Ted Kennedy, D.R.I.P.

Ted Kennedy, the ubiquitous compassionate "lion of liberalism," is now dead at the age of 77, thanks to his incurable brain cancer. The limousine socialist is now being canonized by the talking heads of MSNBC, CNN, and other socialist-worshipping networks as well as the major print newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and many other state-cheerleading publications.

We are talking about the same vile collectivistic socialist Democratic senator who supported the evil Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its provisions, including Title VII, which transferred the private property of any free enterprise to the ruling domain of the state simply by outlawing discrimination "on the basis of race, color, gender, religion, and national origin." Subsequently, pregnancy, age, and disability discrimination and the prohibition of sexual harrassment were later included in the provisions of the law, which effectively demolished employers' right to discriminate against employees by not hiring them or simply firing them, even if the employees are discriminated on those grounds. It also resulted in the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which intervenes in private employers' right not to hire or to fire employees if they are deemed discriminatory by the U.S. Supreme Court, the federal courts and the U.S. District Courts, and the lower courts and the U.S. Court of Appeal.

He was also responsible for expanding the U.S. intervention in Vietnam in the 1960s. He pushed for evil legislation such as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (which repealed quotas on national origin, thus restricting and empowering the state's role in the immigration market), the National Cancer Act of 1971 (a vile law which launched the U.S. War on Cancer and mandated that the National Cancer Institute would be subsidized with no incentive to find cures for cancer), and the vile No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of 2009. He even voted against the infamous Iraq War Resolution, which is hypocritical considering he backed the Vietnam War and the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, not to mention backed additional Humvees for U.S. troops as a measure to keep them in Iraq.

And, oh yes, let's not forget his infamous involvement in the highly-publicized Chappaquiddick scandal that transpired on the night of July 18, 1969, in which he, in an inebriated stupor, drove his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88 with one of the few women who had worked on his brother Bobby's presidential campaign as a passenger off a bridge into a pond inlet. This vile maniac didn't even bother to save the life of this 28-year-old woman; instead, he swam to safety and never reported the incident until her body was discovered the next day. He only served two months in jail, when he should have served a lot longer than that. Oh, and he was a pathetic alcoholic to boot.

This is the same Kennedy who pushed for the then-estimated $400 billion Medicare Drug Prescription Benefit that he, many Democrats, and the bulk of the Republican congressional leadership wanted. Just prior to his death, he took partisan measures to ensure that Obama's public option would pass.

It doesn't help that his fellow collectivists in the House and the Senate and the major talking heads in the mainstream press and media are canonizing him, as though he were a Catholic saint. Even Obama eulogizes him by asserting that Kennedy was "a colleague, a counselor and a friend" and then extoled him by saying that his "ideas and ideals are stamped on scores of laws, reflected in millions of lives."

Someone gag me with a spoon, please?

To sum it up, this "lion of liberalism" was all about controlling other people's lives, manipulated his way to avoid criminal prosecution for murder of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and a woman in his brother's campaign, lied to his constituents, and had neither any conscience nor remorse for stealing other people's money.

Goodbye and good ridance to you, Teddy. Just do us a favor: don't rest in peace. Just rest in torment. I hope you get the justice you deserve in the black bowels of political hell. Perhaps you'll end up pleading for mercy to save your soul.

[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles and The Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity Movement website.]

Ron Paul Goes Up Against Two Statist Physicians on Larry King Live

Ron Paul weighs in on the "health care debate" (more like a pro-socialized medicine cheering) on Larry King Live, which aired on August 11, 2009. The two statist physicians, Dr. David Scheiner (Obama's former personal physician and a member and supporter of the Physicians for a National Health Program that "supports a national single payer health program") and Dr. Dean Ornish (the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and a medical editor at The Huffington Post blog)) who are on the same panel with him support the government control of health but want to take it further. CNN's Wolf Blitzer sits in for King and "moderates" the absurd "debate."

Scheiner, who is FOR the U.S. conversion to a "single-payer health care" apparatus, goes into defense mode for his precious "one-size-does-not-fit-all" policy, saying the following:

DR. DAVID SCHEINER: Well, you know, the question is, right now there are 89 representatives in the House, in, uh, the House that support single-payer. Sixty percent of physicians support, uh, single-payer. My organization, there are 16,000 physicians who are fighting for single-payer. The question is I don't think the public has adequately been informed as to what single payer is. It has been so demonized. Medicare works! Now why is Medicare expensive? Because it takes care of old, sick people. If it were universal, the costs would be spread out. If the administrative costs were lower, they, they...we would be able to afford it. I don't know why people are so frightened. A national health insurance doesn't mean that we have socialized medicine. We have private doctors. Free choice! Patients do not have free choice today. They have to go to the doctor; their insurance company says. They have to go the hospital, the laboratory. The medication constantly changes, because they tell us it's not in their formula. I want the public to have freedom of choice single payer gives them.

