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Health Care: Democrats on the take and in the dead of night pass an execrable piece of legislation that they haven't read, the public doesn't want and only socialists could love. What has happened to this country?
If we hadn't stayed up past midnight Sunday, we wouldn't have known what was going on. Here we thought a vote on the proposed health care overhaul wasn't going to take place until Thursday night — Christmas Eve.
But there they were, the United States Senate, at 1 a.m. Monday, rushing to vote in the middle of a snowstorm to close debate on the most important piece of legislation of our time — the nationalization of the U.S. health care system. And we've been scrambling ever since to make sense of it.
Let's see if we have this right:
• This was a vote on a Democrat-concocted scheme that Americans have rejected every time it's been proposed for 100 years and that is opposed again, by 54% to 41% by the public at large, by 2-to-1 by practicing physicians and by every last member on the Republican side of the aisle.
• The vote was taken without any members having read the main 2,074-page bill, let alone the 383 pages of amendments that were tacked on at the last minute to buy off senators, including Nebraska's Ben Nelson, Louisiana's Mary Landrieu and Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders.
• Despite growing public opposition, Democratic members had the nerve to call those who questioned their monstrosity "obstructionists" and worse. Rhode Island's Sheldon Whitehouse called health care bill foes "birthers," "fanatics" and "people running around in right-wing militia and Aryan support groups." Is this what Democrats meant when they said they seek bipartisan solutions to the nation's problems?
• The bill contains at last count 18 new taxes totaling an estimated $406 billion — including significant new levies on those earning less than $250,000, a major breach of Obama's pledge not to raise taxes by "one penny" on those in that income group.
A family of four that refuses to buy into a "qualifying" health insurance program will pay a "surtax" of as much as $6,750. At the same time, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that health insurance premiums will nearly double by 2016.
As the nonpartisan Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation put it, "The House and Senate health care bills contain enormous tax hikes to accompany massive increases in government spending."
Politics: Sen. Mary Landrieu was the new "Louisiana Purchase." Sen. Ben Nelson got the federal government to pick up his state's future Medicaid tab. Maybe we should just put Senate votes up on eBay. Nelson, the 60th vote in the middle-of-the-night Senate party line vote on health care ...
Betrayal: Who deserves the most blame for the wrecking ball that Congress and the president will soon take to the greatest health system in the world? The Republican who gave them her vote. 'When history calls, history calls," Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe said in October when she joined Senate ...
Science is one of the great achievements of the human mind and the biggest reason why we live not only longer but more vigorously in our old age, in addition to all the ways in which it provides us with things that make life easier and more enjoyable. Like anything valuable, science has been seized ...
President Barack Obama's weak Copenhagen accord may make it harder for Congress to pass punitive cap-and-trade legislation that requires greenhouse- gas emission cuts. A recent Gallup Poll showed that Americans prefer 75% to 10% not to enter into an emission-reduction scheme that doesn't include ...
From the 14th floor of New York-Presbyterian Hospital, I could look across the East River to much of Brooklyn and Queens. Behind me in the hospital bed was the woman I love, who was sick, very sick, attended by some remarkable doctors (including her own, indomitable daughter), and I would sometimes ...
Posted By: Osamas Pajamas(115) on 12/22/2009 | 2:02 AM ET
Raise your left hand if you think that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution aims to preserve our right to shoot Bambi in the bxtt every now and then for deer tacos. Raise your right hand if you think that the authors of the Second Amendment --- and their intellectual antecedents --- intended for Americans to be armed with deadly force against tyranny. This is just a little exercise to test your sense of history and current events, and to clarify your thinking just a wee bit.
Posted By: jbd10611(5) on 12/22/2009 | 1:41 AM ET
I believe we still have men of courage and leadership, I count myself as one of them. However most of us are not in the position to change things or to prevent more damage. Time for legal action against these Socialist who seek to destroy our country. I can't think of one thing they have done as being legal. Do not wait on Supreme Court to act, they must be caused to act. Malfeasance, violation of oaths of office, proposing legislation that is not supported by our Constitution. Incompetence!
Posted By: Ellman(200) on 12/22/2009 | 12:04 AM ET
I don't understand why people continue to say that "the government will force us to buy insurance". I have no intention of buying insurance regardless of what the government wants. I'll go to court and fight this to the Supreme Court. This is unconstitutional, but worse, a form of coercion that none of us should stand for. The founding fathers did not accept it from the British and we'd be fools to accept it from our Congress. This is the tyranny of law and we have to resist it by all means!
Posted By: Richard Cancemi(80) on 12/21/2009 | 11:58 PM ET
We need a 1776 Revolution again!!!
Posted By: Richard Cancemi(80) on 12/21/2009 | 11:57 PM ET
How is that these scoundrels/scalawags/ hooligans/hoodlums/ hypocrites are getting away with these abominations? Surely they have committed enough abuse and violations of the Constitutions to warrant some court action? Where are any men of courage? I think the Republicans protest but in DOING nothing they are playing their own brand of politics and colluding with the Socialists in our midst. We have no men of courage or leadership. What we have is a party of self-serving wimps.
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