» Obama Forcing Private Companies to Have Board Votes on Illegal Policy - Big Government

» Obama Forcing Private Companies to Have Board Votes on Illegal Policy - Big Government

Another day, another Barack Obama Administration totalitarian diktat.

In other words, whatever Obama wants – by any means necessary.

Behold Obama’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Which last week handed down from on-high a mandate that telecommunications companies AT&T, Verizon and Sprint MUST have Board votes on Network Neutrality.

SEC to Telcos: Yes, Net Neutrality is a Significant Policy Issue



The problem for Obama’s SEC is – Net Neutrality isn’t even a LEGAL policy issue. Because Congress has never passed a law making Net Neutrality actual policy.

The federal government – via the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – first tried to unilaterally impose Net Neutrality in 2008. And the D.C. Circuit Court in April 2010 unanimously threw the government out on its ear.

Because the FCC “has failed to tie its assertion” of regulatory authority to an actual law enacted by Congress, the agency does not have the power to regulate an Internet provider’s network management practices, wrote Judge David Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

Tuesday’s decision could doom one of the signature initiatives of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, a Democrat. Last October, Genachowski announced plans to begin drafting a formal set of Net neutrality rules–even though Congress has not given the agency permission to do so.

But it didn’t doom Genachowski and Obama’s illegal Net Neutrality intentions. It didn’t even daunt them. Just eight months after this stinging rebuke, Obama’s FCC went ahead and illegally jammed through Net Neutrality anyway.

They did so despite the D.C. Circuit Court’s unanimous ruling. And they did so despite the fact that more than 300 members of the then still-Democrat-Majority Congress – the body charged with giving the FCC Net Neutrality authority – were for months in advance telling them not to.



Verizon, MetroPCS and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli are all now suing to undo this particular Obama power grab. In the same D.C. Circuit Court that threw out the FCC’s first illegal attempt.

There are very few things judges and courts like less than summarily dispatching a case – and then again having to hear the same case. So the FCC’s Illegal Attempt II will most likely suffer the exact same fate as Illegal Attempt I.

The FCC has been all along hedging its Net Neutrality bet – by illegally jamming merging companies with Net Neutrality mandates as a condition of the government approving said mergers.

Which – on the 2010 Comcast-NBCU merger – even the uber-Leftist Washington Post thought was a bad idea:

FCC officials should resist calls by some merger opponents to impose “net neutrality” principles on Comcast’s Internet component.

Obama’s FCC – shocker – did it anyway.

(Why private companies that have reached mutually agreeable business arrangements must then seek government approval is one excellent question. Why the government can then illegally make up laws out of whole cloth and stick these companies with them as approval conditions is another.)

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So what Obama’s SEC is now doing on Net Neutrality is just and yet another illegal power play by Obama’s Administration.

Overrunning the private Board practices of private companies – and mandating they vote on something no government agency has any authority to impose.

Uber-Leftist policy – by any means necessary.

The Obama Way.

» Obama Cuts Weather Satellites for Defense…But Not For Commerce - Big Government

» Obama Cuts Weather Satellites for Defense…But Not For Commerce - Big Government

The insistence on cutting defense programs even while spending hundreds of million of dollars to fund the misnamed Arab Spring seems bizarre at the very least.

But there’s a reason that Democrats made their budget cut proposals contingent on military funding being cut: they dislike the military strongly, and want America to be a far less assertive global leader. They’d prefer we spend the money on critical items here at home … like weather satellites that may harm commerce. Or something.

» Rep. Allen West Delivers Epic Speech on GOP’s Proud History of Fighting For Black Equality - Big Government

» Rep. Allen West Delivers Epic Speech on GOP’s Proud History of Fighting For Black Equality - Big Government

In a sweeping and stirring oration on the floor of the House of Representatives, Rep. Allen West (R-FL) proudly recounted the Republican Party’s long history of fighting for black freedom against the Democratic Party’s history of racism and oppression.

Rep. West’s speech offered a timeline of Republican Party victories on behalf of African Americans’ long battle for equality. From the elections of the first black members of Congress (Sen. Hiram Revels (R-MS) and Rep. Joseph Rainey (R-SC)), to the adoption of the 13th Amendment, 14th Amendment, 15th Amendment, 1875 Civil Rights Act, 1957 Civil Rights Act, 1964 Civil Rights Act, and of course the Emancipation itself, Rep. West recounted how each victory was the result of the Republican Party’s commitment to freedom for all citizens, regardless of hue.

Rep. West’s oration marking Black History Month also placed his own election in the pantheon of Republican victories on behalf of African Americans:

In some ways, Mr. Speaker, I carry the torch of Josiah Walls. You see, in 1876, the Democrats contested his election and had him replaced midterm with one of their own. No black Republican would again be elected from Florida to this House until November 2, 2010, when the voters of that State entrusted me to be their Representative.

