, no matter what they and their sycophantic arse creepers of the lefty media say about it.

Doesn’t that make the President and his congressional majority a “renegade” criminal government, anyway, and certainly even less valid than that of the late King George?

…of the ObamaCare vote, which at this point seems to be one of the few things that stand between what America was founded and then succeeded as, and its tragic transformation into a socialist state, I ran across this article by Robert F. Turner.

As a scholar who has studied and revered the Constitution for more than four decades, watching the behavior of our Congress in recent years has been all too often a depressing experience. One wonders whether some legislators have even bothered to read the Constitution, or if the problem is they simply don’t care about the oath they took to support it.

While doing research for my doctoral dissertation many years ago, I had the pleasure of reading extensively from the Annals of Congress, notes from Cabinet meetings of early presidents, and a great deal of other historical material while seeking to understand portions of our Constitution. In the process, I found myself marveling both at how remarkably well-read the Framers were - encountering frequent references to the writings of Locke, Montesquieu, Blackstone, Vattel, and other prominent 17th- and 18th-century thinkers - and also at the high principles repeatedly expressed by members of both political branches of our government when novel issues surfaced.

The pedigree of people we elect to Congress has evidently changed.

Sadly, the latest parliamentary shenanigans in the House, to pretend that the Senate health care bill has already been signed into law so that the (non)law can be “amended” immediately to secure enough House votes for passage, is but par for the course. It is no better than Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s attempt to use Congress’ rule-making power to deny future Congresses their constitutional right to repeal or amend a previous law by majority vote. Section 3403 of the bill passed by the Senate provides: “It shall not be in order in the Senate or the House of Representatives to consider any bill, resolution, amendment or conference report that would repeal or otherwise change this subsection.” The Constitution can’t be changed by statute, and it certainly can’t be changed by amending House or Senate rules.

Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution sets forth detailed requirements for the making or amending of a law, specifying that “Every order, resolution, or vote to which the concurrence of the Senate and House of Representatives may be necessary” shall be presented to and approved by the president (or enacted over his veto) - so as to prevent unprincipled legislators from bypassing the procedural necessities by the kind of semantical chicanery currently being contemplated by House leaders.

Mr. Turner finishes the column in spot-on fashion.

At some point, if we are to have any chance of preserving our magnificent Constitution, the American people are going to have to start saying “no” and holding legislators accountable at the polls for violating their oaths of office. The senators and representatives we elect were intended to be servants of the people, not a special class of aristocrats empowered to rule our lives while remaining aloof from the very laws they enact. Writing in Federalist No. 57, James Madison assured the American people that one of the checks against legislative abuse of power was that Congress could “make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.” One can only wonder what the Obamacare vote would be if it applied to members of Congress and their staffs.

After nearly four decades of watching our elected representatives flout their solemn duty and evade the burdens they impose upon the rest of us, I have finally concluded that the time has come to start voting against incumbents who behave as if they are the rulers rather than the servants of the American people.

Me, I’d vote ‘em all out, Left, Right and Independent and elect all Senators and Representatives from among candidates who have never held political office before and impose term limits — one single 6 year term, thus eliminating any ambitions for reelection, leaving them focused solely on their duties as representatives of the will of their constituents, the folks who put them in office.

We haven’t posted for a month, but between Wolf’s current activities, Chuck’s maritime indulgences and my own incumbent issues, well… My apologies, and hopes that these intervals between posts are able to return to pre 2008 levels really soon…

…The course on the front burner today is obviously the ObamaCare debacle, which is summed up pretty well by Wesley Pruden.

Being me, I’ve gotten into debates of sorts with a number of people who have been either undecided (not unusual, considering that the very template upon which the entire government-run healthcare equation is based is a virtual labyrinth of contradictions and blank checks interwoven with the seeds of stealth legislation, promoted as “good for us” by a media which is as ignorant about the technical details of the whole thing as most of us) or sort of decided.

My way of talking about the issue is, I think, pretty simple.

The vast majority of Americans would rather have small government and keep more of their hard earned money. They want quality medical care and the choice of where to obtain it.

Passing ObamaCare, or any federally managed health care legislation, would be the equivalent of uploading software into your computer that contains a few dangerous and irradicable viruses.

It would install a permanent, ever-growing chain of bureaucracies inside our government, scoring an instant and lasting victory for the tax-and-spend socialists on the far left, essentially transforming the United States of America into a socialist country.

Obama, Pelosi and their ilk are willing to sacrifice the careers of a score or more Democrats on the Hill, decimate their own party for the next decade or so, just to force this single bill on us because it will, if enacted, provide that “change” Barack Hussein promised during his campaigning days — a 180 degree change, as a matter of fact, one that would make America as we know it disappear for all time.

