AP: Obama declared health care law ‘is here to stay’
Caught between nervous Democrats and emboldened Republicans, President Barack Obama on Friday stepped up the sales pitch on his health care overhaul as the final elements of his top domestic achievement go into effect. With his legacy and the law’s success at stake, Obama said: “The law is here to stay.”
Behind the scenes, the White House readied a campaign-style effort to get healthy young people to sign up for the insurance “exchanges” in order to keep premium costs from skyrocketing. On Capitol Hill, House Republicans are planning yet another vote to try to try to repeal the law.
The insurance exchanges are the centerpiece of the landmark overhaul of the nation’s health insurance system and the White House mobilization is crucial to the success of the health care law and, by extension, to Obama’s place in history as the first president in decades to expand health care coverage.
“There’s a lot that this law is already doing for Americans with insurance,” Obama said during a Mother’s Day-themed event at the White House. “There’s a lot more that’s going to happen for folks who don’t have insurance.”
But he cautioned: “We still have a lot of work to do in the coming months to make sure more Americans can buy affordable health coverage.”
And he urged the public not to be swayed by what he said were scare tactics from critics of the law who might blame it for rising premiums.
“Don’t be bamboozled,” he said.
Underscoring the policy and political consequences, the White House plans to employ both the resources of government as well as those of his reconfigured political operation as it aimed to enroll 7 million people in health insurance exchanges between Oct. 1 and the end of March. The goal is to get 30 million people to sign up within five years.
Moreover, the composition of those signing up for the new exchanges matters just as much as the overall totals. In order to keep premium costs down, officials say they must register 2.7 million healthy people between the ages of 18 and 35 in order to counteract the costs of ensuring seniors and people with health problems.
The White House’s hopes that Obama’s East Room event would draw broad attention crumpled, however, when the president’s event had to compete for attention with revelations about administration deliberations over the September attack on U.S. diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, and an acknowledgement by the Internal Revenue Service that its workers had singled out conservative groups for additional review.
The effort comes as the public remains divided over the health care law. As a result, the White House is planning an election-like campaign to target those uninsured or individually insured young people, an effort reminiscent of the sophisticated voter outreach that helped Obama twice win the White House. The administration has identified where many of the healthy and uninsured young live and will be working with health clinics, hospitals, churches and other groups to sign them up for the exchanges.
Organizing for Action, an outside political group supporting Obama, will also be involved in the effort to promote the exchanges.
Administration officials say one-third of the young people they need to sign up for the exchanges live in California, Texas and Florida. Just over 50 percent are minorities and 57 percent are men.
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Judge Napolitano: Why We Should Mistrust the Government
It should come as no surprise that President Obama told Ohio State students at graduation ceremonies last week that they should not question authority and they should reject the calls of those who do. He argued that “our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule” has been so successful that trusting the government is the same as trusting ourselves; hence, challenging the government is the same as challenging ourselves. And he blasted those who incessantly warn of government tyranny.
Yet, mistrust of government is as old as America itself. America was born out of mistrust of government. The revolution that was fought in the 1770s and 1780s was actually won in the minds of colonists in the mid-1760s when the British imposed the Stamp Act and used writs of assistance to enforce it. The Stamp Act required all persons in the colonies to have government-sold stamps on all documents in their possession, and writs of assistance permitted search warrants written by British troops in which they authorized themselves to enter private homes ostensibly to look for the stamps.
These two pieces of legislation were so unpopular here that Parliament actually rescinded the Stamp Act, and the king’s ministers reduced the use of soldier-written search warrants. But the searches for the stamps turned the tide of colonial opinion irreversibly against the king.
The same king also prosecuted his political adversaries in Great Britain and here for what he called
“seditious libel” – basically, criticizing the government. Often that criticism spread and led to civil disobedience, so the British sought to punish it at its source. The prosecutions were so unpopular here, and so contrary to the spirit of what would become the Declaration of Independence, that when the British went home and the Framers wrote the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was added, the First Amendment assured that the new government could not punish speech.
Yet barely 10 years into “our brave, creative, unique experiment in self-rule,” in the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, Congress at the instigation of President John Adams criminalized
free speech that was critical of the new government.
How did it come about that members of the same generation – in some cases the very same human beings – that declared in the First Amendment that “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” in fact enacted laws that did just that?
As morally wrong, as violative of the natural law, as unconstitutional as these laws were, they were not historical incongruities. Thomas Jefferson – who opposed and condemned the acts (he was Adams’ vice president at the time) – warned that it is the nature of government over time to increase and of liberty to decrease. And that’s why we should not trust government. In the same era, James Madison himself agreed when he wrote, “All men having power should be distrusted to a certain degree.”
The Alien and Sedition Acts were but the beginning of a long train of government abuses visited upon people in America as a consequence of the “experiment in self-rule.” I am not quoting Obama’s Ohio State speech to nitpick, but rather to establish a base line for my argument that he rejects core principles and historical lessons and, most troubling, the natural law itself when he opines that government should be trusted because it has gained power via self-rule.