Rep. West also recounted the victories of GOP luminaries like President Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, President Dwight Eisenhower, and Sen. Everett Dirksen.

Mr. Speaker, Republicans were unfazed by the many Democrats, including John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who criticized President Eisenhower’s decision. Meanwhile, it was the Democrats in the Senate who filibustered the first civil rights act of the 20th century and the Republicans who managed to pass it nonetheless. The law established a Civil Rights Division within the Justice Department and authorized the Attorney General to request injunctions against anyone attempting to deny a person’s right to vote. It was written at the behest of President Eisenhower after a long drought of civil rights bills under Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and President Harry Truman.

It was a Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen, a Republican, who helped write the first Civil Rights Act of 1964, widely regarded as the most influential of them all. And in recent years, it’s been the Republican Party that has fought to prevent African Americans from being trapped in a permanent underclass through dependence on government handouts.

In the speech’s moving peroration, Rep. West closed his remarks by reaffirming the Republican Party’s commitment to conserving the dignity of every human life, regardless of position or color.

With a core belief in the supremacy and the sovereignty of the individual and the unconditional dignity of every human life, the Republican Party is, always has been, and forever shall be the party of equality of opportunity. Happy Black History Month.

When Is A Tie Not A Tie?

JustOneMinute: When Is A Tie Not A Tie?

When is a tie not a tie? And when is a tie-breaker not a tie-breaker? When our friends in the liberal media are reporting on Obama.

So Michelle and Barack win the "Most Charitable" title because they contributed a higher proportion of their Gross Income to a tax-advantaged retirement plan? I understand that charity begins a home, but really?

Articles: Obama and the Negotiator's Tactic

Articles: Obama and the Negotiator's Tactic

By Russell Nagelkirk

There is a pattern to how Obama has advanced the project of a command-and-control economy -- i.e., fascism with a veneer of capitalism. Using a negotiator's tactic, Obama sets up his opposition so that they will be happy with meaningless scraps. The idea is to make demands that are outrageous to demand and then later back away to a degree it is no longer deemed egregious. The opposition walks away foolishly thinking it scored a victory, all the while not realizing that the line had been moved. By being focused on the worst of the demands, no one notices that they are accepting the premise behind the demands.

This is the tactic of the shrewd negotiator, who includes things that he knows he does not need in his list of wants. It is his hope that when he feigns a concession by removing some of the unneeded items, the other side shall be in a morally obligatory position to make their own concessions.

In the political arena, the use of this tactic serves two purposes, the first being to put false pressure on the other side and the second to create a smokescreen for an underlying agenda.

Obama regularly employs this tactic and has shoved us towards fascism with it. Here I mean "fascism" in the sense that Obama believes that the capitalist economic system must be directed, managed, and coordinated under the supervision of the state, to bring about transformation the state deems desirable.

For example, instead of proposing to cut corporate business taxes, limiting regulation, or other actions that tangibly free up business capital to hire, he proposes a "stimulus" instead, a scheme to spend money that does not yet exist to come from someone in the private sector and to be spent on nonexistent "shovel ready" jobs. With a budget that automatically increases each year, it was outrageous to demand that we spend more. The parties should reasonably hammer out something that reduces costs to business. But instead of the debate being about whether or not there should be a stimulus, they compromise instead about how much the stimulus should be. Invisibly, the line is moved so that the stimulus represents a fresh baseline for the budget, and the false premise that the government can boost the economy tacitly receives the imprimatur of Congress.

Then there was ObamaCare. Shrouded in a miasma of inconsistency, questions abounded whether the president was determined to get single-payer, government-run health care. He said he wanted to increase competition and reduce costs, that we have to work with what we have and fix what is broken. He then, nonetheless, pushed for a major overhaul that injected government into the "system" of health care. Again, this was an outrageous step. It was so outrageous that no Republicans signed up, so the negotiation ended up being between Obama and the more conservative Democrats. The final holdouts, including Bart Stupak, signed on thinking they won victories for their causes, including a useless executive order ostensibly to prohibit directing federal funds to abortions. But by signing on, they moved the line. They accepted the premise that government's role and authority to manage and control the health care industry should be almost limitlessly expanded.

Finally, there is the recent rule by the administration that requires health plans to provide free contraception and sterilization, except if the employer is religious. The outrage is that the definition for "religious" is so narrow that it does not exempt Catholic hospitals or universities, so, Catholic or not, they will have to set aside their conscience and convictions. Obama must have known that this would spark outrage. They went ahead anyway. Why? I think it is the same negotiation tactic, though technically this isn't negotiation; it is rule-making. Obama wants greater government control, so he demands the outrageous, and now he is testing how much he has to walk it back to quell the fires. As seen here, he has offered a "compromise" (a meaningless scrap), and since the religious institutions speaking out don't want confrontation, they may bite. If so, Obama will have moved the line. This process also serves as the smokescreen for his effort to cement the premise, which premise is the rule itself, created so that, as Krauthammer put it here, "the rest of civil society may be broken to the will of the state's regulators."