I’m serious, folks. Even a “far right” majority would be stuck with the system — unable to reverse the legislation, they’d be tasked with maintaining it, feeding it, expanding it to keep it alive while it sucked the blood from the U.S. taxpayer and destroyed a successful private sector run healthcare industry that only a marxist with a political agenda could call “a failure” with a straight face.

The only response by Republicans in Congress to government run healthcare should be NO! NO NEGOTIATION, NO CONSIDERATION, NO GOVERNMENT RUN HEALTHCARE, PERIOD! MOVE ON!

But no, the GOP still address the issue as a valid topic of discussion, which it is not — remember, we are governed by The Constitution, and therefore government run healthcare is not, legally, even supposed to be on the board.

Now, we even find, the lefties are seeking ways to get around the rules in order to get their agenda passed.

If the GOP allows this legislation to pass in any way, shape or form, they will have failed not only every conservative in the nation, but every American.

Knowing how much I detest liberal interference in what was once among the best systems of education in the world, Seth forwarded the following material to me awhile ago, from Red State.

While we are all focusing on H.R. 3200, the House Democrats’ health care plan, we should at least glance at H.R. 3221, the House Democrats’ plan to kill off higher education access. (PDF)

The legislation is opposed by many major universities including Notre Dame, among others. Basically, the bill would shut down all private providers of student loans, drive up costs for universities, and become a bureaucratic nightmare for institutions of higher learning. The professors may be leftists, but the administrators have to pay attention to the bottom line.

Incredible! It’s bad enough that today’s students are subjected to a course of liberal indoctrination during the span of their educations, now the lefties in Congress have decided that the government should decide, by controlling student loans, who gets, and doesn’t get, a college education?

In the process, putting the government in charge of something like this will create another big bureaucracy, one fraught with the same quagmire of ineptitude and the normal attached smothering taxation we always get from government usurpation of private sector functions. Prime example: The mess to which we’ll be treated if we are victimized by government run healthcare.

The Director of Student Financial Strategies at University of Notre Dame warns in a letter to Congressman Miller, “Any legislation that eliminates choice and competition and mandates that all institutions adopt an all-government run program for the 2010/11 academic year is filled with immense risk and would create massive confusion.”

Get that? The Democrats want an “all-government run program” to provide people access to money to pay for college. And if they do that, then they can force universities to comply with lots of new rules or deny students the right to use federal student loans to go to particular colleges.

But it gets better. Boy does it ever get better.

How!!!?

§ 343 of the plan creates a Green Schools Czar. No kidding. A Green Schools Czar (and committee naturally) would examine the impact of more environmentally friendly universities and find ways to create even more environmentally friendly universities. Oh . . . I have an idea . . . if students need financial assistance and they are forced to go through the feds, the feds can simply tell universities to become compliant or they won’t let students use their student loans to go there.

What is so funny is that §312 of Obama’s stimulus plan also sent money to schools to become more environmentally friendly. That was the carrot. Well, this new law will become the stick.

A green schools czar. Czars and more czars, all the better for the Obama Administration and the Kommie Left to maintain Kontrol.

Recapped today,

If you want an indication of just how radical the Democrats in Congress have become, consider the vote on H.R. 3221. The legislation, which I wrote about yesterday, shuts down all private lenders for higher education student loans, requires that colleges and universities adhere to a new federal bureaucracy, creates a new Green Schools Czar, and hints that any school not complying will see its students denied federal student loans.

The liberals now in firm control of our government will stop at nothing to change America into something entirely different than the great country in which we were born and raised.

We right thinkers had best enjoy it while there’s something left to enjoy.

We are witnessing, via the excesses of the Obama Administration and the Democrats on the Hill, the largest and, by virtue of its size, least affordable spending spree by any government in history, sums of money so vastly beyond that which we have to spend that to say these people are overextending us would be a profound understatement.

The children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the present generation, as yet unborn, are becoming unwitting lenders in the financing of the great debt being generated, yet when their taxtimes arrive, they will no longer function as lenders, but as borrowers — through rendered-necessary and heavily increased taxes, it is they who will be forced to pay off both the principals and interest of the immense debt underneath which our incumbent, irresponsible liberal “progressive” leaders are in the process of burying them.

This collective “groundbreaking” expenditure is falsely packaged as a series of measures geared toward jump-starting our troubled economy. In actuality, it is a collection of temporary bailouts that will lead to other temporary bailouts as the supposedly bailed-out companies fail under the inept auspices of government direction and allocations of massive amounts of the current and future taxpayers’ hard earned lucre to liberal “progressive” political PACs, unions and Utopian causes — you know, those bureaucracy-generating ones, for which our political left is famous, that snowball over the years into expensive tragedies.

Hundreds of billions of dollars. The concept, even, of so much money is mind boggling.

That said, stop and think.

There are what? About three hundred million people in this country? And the Obama spending spree totals more than two million times that number?

Well, Barack, Pelosi, Reid and friends, how about this?

