Socialized Healthcare, Here We Come!
So Pelosi finally found the votes to pass ObamaCare in the House, and I think it’s reasonable to expect the Senate to ratify along party lines, so hooray for us, our healthcare system is finally reformed! Even better, it will save us money, lower taxes for Democratic voters, improve health care quality, and pay down the deficit. What’s not to like (unless you’re one of those godless insurance companies)?
Apologists of this latest scheme will hasten to point out it’s not, strictly speaking, “government run” healthcare. That’s true, inasmuch as it’s actually government mandated, government funded, government regulated health care provided by nominally private insurance carriers and medical facilities. But don’t worry, we’ll have so much fun suckling at this teat that a “public option” won’t be far behind, after which we can finally put the last nail in the coffin of the evil insurance industry.
For those such as myself who believe strongly in the American founding principles of individual liberty and specifically enumerated Federal power, this is a dark day. The Democrats in Congress, without a single Republican vote, have rammed through a health care bill which inserts the Federal government and its already-strained coffers inextricably into the health care industry at every level, in clear defiance of both our Constitution and the will of the American people. This is an entitlement we cannot afford (financial legerdemain notwithstanding) which will increase the cost of our care, reduce the quality of care we receive, and grow in power and cost beyond our ability to foresee. The Democrats have done their country a grave disservice, and I hope they pay dearly at the polls.
Decimating their legislative ranks won’t unfuck us from our current predicament, but it will provide some temporary catharsis before the worst of the tax increases and rationing kick in. In the spirit of taking what I can when I can, I’ll focus my attention there this November. As I promised the Virginia Senate delegation back in December, if you’re a politician in Virginia and would like money and time from me to help you win, here’s all you have to do:
- Identify a member of the Virginia congressional delegation, House or Senate, who cast a ‘yay’ vote on either the Senate or House healthcare bill or in conference committee
- Run against that member for his/her seat
- State as one of your policy positions that ObamaCare is an extra-constitutional power grab bought with money we don’t have, and that you will make it a priority to kill it, water it down, undermine it, discredit it, or throw a shoe at it
That’s it! But wait, there’s more!
If you’re a politician interested in a House or Senate seat outside of VA, there might be some money in it for you too! Same deal as the VA politicians, but I don’t have enough money to support the campaigns of every possible opponent of every Democrat asshat on Congress, so find one who’s believed to be vulnerable and let me know; if I think he/she is vulnerable as well, then presto! Money’s on its way. Bonus if you’re running against that gullible fuckstick Bart Stupak.
Finally, let me suggest some cool fundraising ideas:
- Tar’n'feather dinner. It’s like a regular fundraising dinner, only a random drawing of your Gold and Platinum contributors selects three lucky guests who get to tar and feather an effigy of either Pelosi, Reid, or Obama.
- Phonebook Congress. Set up a campaign website and Facebook page for ‘Random Name from Phonebook’ to run against your opponent. Coordinate a money bomb. Show that statist asshole just how despised he/she is. You can even keep the proceeds for your own campaign warchest
- Pitchfork mob. Get a bunch of supporters together and storm your opponents’ office armed with pitchforks and torches. I’m kidding. Sort of. But not really.
There you have it. There’s a ton of money to be made on this thing, even if you’re not a Democratic congresstard.
Carry in National Parks is a go!
I just read in the latest VA-ALERT that VCDL’s hard work (and, certainly, that of other RKBA organizations, not the least of which being the NRA) have finally paid off, with the Department of Interior adopting rules which will permit concealed carry within national parks under the same rules applied to state parks in the state where the national park is located. This is huge for me, as I won’t go to national parks and be disarmed.
Congrats to VCDL and everyone else who worked on this. Another victory for RKBA; let’s hope The Lightbringer’s Secretary of Interior doesn’t roll this back!
Is it cynical to be bummed about Obama's victory?
Last night watching the returns in a bar that insisted on tuning to CNN, the expert panel was running a circle jerk about the awesomeness of the occasion, and I’ve heard repeated at least a couple times now that you’d have to be really cynical to not feel pride at American’s “accomplishment”, that is to say, electing our first black president. Maybe it’s my bitter clinging to guns and religion, but I don’t feel any pride.