In short, we're making such a fuss about the exception to the rule that we don't object to the rule.

Consider the ramifications of where we are today. We have generally accepted the gross idea that government may be entrusted with the power so controlling and intrusive that it may compel one side to buy the product of insurance, another side to sell it (if you mandate the purchase, logic holds that you mandate the sale), and then on top of all the very composition of the product.

Ladies and gentlemen, tyranny and fascism are here. When are we going to draw the line?

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/02/obama_and_the_negotiators_tactic.html#ixzz1mjwUFa5n

Black liberals should be ashamed

Black liberals should be ashamed

As we know, it is liberals’ proclivity for projection that compels black liberals to deride conservatives of color as sellouts, Uncle Toms and things of this nature, when it is they who are acceding to the dominion of progressive overlords and advancing that cause. Among the progressive overlords are factions that not only are conspiring to compromise black Americans socially, culturally and economically, but which would have kept blacks in the back of the bus and drinking from their own water fountains had they been able to maintain the status quo in segregated America.

Yet, black liberals – prominent ones, more especially – continue to advance the socialist doctrine of their overseers, with relish and most vociferously, to be sure. Some have taken it to a high art, while others rail as inarticulately as severe brain injury patients, astonishing us with the fact that they have not only gained employment doing so, but made lucrative careers out of deceiving their fellow Americans of high melanin conten

I discussed many of the methods and machinations of liberal politicians and career activists pertaining to race politics in my book, Negrophilia: From Slave Block to Pedestal – America’s Racial Obsession,” but as more and more sulfurous fissures have erupted across the political landscape (primarily due to the policies of the Obama administration), the issue of prominent black liberals and their duplicity becomes increasingly significant.

As commentator Glenn Beck has pointed out, there are scores of noteworthy black achievers throughout American history, ranging from the Revolutionary War period up through the pre-Civil Rights Movement days, but black kids aren’t taught about them. Why? Because it is more important for them to learn that blacks weren’t able to accomplish anything in America until the left began fighting the good fight on their behalf than it would be to expose them to that which would instill pride in their forebears and, by extension, them. The prospect of hope and change to which that might give rise is far too frightening to the left to allow.

We know that politicians are essentially whores; more than even money or power, they thrive on their ability to artfully play the game. As such, they will stoop to anything, even if it humiliates them, their constituency, or some other individual or group. That being the case, it is always only a matter of time before they sell out to someone, some thing, or some destructive agenda.

But what’s the prominent black activist’s excuse?

It isn’t conservative white Republicans who have institutionally undereducated generations of black kids; those responsible aren’t even exclusively white. It’s been liberals, segregationist Democrats at first, and then socialists as these infiltrated that party. As civil-rights activism became a cottage industry, and more and more blacks were offered political opportunities to shill for the liberal power structure, their trusting compatriots of color had no reason not to buy into the lies.

Those lies became increasingly infused with Marxist dogma as the radical left’s power base coalesced: Those who’d been dedicated to holding blacks in thralldom were not only white, but conservative, Christian and, of course, dedicatedly capitalist. Having heard many a young, angry black nationalist spout off when I was a child, I know the rhetoric well, but young black people don’t know that it’s an old, communist con any more than white kids do. As I’ve said time and again: What progressives have done with regard to the black community in America is probably the single most successful thing they have accomplished. In part, this is due to so many blacks having been willing to carry their water, whether due to ignorance or ideology.

The high-profile black liberal, however, can’t really fall back on ignorance. One would have to be monumentally dull to continue to fall for the lies and manifest inferiority of liberal doctrine in perpetuity after being on the inside for years. In their hearts, men like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and even Barack Obama know that they’ve no more interest in the welfare of black Americans than “Great Society” President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who is reported to have said, “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”

So, I would ask of high-profile black liberals: Are you really in favor of the universal suffering that socialism promises to bring upon us all regardless of race, or are you just as innately unintelligent as your liberal overseers believe you to be?

Communism by insurance mandate - HUMAN EVENTS

Communism by insurance mandate - HUMAN EVENTS

One theory for why Barack Obama pushed the contraception mandate right now is that it helps Rick Santorum. Others theorize it's because Obama is an anti-religious bigot with a left-wing agenda. Reasonable minds can disagree on this.

But it may end up helping Mitt Romney by reminding people that the "individual mandate" is the least of the problems with ObamaCare. (The "individual mandate" is simply the legal argument for why ObamaCare is unconstitutional in a country that has accepted Social Security and Medicare as constitutional.)

