Thought for the day

Mark Steyn - April 14, 2012 What’s Your Plan?
"The “Buffett Rule” is just another pathetic sleight of hand.A-hem. According to the Congressional Budget Office (the same nonpartisan bean-counters who project that on Obama’s current spending proposals the entire U.S. economy will cease to exist in 2027) Obama’s Buffett Rule will raise — stand well back — $3.2 billion per year. Or what the United States government currently borrows every 17 hours. So in 514 years it will have raised enough additional revenue to pay off the 2011 federal budget deficit. If you want to mark it on your calendar, 514 years is the year 2526. There’s a sporting chance Joe Biden will have retired from public life by then, but other than that I’m not making any bets."

My Letter to Mitt Romney

The news people are saying that your campaign is bungling up everything. You are too sqishy. I watch the news everyday and I have noticed that the news will only bring up the "sqishy" parts of your speech and not the other Reaganesk types of speeches you are most likely giving. We all want you to come out with a simple plan like Obama has (The Buffet Rule) We need you to be bold and say something like "The Reagan Plan" (or come up with your own). """We are going to cut spending, eliminate subsidies and loopholes, and cut taxes""" Be Bold. And if the liberals or anybody else fires back, you Don't be defensive but go on the offensive, state the Reagan plan will work and then say the Obama plan will NOT do a thing FOR America, it only pits one American against another. You need to call for unity and fairness for all Americans. Since Obama uses the Fair word, you should use it to your advantage also. It is only fair that we cut taxes for everyone. (And everyone should pay some taxes even if it is a dollar.) But my point is make your message simple and keep at it. Take a page from Herman Cain from his 9-9-9 plan. Did you notice that he always brought that up and kept at it? Get that Reaganesk message and go out and be strong about it. People will get used to it. Basically, quit being "squishy". You may feel that you are saying the same thing all the time (like Herman Cain was teased about his always talking about his 9-9-9, but at least that is what they were talking about him) but that is the only way to get your message on the TV news. But you need to be bold and only give them that kind of talk. I look forward to you winning this Race against Obama!!

Obama's vieled threat to the Supreme Court

Obama's words with my commentary

Obama "And I think it's important - and I think the American people understand, and I think the justices should understand that in the absence of an individual mandate, you cannot have a mechanism to ensure that people with pre-existing conditions can actually get health care."

Me "I think that it's important that the american people should not be forced to pay for anything."

Obama "So there's - there's not only an economic element and a legal element to this, but there's a human element to this. And I hope that's not forgotten in this political debate."

Me "The debate should not be about people, it is about the constitutionality of Obamacare. The liberals are so set on Social justice that they have ripped up the constitution and have replaced it with Socialists policies. That is not what the Founding Fathers wanted for our country."

Obama "Ultimately, I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Me "There was not a strong majority of the democratically elected Congress. None of the republicans voted for it and there were democrats who also voted against it, our Utah congresman Mattheson was one because he had alot of pressure from his constituents. Besides it would not be an unprecidented step. There have been other times in the course of our 200 years as a Nation"

Obama "And I'd just remind conservative commentators that for years what we've heard is the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint, that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example. And I'm pretty confident that this - this court will recognize that and not take that step."

Me "I was flabergasted that he would say that the Supreme Court is an unelected group of people. Of course they are, they is in the constitution, but Obama makes it sound like it is bad. People tell me that Obama was a Constitutional teacher at some college. What was he teaching? What constitution was he teaching? Obama is sounding like a king giving orders. That is scary!"

Thomas Sowell talks about the Filburn court case and how it could affect the Supreme Court in the case of Obamacare

"When a 1942 Supreme Court decision that most people never heard of makes the front page of the New York Times in 2012, you know that something unusual is going on.

What makes that 1942 case - Wickard v. Filburn - important today is that it stretched the federal government's power so far that the Obama administration is using it as an argument to claim before today's Supreme Court that it has the legal authority to impose ObamaCare mandates on individuals.

Roscoe Filburn was an Ohio farmer who grew some wheat to feed his family and some farm animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture fined him for growing more wheat than he was allowed to grow under the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938, which was passed under Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce.

Filburn pointed out that his wheat wasn't sold, so it didn't enter any commerce, interstate or otherwise. Therefore the federal government had no right to tell him how much wheat he grew on his own farm, and which never left his farm.

The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution says that all powers not explicitly given to the federal government belong to the states or to the people. So you might think that Filburn was right. But the Supreme Court said otherwise. Even though the wheat on Filburn's farm never entered the market, just the fact that "it supplies a need of the man who grew it which would otherwise be reflected by purchases in the open market" meant that it affected interstate commerce. So did the fact that the home-grown wheat could potentially enter the market.

The implications of this kind of reasoning reached far beyond farmers and wheat. Once it was established that the federal government could regulate not only interstate commerce itself, but anything with any potential effect on interstate commerce, the Tenth Amendment's limitations on the powers of the federal government virtually disappeared.

Over the years, "interstate commerce" became magic words to justify almost any expansion of the federal government's power, in defiance of the Tenth Amendment. That is what the Obama administration is depending on to get today's Supreme Court to uphold its power to tell people that they have to buy the particular health insurance specified by the federal government.

There was consternation in 1995 when the Supreme Court ruled that carrying a gun near a school was not interstate commerce. That conclusion might seem like only common sense to most people, but it was a close 5 to 4 decision, and it sparked outrage when the phrase "interstate commerce" failed to work its magic in justifying an expansion of the federal government's power.

The 1995 case involved a federal law forbidding anyone from carrying a gun near a school. The states all had the right to pass such laws, and most did, but the issue was whether the federal government could pass such a law under its power to regulate interstate commerce.

The underlying argument was similar to that in the 1942 case of Wickard v. Filburn: School violence can affect education, which can affect productivity, which can affect interstate commerce.

The power to regulate indirect effects is not a slippery slope. It is the disastrous loss of freedom that lies at the bottom of a slippery slope."

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305.

My Thoughts: Does that mean that if I am growing my own food in my garden that I would be affecting interstate commerce? How about those that get abortions? They are affecting interstate commerce by killing a potential tax payer who would be helping the economy in helping the interstate commerce!! This should go to court!! Forget about what the woman's right, its all about interstate commerce!!