If you’re dead set on doing the socialist thing, why not simply bail out all Americans on a case-by-case basis? This one needs his irresponsibly assumed mortgage paid off, fine: pay it off for him. That one is un-or-underinsured in the healthcare department, pay off his hospital bills or open an account from which his health insurance premiums can be debited. This one’s homeless but wants to work and be independent, get him a small studio apartment, pay the bills and give him a few hundred a month to eat and commute on while he’s attending the trade school we’re paying for and then looking for a job. Etc, etc, etc…

Let those in need of assistance file for it, give them, say, a three month window and the carved in stone warning that the government is only going to do this one time. To process claims and disburse funds, hire qualified temps with an understanding that the job will only last three months.

Even if everybody in the country had a million dollar problem, three hundred million would be a real bargain compared to what they’re serving up now.

That, friends, is about as far reaching a compromise as I would make, were I in the position to do so.

*Offer extends only to individuals, not big corporations, and only to U.S. citizens.

Capable, visionary, ambitious people built the big banks, brokerage houses and automobile companies into the dynamos they have become. Let these same concerns now fix themselves, restructure, go Chapter 11, do whatever they need to do. Don’t nationalize these private sector businesses under the pretense of bailing them out. This is America, we don’t do that kind of thing.

Or at least we didn’t.

…when I look at the way things have come together for the worse in America, well…

Fannie Mae and other unconstitutional governmental (thanks, Democrats) incursions into the mortgage millieu snowballed, gradually gaining girth until we were looking at a voluminous downhill juggernaut that, very rudely, took the rest of the economy with it as it headed on down the hill.

Waiting conveniently at the bottom of said hill, we found any right thinking American’s worst nightmare — profoundly far left majorities in the House and Senate with the likes of a Barack Obama waiting to be sworn in as President of the United States (no, I’m not throwing rocks at the man, I’m merely making what I prefer to refer to as an astute observation).

We have foreclosures, we have failing banks and brokerage firms, we have failing auto makers.

We have the annual multi-billion dollar illegal immigrant problem, all those criminal aliens our political left, those same critters now running the country, want to legitimize.

At any rate, things aren’t looking all that rosy right now, and given the crock of shit stimulus package these people have dropped on us, they look even bleaker for the future.

Forget the AIG bonuses and all the rest of the stuff that’s making making the public’s blood boil; All the rage we expend on those picayunes — yes, they are bagatelle when placed beside the Big Picture, and they also help to distract Americans, to the joy of President Obama and the Democrats on the Hill, from those things that should be our primary concerns:

We are in the process of nationalizing the banks and other financial institutions, by purchasing their stock, which gives the government a “say” in the day to day affairs of these concerns.

We are being committed to programs that make children as yet unborn into unwitting moneylenders, only lenders with a twist — they will also be the debtors, paying back both principal and interest in the form of taxes.

We are watching a liberal president and a liberal Congress allocate billions of dollars into the coffers of PACs and unions that support their leftist campaigns so that they’ll have these same funds on hand to donate to future liberal campaigns — this is nothing short of robbing all American taxpayers in order to perpetuate the careers of a few politicians who have little or no use for the letter of the Constitution. The most descriptive terms I can think of for this are Grand Larceny and Treason.

We are witnessing the greatest rape of our economy in history, trillions of dollars we neither have nor can afford to borrow being poured like water into bureaucracies, agendas and political programs that will lead us into the depths of economic tragedy as they expand and demand exponential expenditure increases, transforming the world’s greatest economy into the same pitiful class as those of any failed socialist country.

Returning to the top of this post,

I Dislike Sounding Like A Conspiracy Theorist, but…

Our current economic situation, much of it sparked by policies and bureaucracies forced onto/ into the private sector over the last couple of decades by the folks on the left side of the aisle, seems to have coincided rather conveniently with our having both a liberal run Congress and a liberal president at the same time, enabling the passing of the legislation that now threatens to transform our beloved country from the successful free market behemoth it has always been into the miserable, infinitely less free socialist state our miserable, shit eating, treasonous, Stalin loving liberals have longed it to be, their Utopian little minds unable to grasp the depths of the consequences they, themselves will have to bear along with those of us whom they are victimizing by sabotaging the capitalist republic in which we have been quite happy to dwell.

Concurrently, they have pursued the three agendas that are of paramount concern to any totalitarian government.

They attack belief in G-d, because belief in Him might stand between the citizens and their total devotion to the government;

They control and manipulate the media, using propaganda and selective reporting to shape public opinion and, as we’ve seen, even to elect a president!

I hate to say this, my friends, but it looks to me as though our nation’s internal enemies are winning, have perhaps already won, through a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy.

By the time 2012 arrives, it may well be too late to reverse what the Obama Administration and the Pelosi/ Reid Congress have set in motion.

I dislike sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but…