This isn't a Catholic issue or even a religious issue. Conservatives are falling into the Democrats' trap by denouncing it as such. It's a freedom issue. (Or, as Democrats call it, "the F-word.")

If liberals like it, it's subsidized; if they don't, it's prohibited. And now they can impose their left-wing authoritarianism on the entire country by calling their mandates and prohibitions "insurance."

Liberal fundamentalists say: I don't see why anyone needs to hunt; I don't know why anyone needs to eat meat; I don't see why anyone needs to bathe every day; I don't know why anyone minds looking at urine in a low-flow toilet; I don't know why anyone needs an incandescent light bulb ...

Screw you, liberals. I don't know why anyone needs an abortion, free contraception, crap-ass "art" with photos of vaginas on the Virgin Mary, non-farming farmers or a $1 million pension for Anthony Weiner.

But I'm forced to subsidize all of that.

And now we're all going to be forced to subsidize the entire wish list of the Berkeley City Council, recast as "health insurance."

Insurance is not supposed to be for normal expenses in the ordinary course of events, such as multivitamins, house painting or oil changes. Insurance is for unexpected catastrophes: fires, accidents, cancer.

The basic idea is to spread the risk of unforeseen disasters. Filling up your gas tank, for example, is not an unforeseen disaster (though it's getting to be under Obama).

So why is birth control covered by insurance? Birth control pills aren't that expensive -- generics are about $20 a month -- nor is the need for them a bolt out of the blue. Why not have health insurance cover manicures, back massages, carrot cake and nannies?

Liberals huffily ask why it's so important to the Catholic Church not to pay for insurance plans that cover birth control, but the better question is: Why is it so important to liberals to force them to? (Wait until they have to buy coverage for vibrating butt-plugs!)

The answer is: They want the government giving official sanction to birth control and, later, abortion. That comes next. They want it for same reason gays want gay marriage -- it's purely symbolic.

Following Betty Friedan, gender feminists believe the pill is so central to what we are as a nation that it must be paid for by all, i.e. by insurance. The argument for fully subsidized abortions will be: We don't vote on a basic human right!

Whether or not it's a "right," it's not an area for "insurance." Abortion is an elective procedure. No families are going bankrupt because they had to pay for an abortion -- which costs about as much as a haircut for John Edwards or Bill Clinton. Can't we limit the health insurance we are all required by federal law to purchase to financially ruinous, actual medical problems?

No, that is not in the cards. Just as liberals have turned the Constitution into a vehicle for achieving all the left-wing policies they could never get Americans to vote for, now they are going to use "insurance" for the same purpose. Their new method doesn't even require them to get votes from five justices on the Supreme Court.

The secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, will do it all on her own.

Anything close to the beating heart of feminism is about to become a mandatory part of insurance coverage: fertility treatments, chemical sensitivities, a year's leave of absence for fathers after the birth of a child, attention deficit disorder, massages, aromatherapy, watching MSNBC, sex change operations, gender reassignment surgery, gender re-reassignment surgery.

And then, once every single insurance plan in the country is required by federal law to cover one million liberal causes having nothing to do with medical problems, Democrats will be happy to let us purchase health insurance across state lines. Sure, buy your insurance from Utah or Kentucky. Every insurance plan in the country, by federal law, will be identical.

The contraception diktat is only the beginning of the government controlling your life under ObamaCare. There are approximately 100,000 more decisions the HHS Secretary will have to make under ObamaCare that you will not be able to appeal.

The bill should have been called "Kathleen Sebelius' Dream Journal."
As we have seen, Sebelius is not a go-with-the-flow kind of secretary. She is a doctrinaire feminist who thinks it's important to make a statement by ordering something that has only a tangential connection to health care but will have the effect of costing everyone more money.

Are you getting why this isn't a Catholic issue? So what if some "compromise" is reached that makes the Catholic bishops happy? They supported ObamaCare to begin with! They ought to be forced to live with the consequences of the totalitarian regime they helped foist on the rest of us.

Maybe they'll get a waiver from the contraception mandate on religious grounds -- just like unions and Obama-friendly corporations got waivers on the grounds that they realized ObamaCare would suck and they didn't want to be a part of it.

What about the rest of us? You know, the ones who didn't support ObamaCare? We still have to live under the thumb of a nutcase gender-feminist with unlimited authority to ban whatever she doesn't like, subsidize whatever she does like and call it "insurance."

If Obama is re-elected this November and ObamaCare is not repealed, Republicans' only option will be to make Rick Santorum the head of HHS under the next Republican president (if we ever have one).

He can prohibit insurance companies from covering anything related to contraception, AIDS and substance abuse, and mandate that insurance plans pay subsidies to stay-at-home mothers, tuition for home-schooled kids and cover the purchase of his book, "It Takes a Family."

Those particular lifestyle choices have as much to do with "insurance" as contraceptives do.