This nonsense that Medicare "works" is like saying the U.S. Post Office "works." It is so inefficient and bureaucratic and saturated with globs of red tape that doctors, registered nurses (RNs), and other medical practitioners are forced to comply with that the costs of Medicare are going through the roof. Plus, Medicare underpays doctors, who either quit the profession because they can't pay for the costs of their overhead or they are forced to spread the costs to their other patients who aren't on Medicare. Yeah, Medicare is "working" all right.

His claim here is enough to break out into laughter: "Now why is Medicare expensive? Because it takes care of old, sick people." No, Dr. Scheiner, it's not the reason why Medicare is breaking the bank. It's cost prohibitive because the agency coerces physicians to charge the highest amount to their customers (just as the private insurers do, as mandated by federal rules and guidelines) and it's in the red because it spends more on tax revenues than it takes in. Plus, it incentivizes the elderly to use the program more than they would; thus, the service mandated by government is, through the forces of the government-created market, rationed, and the demand for Medicare by the seniors exceed the supplies available to provide for them. That's WHY it is so expensive.

Here's the entire clip for people to enjoy:



[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles and the Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity website.]

The Health Care Protesters and the Town Hall Meetings

The highly-publicized behavior of many of the town hall protesters, who object to Obama's "health care reform" (it's not a reform, but a government boondoggled engineered to convert the already-socialized health care system to a carbon copy apparatus of Massachusetts' "single-payer health care" system), should be viewed with disdain, simply because of their unruly and uncivilized behavior at these events. It's one thing to be outraged by the provisions of the 1,000-plus page bill, which includes globs of ominous sections (one of them giving the Secretary of the Department of HHS very vague and very undefined powers); it's another to level shouting matches, ad hominems, and personal attacks at the politicians and bureaucrats who obviously are not telling their constituents the entire truth about the bloated legislation.

Let's take Senator Claire McCaskill's appearance at a Hillsboro district meeting in Jefferson County, Missouri on August 11, 2009 for example. McCaskill, a socialist Democrat from the state, publicly declares that there won't be a "single-payer health care" bill passed in Congress. She also claims that members of Congress are not going along with the idea and that it's not on the table, although the bulk of the members of the audience are convinced otherwise. Watch the following YouTube clip that showcases how the audience members act towards the senator:



The next clip is not so clear at all. It unveils two purportedly disruptive black women who allegedly caused a commotion at the same event, and you can see an irate McCaskill shouting out to the women, who were being forcefully removed by the local police in attendance:



While it's not entirely clear what the "disruption" was all about, the women in the audience were not unruly at all and did not appear to be that way, except for the members of the audience there. If the women were "disruptive," what about the attendees? Weren't many of them being "disruptive" at all? Why wasn't the entire room cleared out if that were the case? Why the selective removal of certain people from what it appears to be more of a health care rally for McCaskill than a town hall meeting?

The two women shouldn't have been removed at all, and were not even disruptive at all. But even if they were, does that justify their removal from the room? One would think not.

The attitudes of the protesters that encourage some of the flaming emotions running wild at these events should not be condoned, although I sympathize and empathize with these people and how they feel. These angry emotions are epitomized at the following CNN video clip of Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA)'s uproarious town hall event:



The man who walks away from Specter after excoriating him in front of the audience members and the cameras screams furiously, "I'm leaving!" Then Specter, with great arrogance and smugness, responds with the following statement: "Ok, ok, ok, we just, uh, we just had, uh, we just a demonstration of democracy. Ok?" The idiocy of the "demonstration of democracy" argument can be argued for another day, so I won't waste the space on this blog post refuting Specter's ludicrous quip. This is hardly the time and place for it, so I will blog about that at a later time.

Here's the full CNN clip of some of the other members demanding Specter to "leave us alone," which includes a 35-year-old conservative Republican woman taking her potshots at the senator:



I have a suggestion for these individuals: calm down. Take some deep breaths. Blind anger and inability to reason is going to make you look not only bad on camera but also to the masses at large. While I concur with you that Obama's "health care reform" is a travesty (not to mention immensely terrible), flaring tempers and having meltdowns in front of your elected officials are not going to bring people, especially those who are undecided on the health care issue, to your side. Repeating unfounded rumors that you may have heard on the internet or on the radio isn't going to score you brownie points; it'll just turn people away from your talking points. All you're doing is alienating yourselves from those who might be persuaded to hear your side of the aisle. Just simply make the moral, philosophical, and economic case against government control and expansion of medical care. Nothing harms the cause of human liberty more than any of the childish and absurd claptrap I've exemplified.

All of that being said, that doesn't mean Specter, McCaskill, and the other Democratic lawmakers get a free "get-out-of-jail" card from the political beatings. The critics of the protesters -- those who want to sustain the current status quo of government-controlled, government-regulated, government-coddled, and government-subsidized health care (although currently it's a corporatized system) and want to extend it further -- are out of line because of their pathetically and ludicrously smug and arrogant sandbagging and smearing of the citizens who oppose the so-called reform bill. As Sheldon Richman recently and correctly opined in his Anything Peaceful blog post (which inspired this blog post about the matter):

Why would anyone have confidence in an 1,000-page-plus piece of legislation, obscurely written, that would give not-fully-defined powers to the secretary of Health and Human Services?

