A federal judge in Florida on Thursday said he will allow some of the lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the health care law to proceed — and criticized Democrats for making an “Alice in Wonderland” argument to defend the law.

U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson allowed two major counts to proceed: the states’ challenge to the controversial requirement that nearly all Americans buy insurance and a required expansion of the Medicaid program.

In his ruling, Vinson criticized Democrats for seeking to have it both ways when it comes to defending the mandate to buy insurance. During the legislative debate, Republicans chastised the proposal as a new tax on the middle class. Obama defended the payment as a penalty and not a tax, but the Justice Department has argued that legally, it’s a tax.

“Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing, after which the defenders of that legislation take an “Alice-in-Wonderland” tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely, thereby circumventing the safeguard that exists to keep their broad power in check,” he wrote.

Vinson ruled that it’s a penalty, not a tax, and must be defended under the Commerce Clause and not Congress’s taxing authority.

A Dec. 16 trial date is planned in the lawsuit, brought by 20 state attorneys general and governors. Many legal experts expect it to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

This could be B.O.’s Schechter case [A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, 295 U.S. 495 (1935) that poked a stick in the spokes of the NRA (NOT the National Rifle Association!) and effectively gutted the early phase of the so-called New Deal of FDR.]

One can hope for an outcome that would clamp down of B.O.’s latest iteration of the progressive worship of bureaucracy and centralization of power as expressed by Obamascare.

Support for Obamacare continues to slip:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March.

Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%. Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

The new findings include 46% who Strongly Favor repeal of the health care bill and 25% who Strongly Oppose it.

While opposition to the bill has remained as consistent since its passage as it was beforehand, this marks the first time that support for repeal has climbed into the 60s. It will be interesting to see whether this marks a brief bounce or indicates a trend of growing opposition.

What happened to all those assertions from ObamaPelosiReid that once the bill passed and people knew what was in it that it would magically become popular? Oooops!

Chinese accused of vast trade in organs
Harvests come from religious dissidents

China’s hidden policy of executing prisoners of the forbidden quasi-Buddhist group Falun Gong and harvesting their organs for worldwide sale has been expanded to include Tibetans, “house church” Christians and Muslim Uighurs, human rights activists said Monday.

In a news conference on Capitol Hill, several speakers, including attorney David Matas of B’nai Brith Canada and Ethan Gutmann of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, said their investigations have unearthed a grisly trade in which an estimated 9,000 members of Falun Gong have been executed for their corneas, lungs, livers, kidneys and skins.

They likened the practice to the Nazi treatment of Jewish prisoners in World War II concentration camps, which included using them for sadistic medical experiments and taking the gold fillings from the teeth of corpses.

The newest wrinkle, they said, is that organs from other religious prisoners — specifically dissidents from China’s Christian, Muslim and Tibetan Buddhist communities — are also being harvested to satisfy an insatiable global demand.

“These groups are useless to the state,” Mr. Gutmann said. “They are toxic, so you can’t release them. But they’re worth a great deal of money in terms of their organs.”

Organs from just one person can fetch a total of $100,000 on the worldwide market, he added.

Remember the investigations on corporations who were in bed with the Nazis?

So what about the same or worse with the ChiComs…or is a business one that’s deemed “too big to fail”?

President Obama’s health care overhaul law will increase the nation’s health care tab instead of bringing costs down, government economic forecasters concluded Thursday in a sobering assessment of the sweeping legislation.

A report by economic experts at the Health and Human Services Department said the health care remake will achieve Obama’s aim of expanding health insurance — adding 34 million Americans to the coverage rolls.

But the analysis also found that the law falls short of the president’s twin goal of controlling runaway costs. It also warned that Medicare cuts may be unrealistic and unsustainable, driving about 15% of hospitals into the red and “possibly jeopardizing access” to care for seniors.

The mixed verdict for Obama’s signature issue is the first comprehensive look by neutral experts.

Surprise, surprise, surprise!

Not.

Same healthcare arguments, just decades earlier

…to serve as the public face of its campaign against a government-sponsored health plan, the AMA chose none other than Ronald Reagan, the star of “General Electric Theater” and former president of the Screen Actors Guild whose views on politics matched its own.

Warning that enacting Medicare would lead to socialism in America, Reagan said that if Americans did not stop Medicare reform, “one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in America when men were free.”

In an 11-minute recording for the AMA, Reagan invoked the name of Norman Thomas, the Socialist Party presidential candidate, saying:

“Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program. . . . One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. . . .

“Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration, it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.”

Reagan’s prescription? “Write to our congressmen and senators,” he said. “The key issue is this: We do not want socialized medicine . . . demand the continuation of our traditional free-enterprise system.”

Sound familiar?

Note to critical readers: it’s not the Chief that is labeling universal health care as socialist…it’s the proudly socialist Norman Thomas making the point. If you want to argue, take it to him yourself!

Congress clears historic health care bill

Summoned to success by President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled Congress approved historic legislation Sunday night extending health care to tens of millions of uninsured Americans and cracking down on insurance company abuses, a climactic chapter in the century-long quest for near universal coverage.

Widely viewed as dead two months ago, the Senate-passed bill cleared the House on a 219-212 vote. Republicans were unanimous in opposition, joined by 34 dissident Democrats.

SO…what will we REALLY get? (Besides inevitable national bankruptcy!)

Obamacare Means 159 New Gov’t Agencies

Oh, joy…just what we need. (NOT!)

The new government agencies that will be created as the result of Obamacare will worsen the quality of American medical care by restricting physicians and hospitals to use their best judgment, according to Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., a physician and chairman of the Republican Study Committee.