I know, failure to support The Messiah constitutes PC “racism”, but to my mind a real racist is someone who dislikes others based on race. I do not. I didn’t vote against Obama because he’s black. I voted against him because I disagree with nearly every policy position (or, more typically, implied policy position divined from his vague, soaring rhetoric) he has taken.
I already knew American had moved on from our racist past. I already knew a smart, hard-working black man could succeed in this country. I didn’t need to elect Obama to prove it to myself. So I’m not proud. I’m not happy. I’m not hopeful. I’m scared.
The fight for freedom against all forms of tyranny never ends, of course. It sure as hell didn’t end under Bush, and it would not have ended under McCain. But sometimes the fight feels like it’s going your way, and other times it doesn’t. This is one of those other times, and it sucks. If that makes me a cynic, then so be it.
I guess we're fucked now
Well, Obama has won the presidency, and the dems have tightened their hold on Congress. The next few years will not be good for American liberty.
It’s tempting at times like these to say things like “America as I knew it is dead” or “This is the end of America”. I’m hopeful that’s not true. The Messiah and Congressional Democrats have made alot of promises they can’t keep, and I suspect the HopeChange(tm) crowd will move on to another fad once the shine wears off. When the gun bans start to fly, the Democrats in moderate states will start to feel the heat, and I suspect tax increases won’t make any friends either. Here’s hoping we have another Jimmy Carter, and not another FDR.
If you aren’t set for guns and ammo yet, you’re too late. The panic buying will be epic. You were warned.
Thoughts on the Presidential Election
I’ve not posted anything on the 2008 Presidential race, since plenty of others have stated my positions better than I could. Those who know my politics shouldn’t be surprised to learn that I voted for McCain/Palin. My objections to The Messiah are manifold, but chief among them are:
- Barack Obama will ban guns. I don’t care what he told you to get you to vote for him; he’s a liberal anti-gun politician with a liberal anti-gun Congress. I expect a ban on private sales of firearms and a new Assault Weapons Ban within the first year. Depending upon how much hysteria the media can drum up with regard to violent crime, I expect to see at least an attempt to restrict concealed carry at the federal level, and attempts at ammunition bans/taxes and microstamping bills. If you believed the partisan MSM and Obama fellow travelers, well, you’re an idiot. A vote for Obama is a vote for gun control, period.
- Barack Obama will raise taxes. I realize he said he’d cut taxes for 105% of the workforce and only soak the super rich who can afford it, but that is not true. Yes, he’ll try to pay for some of his runaway social programs by cutting the military budget to the bone, but that only goes so far. Barack will make sure you pay your “fair share”.
- Barack Obama will grow the size and power of the Federal government much more than McCain would. As a libertarian I despise the power and girth of the Federal government; under Barack it will be bigger, more powerful, and more wasteful.
- Barack Obama will pack the Federal courts with liberal judges. With a filibuster-proof Senate, he can appoint as many of his nutjob far left pals he wants. Maybe Bill Ayers won’t get a circuit court seat, but you can be damn sure some of his ideological peers will make the cut. After four years of Obama SCOTUS appointments, we’ll learn all sorts of things about the Constitution we didn’t know before.
- Barack Obama will preserve Roe v. Wade. The SCOTUS decisions discovering a heretofore unknown Constitutional right to privacy lurking amidst the emanations and penumbras of the Constitution, and the Constitutional right to an abortion that implies, are among the most egregious activist contortions of the Constitution in the least hundred years. There is no Constitutional right to an abortion, and the Federal government has no Constitutional power to either guarantee or restrict access to abortions. It’s a states issue. Under Barack Obama’s larger and more powerful Federal government, states’ issues will be Federal issues.
- Barack Obama will undermine our security. His policy of open dialog with the most vile regimes on the planet, combined with a flat-out refusal to use military force, will make us a little less unpopular in Paris, and weaken us considerably in the eyes of our enemies. Joe Biden and I agree on this: the Ahmedinejads and Kim Jong-Ils of the world will start to probe the fences to see what they can get away with. Future terrorist attacks will be treated as law enforcement matters, with the occasional cruise missle if the plebs need a distraction from domestic politics.
