Obama Administration and Social Security Administration Finalizes New Gun Prohibition Rule
Source: NRA-ILA | Grandma Got Run Over by Obama: SSA Finalizes New Gun Prohibition Rule
Category: President Obama
Have Your Health Insurance Premiums Dropped Under Obamacare?
Obama promised that Obamacare would lower health insurance premiums for American families by about $2,500. Here’s a video montage of Obama saying it again and again.
Do you know anyone who has seen their premiums go down since Obamacare was enacted in 2010? My premiums and deductibles went up yet again this year. Judging by the chart from the Kaiser Family Foundation below, I’m not alone.
LP Response to Obama’s NSA "Reform"
Statement from Geoffrey J. Neale, chair, Libertarian National Committee, in response to President Barack Obama’s announced plan for minor reforms of NSA mass surveillance:
“Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of the rights of its citizens, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it. And, make no mistake, our governments — federal, state, and local — have all become injurious to the rights of citizens.
“Barack Obama today delivered a speech that promised next to nothing. He promised that ‘greater safeguards for civil liberties’ will be enacted, and that steps will be taken to rein in the worst of the NSA surveillance abuses.
“But government cannot be reined in. Once it has power, it seeks more. Once it has information, it keeps it — and often tells us that it didn’t keep it (such as the records of gun purchases run through the NICS system) even though it really did — and then it wants more. It is the nature of the beast; everything it thinks it can use, it stuffs into its gaping, insatiable maw.
“There is already a list of ‘safeguards,’ and they are mentioned specifically in the Constitution. If the supreme law of the land is ‘just a piece of paper,’ what other ‘safeguards’ will keep millions of bureaucrats from breaking the law further?
“The only way to limit government intrusion into our lives is to eliminate the functions that have little to do with defending individual rights within our borders. If government were restricted only to acting on its one legitimate function — protecting individual rights — 95 percent of government operations would cease to exist. And Edward Snowden would have had little incentive to break the news on the government’s rampant criminality.
“Edward Snowden should be granted a full pardon and complete immunity from prosecution. The government’s ire should instead be turned toward prosecuting the millions of bureaucrats who have violated both their oaths of office, statute law, and even the Constitution itself.
“A non-interventionist nation at peace with the world doesn’t need a worldwide security apparatus. A nation that doesn’t meddle in conflicts around the world doesn’t need a two-ocean Navy, or thousands of nuclear weapons, or gargantuan stockpiles of chemical and biological agents. A nation that stays out of foreign conflicts is less likely to be a target of terrorists. And a nation like that doesn’t need to spy constantly on its own citizens.”
Help Welcome Obama To Iowa
For those of you who live in Northeast Iowa (or those of you who don’t mind driving a little way) here is an email I received from the Dubuque Tea Party regarding President Obama’s upcoming visit to the state.
As you probably know by now our job-killing president will be in Peosta, Iowa at Northeast Iowa Community College THIS TUESDAY for a Rural Economic Forum (another Agenda 21 initiative).We are planning to protest this president during his visit. The information we have gathered shows that the Rural Economic Forum is scheduled to begin at 11:30 AM. We are planning to arrive in Peosta just before 10:00 AM. We will have to “play it by ear” as far as where we will be allowed by the Secret Service to park and protest.Personally, I am going to try to park at the Red Roof Diner or at the Americinn which are very close to both the off ramp of Highway 20 and NICC. In my first email I mentioned that there is only one road in to NICC. I was wrong. There is also an entrance to NICC off Burds road to the north. Hopefully they will use the Enterprise Drive entrance.I have got to believe the president’s bus will come in on Highway 20 and exit onto Sundown Road/Y-21/Peosta Street and pass by the Americinn Motel and Suites. That’s where I hope we can gather – along Peota Street in the grassy area in front of the Americainn.For those who cannot make it in the morning there is another opportunity for you to protest. The Rural Economic Forum is scheduled to conclude at 2:30 PM. So, if you want you could gather at about 2:00 PM in the same above location to protest as the president departs.Please spread the word. We would love a huge crowd to show the president and all the democrats in this area that we are still here in force, we are still very angry with this president’s job-killing Keynesian policies, we are NOT going away, and we will do whatever it takes to make him a one-term president.Bring your signs and join us THIS TUESDAY, AUGUST 16TH at 10:00 AM.Yours in Liberty,Jeff Luecke for YOUR Dubuque Tea PartyP.S. I know most of us work. I am taking the morning off to do this. We need to resist this man’s incompetent manipulation and command/control of our economy. Let’s send him a strong message!!!
Update from Jeff Luecke (8-15-11):
It has come to our attention that the streets/roads in Peosta will be shut down at 9:45 AM tomorrow morning.
So, we need to get to Peosta and check things out no later than 9:30 AM to see where we can park.
If worst comes to worst we can park on the shoulder of Highway 20 and walk to wherever we want to stand as we await “The Destroyer in Chief.”
Hope to see you ALL there in FORCE to send a strong message to Mr. Obama that we do not want or need him and his oppressive policies in our lives.
Ron Paul As Popular As Obama?
According to Rasmussen Reports, a hypothetical 2012 race between President Obama and Dr. Ron Paul would be a dead heat.
The report says: “A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.”
“Thirty-nine percent (39%) of all voters have a favorable opinion of Paul, while 30% view him unfavorably. This includes 10% with a very favorable opinion and 12% with a very unfavorable one. But nearly one-out-of-three voters (32%) are not sure what they think of Paul.”
I don’t think we can get that lucky, but if the GOP puts Dr. Paul at the top of the ticket in 2012, this blogger will gladly vote Republican.
