The Right Lane Updated 2.07.13

The pursuit of Constitutionally grounded governance, free markets and individual liberty

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

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Under Obamacare, 7 Million Will Lose Their Employer-Based Health Insurance

Thanks to Obamacare, a CBO-estimated 7 million people will lose their employer-based health insurance, nearly twice the estimate that was released last year in August. How’s that for universal health care? And what happened to being able to keep the plan you’ve got if you like it? That’s what Obama promised a few years ago in July:

 “No matter how we reform health care, we will keep this promise:  If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period. If you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan. Period. No one will take it away. No matter what.”

The Affordable Care Act is expensive and will continue to contribute to rising health care costs. Many businesses will not be able to afford to comply with Obamacare’s mandates and will instead pay the less expensive penalties. This will leave many uninsured. On the bright side, all the penalties being paid by these businesses will help to raise revenue for the feds:

 “CBO said that this year’s tax cuts have changed the incentives for businesses and made it less attractive to pay for insurance, meaning fewer will decide to do so. Instead, they’ll choose to pay a penalty to the government, totaling $13 billion in higher fees over the next decade.”

This has been the plan all along. The government has created an economic environment that will continue to force people out of their private insurance plans and into a single payer system. And it won’t be Obama’s fault. He’ll claim that these people still had the “freedom of choice” to have their private insurance, but those greedy businesses chose not to provide coverage for their employees and instead opted to “maximize their profits.” It’s all the free market’s fault. So, once again, the government creates a problem to elicit a reaction from the public and then offers its “solution” to the problem that it created in the first place. They created the problem by imposing taxes, regulations and mandates that these businesses can’t afford, which causes people to lose their health insurance. But, the government will be there to save the day and offer them “free” health care.

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U.S. Gun Owners Outnumbered Hunters by 5 to 1 in 2011 By Patrick Burke

In 2011, gun owners in the United States outnumbered hunters by 5 to 1. There were 13.7 million hunters in the United States over age 16 -- 12.7 million of whom used rifles, shotguns or handguns for hunting, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. That means hunters constituted only 15.9 to 18.1 percent of the estimated 70-80 million gun owners in the U.S. in 2011 -- the latest year for which statistics are available. In a Dec. 28 national report, USF&W said 13.7 million individuals over age 16 self-identified as hunters, and that 12.7 million used guns (shotguns, rifles or handguns) while hunting. Another 2.9 million hunters used antique muzzleloaders to hunt, but according to USF&W, there is overlap between this figure and other figures due to self-reporting. Around 4.5 million hunted with bows and arrows.

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Scarborough Tears Into ‘American King’ Obama’s ‘Chilling’ Drone Strike Defense

"There are no checks and there are no balances. We can kill you. We can pick you out of a list and drop a bomb on you, and not only can we kill you, we can then kill your 16-year-old son who is not even affiliated with al Qaeda, and then we can blame it on the father for us having to kill the son.” Here you have something truly chilling,” Scarborough said of the drone news. “Here you have the United States government saying, we can kill you, American citizen. You have no constitutional right to a jury by your peers. You have no constitutional right even to probable cause or to due process. You have no right to a lawyer. You have no right to counsel. You have no right to anything. If we suspect you, just suspect you, without evidence, that you were thinking about committing an act against the United States of America, we can kill you.” He continued: “There are no checks and there are no balances. We can kill you. We can pick you out of a list and drop a bomb on you, and not only can we kill you, we can then kill your 16-year-old son who is not even affiliated with al Qaeda, and then we can blame it on the father for us having to kill the son.” Scarborough then urged Republicans to take it to the House and Senate floors to decry this executive abuse. Mark McKinnon added: “Forget Republicans. How about liberals and Democrats? I mean, can you imagine if George W. Bush had proposed this idea?” However, McKinnon then disagreed with his co-panelists: “I agree with the policy. I think it’s a good idea.” “You think it’s okay to kill Americans without probable cause?” Scarborough asked. “You think it’s a good idea?” “Thinking about the threats against us and the machiavellian plots, I’m willing to err on the side of giving a little bit of latitudes,” the former Bush advisor said. “This kid, this 16-year-old kid goes out to a restaurant and he gets killed because of his father,” Scarborough said, citing the assassination of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. “That causes you no concern? Constitutionally?” “I err on giving the government latitude on this one,” McKinnon doubled down.