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Click below to read the full article on Lew Rockwell’s website.
Hannity and Rumsfield Try To Justify the Need to Police the World
Peter Schiff Owning a Panel on C-SPAN
Reason.com: Are All US Phone Calls Being Recorded?
The real capabilities and behavior of the US surveillance state are almost entirely unknown to the American public because, like most things of significance done by the US government, it operates behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy. But a seemingly spontaneous admission this week by a former FBI counterterrorism agent provides a rather startling acknowledgment of just how vast and invasive these surveillance activities are.
Over the past couple days, cable news tabloid shows such as CNN’s Out Front with Erin Burnett have been excitingly focused on the possible involvement in the Boston Marathon attack of Katherine Russell, the 24-year-old American widow of the deceased suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev. As part of their relentless stream of leaks uncritically disseminated by our Adversarial Press Corps, anonymous government officials are claiming that they are now focused on telephone calls between Russell and Tsarnaev that took place both before and after the attack to determine if she had prior knowledge of the plot or participated in any way.
On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could.
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Click below for the full article.
http://reason.com/24-7/2013/05/06/are-all-us-phone-calls-being-recorded
Adam VS The Santorum Sweater Vest
Ron Paul Criticizes Boston Lockdown: ‘We Had Martial Law Out There,’ ‘It’s Criminal’
Reason.com: When Cops Claimed the Right to Search Anyone Who “Causes Fear in a Community”
Radley Balko has published a series of stories at The Huffington Post that use the government’s response to the marathon bombings as a newshook to write about Boston’s recurring role in the history of militarized policing. The most interesting article in the sequence, I think, is the segment on the modern drug war. Here’s the setup:
In the early 1980s, Boston authorities introduced widespread stop-and-frisks, barricades, and other high-intensity policing tactics in high-crime neighborhoods like Roxbury and Matapan. Critics claimed police were implementing a “search on sight” policy of black men in some neighborhoods, doing away even with the low bar of needing reasonable suspicion before conducting stop-and-frisks. Police admitted a search-on-sight policy, but only for anyone known to be or suspected of being in a gang, along with anyone who associates with those people. They also claimed to be following a vague policy that allowed them to search anyone they felt “causes fear in a community.”
According to a subsequent lawsuit, black men were stopped, patted down, and in some cases strip searched for no more than wearing the sports logo of a particular professional sports team. A Boston Globe investigation found 15 people who had been stripped searched on the street, but were never arrested.
State Sen. William Owens said the tactics were alienating an entire generation of black men, and that had effectively imposed martial law on some communities. Tensions boiled over in 1989 when a plainclothes officer shot 30-year-old Rolando Car during a stop-and-frisk after mistaking Carr’s keys for a gun.
At another point, “Residents of Lawrence were issued passes that they had to show to get into and out of the neighborhood. Anyone entering Lawrence had their vehicle license plate documented by police manning a barricade. A letter was then sent to the registered owner of the vehicle to let him know the car had been spotted in Lawrence.” The police chief, Balko notes, “described the tactics as a form of community policing.”
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Click here for the full article.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/06/when-cops-claimed-the-right-to-search-an
Reuters: Fight expected in House on online sales tax
The Senate voted overwhelmingly on Monday to give states the power to enforce their sales tax laws on online purchases, but the legislation faces a tougher fight in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives.
The Democratic-controlled Senate voted 69 to 27 to back the measure, which pits brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart Stores Inc and cash-hungry state governments against such Web retailers as eBay Inc and Republicans wary of new tax measures.
“Call me a conservative, but I believe the right approach to tax fairness is to reduce rates — not force higher rates onto others,” said Tom Graves, a House Republican from Georgia.
House Speaker John Boehner plans to send the bill to the House Judiciary Committee, a senior Republican aide said. That will mean hearings ahead. The Senate uncharacteristically bypassed this step.
Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert Goodlatte, a Republican, has reservations about the legislation, including its complexity and potential impact on small businesses, a spokeswoman said.
Goodlatte has yet to schedule any hearings on it, she said.
Backers of the measure include major traditional retailers Wal-Mart andBest Buy Co Inc, as well as e-tailing giant Amazon.com Inc, which wants to simplify its U.S. state sales tax payments.
Opponents include many other online merchants such as eBay, Overstock.com Inc and anti-tax activist Grover Norquist. Lawmakers from states without sales taxes – like Montana, Oregon and New Hampshire – largely oppose the measure.
States that charge sales tax have largely been unable to require e-tailers to collect it from purchasers unless the e-tailer had a physical presence in the state. Otherwise, consumers are supposed to pay the tax, but very few do.
Some states have made separate arrangements with Amazon on the issue, while others have not.
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Click below for the full article.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/07/net-us-usa-tax-internet-idUSBRE9450QZ20130507