Dr. Obama, First Do No Harm
Speaking about the failing economy, President-elect Obama coolly diagnosed, “We understand that we’ve got to provide a blood infusion to the patient right now to make sure that the patient is stabilized, and that means that we can’t worry short-term about the deficit. We’ve got to make sure that the economic stimulus plan is large enough to get the economy moving.” Since the “patient’s” infusion would come from the patient itself (through either taxes or debt), “Doctor” Obama’s treatment may be more like an old-fashioned bloodletting than a true cure.
Obama, like many in Washington (in both parties), is a devotee of Keynesian economics, the ideas of British economist John Maynard Keynes. His theories were first published in 1936 and were quickly adopted by America’s big government progressives, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of the key theories of Keynesian economics is that during economic downturns the government can “prime the pump” by increasing its spending. Since Keynes’ theories increase the size and power of government, it’s no wonder his ideas have always found so many acolytes in D.C.
Keynesian economics has many critics however. Notable detractors include economists Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Murray Rothbard, and Henry Hazlitt. Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek criticized the collectivist approach of Keynesian economics, which requires centralized planning, which Hayek argued leads to totalitarian abuses.
Besides its push for bigger, more authoritarian government, Keynesian economics just doesn’t seem to work. As the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, points out: “[T]he notion that bigger government leads to more growth is theoretically suspect: any money that the government ‘injects’ into the economy with new spending (or tax rebates) must first be borrowed and diverted from private use. The economic pie gets sliced differently, but it is not any bigger.”
Many argue that the Great Depression wouldn’t have been as long or severe if it wasn’t for the Keynesian “cures” employed by the Roosevelt Administration. Later examples of Keynesian policy in practice haven’t fared much better. “Huge increases in government spending under both Hoover and Roosevelt did not help the economy during the 1930s, and more recent Keynesian initiatives—Gerald Ford’s rebates in the mid-1970s, Japan’s stimulus efforts in the 1990s, and President Bush’s rebates in 2001 and 2008—do not seem to have generated positive results,” states the Cato Institute.
Since our public debt currently stands at about $10.6 trillion, and the government is already racking up record deficits this year and no doubt next year, can we really afford to increase spending on anything, particularly for economic “cures” that don’t generally work? (To put that $10.6 trillion figure in some kind of perspective, remember that it took America the time period from George Washington to Ronald Reagan to accumulate ONE trillion in debt. We’re now on pace to add that amount of debt this year alone. With the looming crisis in Social Security and Medicare, that number is sure to go up.)
Dr. Obama, your “patient” is hemorrhaging. Before you apply your Big Government leeches, you might want to pay heed to the medical dictum, “First, do no harm.”
National Servitude
There’s a visceral buzz in the country, or at least on tv, in anticipation of the “Change” coming in January when Obama will take the nation’s helm. What sort of change will he bring? I perused his official website http://www.change.gov/ to see.
On thing that caught my eye was the “America Serves” section of the site. This details Obama’s plan to help the citizenry to “serve” their country. Although it has been scrubbed of the specifics that were posted on it briefly (Obama wasn’t elected on specifics after all), the section still gives the bare-bones of his plan.
In “America Serves” the president-elect promises that “[t]he Obama Administration will call on Americans to serve in order to meet the nation’s challenges.” Obama not only plans to expand the national service programs AmeriCorps and Peace Corps, but will also conjure up several new service programs. A Classroom Corps will work in “underserved” schools. There will also be a new Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps and Veteran Corps.
Kids as young as middle school will be expected to perform 50 hours of community service per year. The federal government would withhold funds from local schools that don’t put their students to work the requisite number of hours (a fact missing from the newly sanitized site). College students will be expected to perform 100 hours per year. For their servitude, the older kids will be given a $4,000 tax credit toward college tuition.
If you think that a lifetime of hard work (wherein the average American works about 113 days per year to earn enough to pay their tax bill, essentially working involuntarily for the government during that period) might get you off the hook for continued “service,” think again. “Obama will encourage retiring Americans to serve” their community too, his site explains.
To be fair to Obama, the guy he beat also supports expanding national service. Among other programs, McCain praised the example of “City Year,” an AmeriCorps program that serves 18 cities. “City Year members wear uniforms, work in teams, [..] and gather together for daily calisthenics, often in highly public places such as in front of city hall,” wrote McCain. He enthusiastically explained that in another program, The National Civilian Community Corps, members “not only wear uniforms and work in teams… but actually live together in barracks on former military bases[.]” This idea is no doubt the authoritarian equivalent of Viagra for the militaristic McCain.
Since “national service” started out meaning compulsory military service, it’s ironic that the military has moved toward a more freedom-friendly volunteer force (as it should), while the politicians in DC seem determined to push compulsory service into new areas of civilian society.
Proponents claim that young participants will learn responsibility and a sense of duty. I would argue that the young will learn that they are mere vassals of the government, which holds preemptive claim over their very lives, rather than free citizens with unalienable rights and lives with intrinsic worth.
Perhaps President-elect Obama (and Senator McCain, who will no doubt vote for any Democrat national service proposal in Congress) should reread the 13th Amendment which states, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” (Emphasis added.) It contains no provision exempting the federal government from it’s prohibition.
In my own day, our high school had already implemented an annual “Community Service Day” in which students did various odd jobs around the three small, rural towns that comprised our district. (And it didn’t even require goading from the federal government to do so.) Like compulsory service supporters contend, I DID learn valuable life-lessons from this. In fact, I learned two: 1)Spending hours trying to rake tiny bits of gravel up a steep, grassy incline with a widely-spaced leaf rake is a pointless, Sisyphus-like task. 2)People in positions of authority aren’t necessarily smart.
Cold Hard Cashner 