- Barack Obama will reduce our freedom. He is a statist liberal politician, who is unlikely to resist attempts by his statist liberal Congress to expand the role of the Federal government into our everyday lives, on matters ranging from healthcare to Internet access.
- Barack Obama will kick our economy in the balls. Repeal the Bush tax cuts, raise capital gains taxes, impose yet more regulation on the capital markets, all in the name of ‘fairness’ and ‘spreading the wealth’. And just wait until you learn the sort of sacrifices Barack will demand of you in the name of saving us from Global Warming.
Don’t get me wrong. John McCain is the Giant Douche to Obama’s Turd Sandwich. I hated McCain for the McCain-Feingold First Amendment Reduction Act of 2001, and his attempts to ban the private sale of firearms. However, McCain is less bad than Obama, particularly given that a Democratic stranglehold on the Congress seems inevitable. If Obama wins, I expect a long, cold winter watching our treasured freedoms eroded for “the children”, “fairness”, “common sense”, and whatever other bullshit rationalizations the Democrats and their media allies can come up with.
Many of my friends and coworkers are voting for Obama. Some of them because they disagree with me on my policy positions, such that Obama’s politics are theirs. I can respect that, as I have strongly-held policy positions myself. I understand if you hate the Iraq war, Gitmo, the PATRIOT act, civilian gun ownership, lower taxes, private healthcare, and deregulation. I get that you support punitive Federal environmental regulations and redistributive tax policies and a powerful central government. I disagree, strongly in many cases, but that’s democracy.
What I hate, though, and what I have a real hard time understanding, are the so-called Rationally Ignorant voters. The type who hear things about Hope(tm) and Change(tm) and how much better it’ll be once The Chosen One is elected, without stopping to ask critical questions like how it will work or what the policies will look like or what it will cost. When America is no more (and realistically, the United States are not exempt from the inexorable rise and fall of great powers, though hopefully I won’t live to see the end) I suspect it will be undone by an unholy alliance of exceptionally evil, exceptionally corrupt political tyrants, and the gullible fucktards who vote for them in return for the vague promise of bread and circuses.
If you’re one of the Rationally Ignorant voting for whichever asshole offers the most uplifting rhetoric and the most bountiful of promises, I HATE you. You are the bug in our otherwise solid system of government. You’re the bastard against whom no number of checks and balances can hedge. You’re the fuckwit who deserves neither security nor liberty. And I leave you with words Samuel Adams penned with you in mind over two hundred years ago:
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!
God save us. I think we’re going to need saving.
Voted in the most important presidential election since the last one
I voted today at Herndon Middle School. I arrived at 5:55 AM (UGH!), waited an hour in a line that spanned the entire length of the school, and voted with a paper ballot (there was no extra wait for paper, amazingly). VA has electronic machines which they’re phasing out, but the vast majority of voters just stood in the electronic voting line. I don’t trust the current crop of electronic voting machines, and I don’t much trust the optical paper ballot scanner either, but I figure it takes more effort to steal an election with a paper trail, so why make it easy?
Maybe it’s the time I went, but compared to ’04 this was a breeze. In the ’04 elections I waited three hours in line that was about as long as the one I waited in today. Maybe the county election officials have improved their workflows or something.
I’ll be watching tonight’s returns with a mix of anticipation and horror. I’m stocked up on full capacity mags, but I always need more guns and ammo. The panic buying if The Messiah (peace be upon him) wins will distort prices badly upward.
Action item for the VA general assembly: Open up early and absentee ballots to everyone. We can’t all have cushy government jobs with ample time to vote.
Way to go Ireland. Britain, you suck.
Two unrelated but nonetheless telling bits of information came to me today.
First, the Irish, being as they are not team players, just had to run the Lisbon Treaty past their citizens, even though every other EU nation was smart enough to limit the decision to their respective elite Eurocrats. It turns out the Irish, upon reflection, aren’t too keen on ceding their remaining sovereignty to Brussels, as the treaty ratification was voted down with extreme prejudice.
As an American, albeit an unusually politically active one, I don’t have a very firm grasp on European politics, but I can’t help but compare the EU with the formation of my own country back in the late 18th century. The thirteen colonies were all pretty independent, and our first attempt to organize into a nation, the Articles of Confederation, failed due to an excessive lack of cohesion. The successor document, the Constitution, attempted to balance the sovereignty of the colonies with the need for a central government to perform certain functions. Thus, the Federal model.