“The rule of law could not simply be in the hands of a king and could not be arbitrarily applied and that’s precisely what this is: it’s in in the hands of an American king.  An American king who actually gets the list of people who he decides who should be killed and who should not be killed and he goes down that list, and there’s so many things that are chilling here,” Scarborough said, before noting that if Bush were president, there would be impeachment hearings immediately over the drone strikes. “All of Washington, all of Manhattan, the entire press corps would focus its intention on this unprecedented overreach,” he said.  Willie Geist then chimed in: “I have a big problem will people being held at Guantanamo Bay without charge and for years and a decade, but I have a bigger problem with people who are being killed without charge in the field of battle. So if you’re outraged about enhanced interrogation, you should really be outraged about someone being killed on the spot of suspicion of being a terrorist.” Scarborough then, once again, tore into the White House’s actions: “When you kill somebody without probable cause or evidence, that’s right there, and then you make it an American citizen who is protected by the United States Constitution, and suddenly that raises it to an entirely new level. And the U.S. government can decide which American citizens it’s going to kill without probable cause?” “That is frightening,” he concluded. “And, of course, the next step is the killing starts taking place on American soil. We’re not far from that.” [all in the name of security; giving away freedom for a so called security]

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The Andromeda Strain, Yes. Jesus, No. Your Tax Dollars at Work  by Gary North

You have heard about the need for the separation of church and state. What about the separation of science and state? But science is neutral, we are told. Suuuuure it is. Scientists are impartial searchers of truth. Suuuuure they are.  The space program above earth’s gravity is a Darwinist boondoggle. The money spent by the government does not pay a positive rate of return, unless you are a Darwinist who thinks life on Mars or in a nearby solar system will prove that life is not unique, mankind is not unique, Jesus is not unique, and therefore Darwinists will not go to hell. They operate in terms of a scientific formula: Life in outer space = there is no hell.

They spend our tax dollars to prove this. They force Christians to pay for it. It’s all purely scientific, you understand. No hidden agendas here. The public overwhelmingly wants NASA’s zero-payoff boondoggles to go on, we are assured. The voters have demanded that they be taxed to pay astronomers and technicians career wages at above-market rates to pursue the search for life in outer space.

The Andromeda strain is out there, waiting to be discovered and brought back to earth for further study. The public wants this.

In an article on ABC News, we read all about planets that will sustain life. These planets are beyond any power of observation on earth. But they have life on them. We are assured of the following by recipients of government funding. “You don’t need an Earth clone to have life.” “We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realize another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted.” “We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy. That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought.” So, there are earth-like planets out there. They are habitable. And habitable planets are inhabited. How do we know? Mathematics.

No one has seen life in outer space, of course. But it is there. Yes, sir, it is there. How do we know? Because NASA has a telescope. It’s called the Kepler. It reveals these distant habitable planets. Sort of. In a sense. The telescope views stars. From time to time, these stars have objects passing in front of them. These are planets. The planets are habitable. There is life on some of them, statistically speaking. Of course, the same statistics would apply without the Kepler. But funding the Kepler is crucial. If we did not have the Kepler, we would have less compelling press releases from NASA. Here is what the Kepler really funds: NASA’s press releases. The article goes on:

There is no saying what such a world would actually be like; the Kepler probe can only show whether distant stars have objects periodically passing in front of them. But based on that, scientists can do some math and estimate the mass and orbit of these possible planets. So far, Kepler has spotted more than 2,700 of them in the small patch of sky it has been watching. Therefore, there is life in outer space. Therefore, there is no hell.

Is there any way to prove there is life in those distant systems? No. Does this mean that NASA should be shut down? No. It means that NASA’s budget should be increased. The search for life in outer space must go on. The press releases must continue to flow. Whenever a federal government-funded project inherently must fail, this means that the program must be funded with more money. This is the logic of civil government. Reward failure. Tax success. This is government-funded science. Could they be friendly to life? There’s no way to know yet, but space scientists say that if you have the right ingredients — a planet the right size, temperatures that allow for liquid water, organic molecules and so forth — and the chances may be good, even on a planet that is very different from ours.

Conclusion: Keep the funding coming! Would the free market support any of this? No. That’s why we need NASA. That’s why we need Congress. That’s why deficits don’t matter. They are spending us blind. They will continue to do so until the Great Default. The spending is astronomical. (Sorry. I could not resist.)

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Why Would We Arm Our Racist, Jihadist Enemies?