In fact, he says, the bill would create 159 new governemnt agencies to regulate insurance and medical care for Americans.

In Churchillian terms this will not be the end of the debate…it’s not the beginning of the end…it’s the end of the beginning.

Hatch Says It’s ’Nuts’ to Think House Vote Ends Health Issue

Republican Senator Orrin Hatch said Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives are “nuts” to think tomorrow’s vote on health-care legislation will resolve the issue.

If the measure passes, Senate Republicans have enough votes on at least two points of order to alter the measure and send it back to the House for a second round of votes, Hatch said in an interview on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt,” airing this weekend.

“If those people think they’re only going to vote on this once, they’re nuts,” Hatch said as House Democratic leaders rounded up support before the scheduled vote on President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority.

“Any stick will do when you want to beat a snake.”

“The Early Show” co-anchor Harry Smith is scheduled to have a colonoscopy Wednesday, with live reports planned as he undergoes the procedure at a New York hospital.

CBS says it will be the first time an anchor has had a colonoscopy live on network television.

How unfortunate – both for them and for us.

Sen. Thune, to his credit, is leading out in the Senate opposition to Obamascare:

Thune: GOP preparing to slow or block health bill in Senate debate

Republicans are preparing to raise points of order and other roadblocks to the healthcare bill, a member of the Senate GOP leadership said Tuesday evening.

Like the African proverb says: “Any stick will do when you have to beat a snake.”

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the fourth-ranking Senate Republican who serves as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, said the GOP is prepared for a number of scenarios in which they would seek to slow down or halt passage of healthcare legislation once it comes back before the Senate.

“I still think it creates a lot of problems when it comes back to the Senate because there will be lots of points of order that will lie against the bill in the Senate, and obviously, we will, hopefully, have the opportunity to raise some of those,” Thune said of the health bill during an appearance on Fox News.

Obama Now Selling Judgeships for Health Care Votes

Tonight, Barack Obama will host ten House Democrats who voted against the health care bill in November at the White House; he’s obviously trying to persuade them to switch their votes to yes. One of the ten is Jim Matheson of Utah. The White House just sent out a press release announcing that today President Obama nominated Matheson’s brother Scott M. Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.

After the “Louisiana Purchase”, the Cornhusker Kickback”, and the Union exemption one had to wonder if there was any way for the abuse of Presidential power in the interest of partisan politics could be even more flagrent. Now we know. The Answer is yes. What’s next? More of the “Chicago Way” of business:

Barack Obama: I’ll steamroll health reforms through Congress

President Obama declared for the first time yesterday that he was prepared to steamroller his troubled health reform legislation through Congress with only Democratic support; a move Republicans denounced as the “nuclear option”.

Signalling that his patience had snapped after a year-long fight, Mr Obama laid the ground for Democrats in Congress to muscle the Bill through using a high-risk legislative manoeuvre known as reconciliation, which overrides a Republican filibuster. Although he did not use the word “reconciliation”, Mr Obama made it clear that that was the route he intended to take.

Democrats will, as a result, be able to get the health reform package through the Senate with a simple majority. Mr Obama’s party ceded their 60-stong majority in the upper chamber after losing the late Teddy Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat in January.

That shock defeat was due, in large part, to growing public hostility to Mr Obama’s health reforms, which many see as too expensive at a time of soaring deficits. Ramming the Bill through Congress is, therefore, a high-risk strategy that Republicans vowed to exploit.

In short, straight out of the progressive playbook: “Screw you people…you’re obviously too stupid to know what’s good for you, so I, as the leader, will drag you into the future whether you like it or not!”

Included in President Oba ma’s latest stab at health-care reform released yesterday is one of the more astonishing admissions of political deception in recent memory.

After months of swearing that his health legislation would lower the skyrocketing costs of insurance premiums, Obama finally acknowledged that actually it would not.

So, instead, he has included a new provision that can simply outlaw premium increases his administration deems “unreasonable and unjustified.”

This, in lieu of literally years of promises and proclamations about transforming the American hospital-industrial complex in a way that would drastically lower the cost of medicine in this country and leave insurance companies scrambling to lower the premiums they charge customers.

During his campaign, Obama flatly promised to lower families’ health-insurance premiums by $2,500 every year.

Then, after he ascended to the throne, Obama repeatedly insisted without any reservations that all the health-care alchemy inspired by him would magically lower those premiums.

Even in the face of congressional accountants who repeatedly raised doubts about those promises, Obama insisted.

Now the comes the truth.

There are more gory details in the original article…

Hmmmm. Isn’t there an account of an ancient Brit king named Knut (later Anglicized to Canute) who tried to change reality by proclamation?   I seem to recall it didn’t work very well .

Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams will undergo heart surgery later this week in the United States.

Deputy premier Kathy Dunderdale confirmed the treatment at a news conference Tuesday, but would not reveal the location of the operation or how it would be paid for.

“He has gone to a renowned expert in the procedure that he needs to have done,” said Ms. Dunderdale, who will become acting premier while Mr. Williams is away for three to 12 weeks. “In consultation with his own doctors, he’s decided to go that route.”

Mr. Williams’ decision to leave Canada for the surgery has raised eyebrows over his apparent shunning of Canada’s health-care system.

APPARENT shunning…? It looks pretty definite to me!

“It was never an option offered to him to have this procedure done in this province,” said Ms. Dunderdale, refusing to answer whether the procedure could be done elsewhere in Canada.

Now THAT’S a statement to parse. Was it an option available but not offered, or one not offered due to beign not available in the province, or in the country for that matter?

In either case, there’s not exactly an impressive showcase for nationalized health care.