It seems to me the EU have made the opposite mistake, trying to centralize authority over nearly 500 million people in one place, eroding the sovereignty of its member nations incrementally. The French and Dutch voters shot down the EU treaty back in ’05, an experience which I must imagine informed the decision to skip the whole referendum thing this time around. The Irish seem particularly hostile to this latest consolidation of power, and I don’t blame them. I constantly bristle under the runaway size, scope, authority, and cost of our central government, and it (used to) be severely constrained by Constitutional limits, and still is today compared to the EU experiment.
Anyway, good on the Irish for standing up to Eurocrat elites and holding on to their country for a little longer.
Contrast this with the seemingly limitless supply of meddlesome statist chicanery streaming out of the UK. Last week is was the shocking revelation that gun bans don’t in fact lead criminals away from crime for want of a tool, but instead forces recourse to edged weapons. This week it’s even better; bans on hat-wearing.
It seems the Brits are working up to the ultimate homage to Orwell in the form of a perpetual live-action production of 1984, a component of which is their absurd Panopticon. One problem though; some assholes wear hats, which makes it harder for the CCTV cameras to get a good shot of their faces. Solution? Why, government diktat of course. New rule: you can’t wear hats in pubs. QED.
I have to wonder what could possibly be wrong with the people who gave us Blackstone, Churchill, and Thatcher, that they seem happy to return their hard-won democratic gains and descend once more into subjugation, for nothing more than some mumbled assurances of safety and the greater good. What the hell is wrong with these people, and what must we as Americans do to avoid ending up like them?
Not Thinking Forfeiture Anymore
A while back I noted the appallingly tone-deaf BATFE procurement of “Always Think Forfeiture” leatherman tools. Today I received an unsolicited email from the offices of Congressman Bill Sali of Idaho, containing a press release announcing Congressman Sali’s success persuading BATFE management to stop distributing the coveted “Always Think Forfeiture” Leathermans. I don’t know anything about Congressman Sali or his politics, but anyone who reality-checks the BATFE is OK in my book.
Dick Saslaw is a real..erm..dick!
Well, news of the open carry dinner has finally hit the AP wire. Considering it’s an AP story it’s astonishingly balanced, with no obvious bias either way. As usual, State Senator Dick “Banjo” Saslaw (D) was quoted in full Prick mode:
Saslaw said he’s not necessarily surprised that VCDL found restaurants in the region that would allow them to dine while armed. But he said that carrying guns is simply not normal behavior in this area.
“What normal person walks around with a gun on your hip? Something’s wrong in your life” if you feel compelled to carry a gun as part of your daily routine, he said.
So over 150,000 Virginians with concealed handgun permits are not “normal” and have something “wrong in [their] live[s]“? God, but that Saslaw is a real dick! Many of us at the dinner would rather not openly carry our guns for all the world to see, but politicians like Saslaw and Timmy Kaine force us to do so by refusing to pass a restaurant ban repeal.
To those of you in Saslaw’s district, can someone please explain what the hell you people see in this guy? Do you like that he repeatedly slanders one of the most law-abiding groups in the Commonwealth at a time when his party is trying desperately to shake the mantle of Gun Control? What were you thinking!?
VCDL Saslaw Dinner Went Well
Rebecca and I went to the VCDL’s Saslaw dinner today at Champp’s in Reston. Sadly, Senator Saslaw was unable to attend, but I suspect he’ll get the message anyway. Roughly 50 people showed up, openly carrying, and there were no police cars, helicopters overhead, or hysteria. In fact, it was downright boring.
It turns out the general manager at Champp’s is strongly pro-gun and welcomes open carry at his restaurant. He spoke to the group for a few moments and welcomed all of us back. I, for one, will never set foot in TGI Friday’s again; Champps will be my preferred casual dining facility now. As an added bonus, it’s just as close to my house, so I’m not even giving up anything.
UPDATE: News of the event hit the AP wire, complete with the requisite Saslaw-foot-in-mouth quote.
Now, here’s another cat/girl/gun pic:
and another