Why should anyone trust these thugs? What have Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, Henry Waxman, and the entire U.S. House of Representatives (except for Ron Paul) and the U.S. Senate done for us lately (other than destroying our liberties behind our backs) and for our freedoms (they couldn't careless about them)? What makes them so special and unique? What, is it because they've got cute-and-cuddly legislative powers and we don't? How can they be representing us when they are only representing their special interests (particularly the ones who crafted the health care plan, despite what Congressman John Dingell of Michigan says; he only sponsored it and not wrote it)?

Sorry, but any attempt to dignify what these collectivistic crooks do with our stolen goods (in other words, our hard-earned money) need to look in the mirror and take a long look. Let's not forget that this oppressive and vile statist government to which we are subjected did not start with Obama.

Those who are ecstatic about the bill (like my socialistic Democratic brother Brian, for example) need to get their heads out of their behinds.

[Cross-posted at The Freeman Chronicles and The Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity website.]

A Free Keene Blogger Pens An Open Letter to Sam Dodson's Arresting Officer

Meg McLain, FreeKeene.com's new blogger and a new, aspiring filmmaker, pens an outstanding open letter to Keene Police Department Lt. Peter Thomas, who arrested Sam Dodson on the charge of driving a vehicle with a suspended license moments after Dodson's July 31 appearance at the Keene District Court.

Here's the letter in its entirety:

Dear Peter Thomas,

This is Meg, from the Keene area activist group. I am writing to you because I believe anger is the gateway to violence, and I want none of it in my life. I’m sure you can understand the fact that someone in my position would be angry; however, you may not understand my views that led me to that point.

First off, I know many police officers, and I don’t believe you are bad people (or ‘monsters’, as you said). Sure, there are bad apples in the bunch; but for many of you, the current system has raised you to believe that enforcing the law keeps people safe from harm, and that is commendable. However, because those who make the laws have lost sight of the concepts of real safety, liberty, personal responsibility, and compassion, and instead turned their focus on power and money, it is the police that must take on the burden of being the ugly face of the lawmaker’s oppression. It is not you I am mad at; however, I am not impressed by your willingness to hurt peaceful people because “that’s your job”. I know it’s not your choice what laws are put in place; however, it is your responsibility as a peace officer to protect people from harm. If the lawmakers are setting up rules that hurt people who have not caused injury or damage to another, wouldn’t it be logical to expect you to protect us from their aggression?

Sam has never caused, or even threatened to cause harm to anyone. I’ve traveled the world, and have never found such a beautiful and compassionate person. I understand his actions may annoy you; but he does those things from a position of love for those who suffer, not hate of the corruption that causes that suffering. That goes for all of us. People driven by hate don’t have the passion that love gives us, so they will always fail. I’m not saying it’s easy… we all get mad. But I am able to pull back, remember the love i have been given by the most amazing person in my life, my Grandfather; and I am once again at peace, ready and willing to share that love with everyone… especially you.

Fact is, I need you on our side. You have accepted the responsibility of protecting us, so it saddens me when i see you unknowingly fail.

Two years ago, I was assaulted and stabbed. I’ve never seen efforts to catch the violent people who attacked me that day; yet twice now, i’ve seen Sam hauled off with his hands bound behind his back. I can’t help but wonder, “Why?”. Is it because people like Sam are easier for you to catch? I don’t want to believe that “justice” is based on laziness. But when I see you wasting time enforcing nonsense when I know violence is continuing unpursued, it leaves me to feel the exact opposite of what I should. I don’t feel protected by police, I feel threatened by them. It is my challenge to you to prove me wrong. Know that you are beautiful. I’m sure it was that beauty which drove you to become a police officer, because you care about your fellow man. Once you see that in yourself, let it come through in your work. I have faith that you can do this. Just ask yourself this simple question while performing your job:

“Who am I protecting?”

Are you protecting another person from harm? Who? Are you only protecting the system? Then who are you saving? If the system requires you to hurt, harass, kidnap, and cage someone, and you can’t place a face or name on the victim of their “crime”… then shouldn’t you recognize the system to be the criminal? It’s hard, I know. But learn to act from love, not from ‘authority’, and you can become a leader in the change to a peaceful society… and a hero to millions.

I thank you for your willingness to talk openly with us. I apologize for anything I’ve said or done to make you believe I hold anything but love and compassion for you, your friends, and family. You are not a monster. You may do things I believe are monstrous; and for that, I forgive you. No matter how long it takes you to stop these acts, I will continue to forgive you. And whenever you are ready to stop committing crimes against peaceful people on behalf of the lawmakers, I will be waiting for you to join my family with open arms.

In Peace,
Meg McLain

[H/T to Meg McLain for her posting of the letter on FreeKeene.com.]

[Cross-posted to The Freeman Chronicles and the Peace, Freedom, and Prosperity website.]