It should be a basic moral axiom of American foreign policy that we don't give away advanced weapons to racist, radical, and unstable foreign governments. In fact, that's not just morality; it's common sense. Yet that's exactly what we're doing. The Obama administration is in the process of delivering 20 advanced F-16 fighter jets and 200 M1 Abrams tanks to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood-led government. Four jets have been delivered, and the rest of the equipment will be delivered within months. To be clear, Egypt did not purchase these weapons. They're a gift from you, the American taxpayer, to the Muslim Brotherhood. That's right, at exactly the same time that 77 percent of American taxpayers face tax increases as a result of the most recent fiscal cliff deal, a radical jihadist government gets more than $200 million worth of American arms – for free. [check the number of Republicans that supported this measure, not just Democrats]

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Norquist: Sequestration ‘Fine Way’ to Stop Overspending By Paul Scicchitano

With time once again running out to avoid $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts, conservative activist Grover Norquist, who invented the “anti-tax increase” tax pledge embraced by Republicans, tells Newsmax TV's Steve Malzberg that conservative legislators should allow the cuts to proceed barring an 11th-hour shift in the president’s negotiating tactics. “The president has put exactly nothing on the table with the exception of sequestration, which is the law of the land,” said Norquist, appearing Wednesday on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV in New York. “The sequester is going to take effect because Obama has no interest in managing spending restraint more artfully than the sequester and his idea of replacing or delaying the sequester is a complete nonstarter,” said Norquist.

On Tuesday, Obama urged Congress to postpone the across-the-board spending cuts scheduled to begin on March 1 to avoid what he described as “real and lasting impacts” on U.S. economic growth.
He urged lawmakers to instead act on a smaller package of spending cuts and changes to the tax code that would increase revenue, such as limiting tax breaks, to replace part of the $1.2 trillion sequestration. Norquist dismissed the president’s plea as disingenuous. “Sequestration is a fine way to cut the budget from Obama’s overspending,” Norquist asserted. “Now the president hoped that Republicans were so scared by the idea of nicking the Pentagon’s budget that when push came to shove — when we came to the time for sequestration to start — the Republicans would come and beg him, ‘oh please let’s do something other than reduce any military spending at all.’” [ watch the news: the Democrats will opine about the Republicans "destroying the military" capability.

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Suit: Ground Zero Mosque Leader Stole Millions By Jim Meyers

Remember this guy and how the MSM came to his rescue?  A lawsuit filed on Monday charges that Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the former leader of the proposed "Ground Zero" mosque project in Manhattan, embezzled millions from his Muslim charity to spend on a sports car, vacations and gifts for a lady friend. The suit was filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan by Westchester, N.Y. businessman Robert Leslie Deak, a self-described Muslim convert who alleges that over several years, Rauf accepted $167,000 donated by Deak to combat anti-Muslim sentiment. The spending was “not limited to a luxury sports car, personal real estate, entertainment, lavish trips and vacations with Evelyn Adorno and support of Evelyn Adorno, gifts and other personal uses,” the suit states.

In the suit, Deak and his wife Moshira Solimon claim that Rauf’s nonprofit organization accepted $3 million in donations from the government of Malaysia for the ground zero project, but Rauf never declared the donations to the IRS for three consecutive years.  Rauf’s attorney Paul Knight declined a request for a comment on Adorno, but told the Post that he “denied the allegations that are raised” and said Rauf will “vigorously defend himself and show that [the suit] has no basis.”

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Own a gun? Time to buy violence liability insurance

Democratic lawmakers proposed legislation Tuesday that would require California gun owners to buy liability insurance to cover damages or injuries caused by their weapons. Similar bills have been introduced in other states after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. They include Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and New York. “I was moved, like many others, being the father of two young children, by the Sandy Hook incident and looking for constructive ways to manage gun violence here in California as well as the rest of the country,” said Assemblyman Philip Ting of San Francisco, who introduced AB231 along with Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez of Los Angeles. “There’s basically a cost that is born by the taxpayers when accidents occur. … I don’t think that taxpayers should be footing those bills.” [clever way to make guns unaffordable]

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House Votes to Require Balanced Budget Date From Obama

The Republican-led House passed legislation Wednesday that would force President Obama to estimate when the federal budget will balance again — and outline the steps he proposes to eliminate the budget deficit. The Require a PLAN Act is part of a new Republican attempt to force Obama and the Democratic Senate to engage in efforts to cut the deficit. Republicans have roundly criticized Obama for submitting late budgets that don’t balance, and the Senate for failing to produce any budget plan at all in nearly four years. As expected, the House approved the bill in a mostly party-line 253-167 vote, although 26 Democrats went against their leaders and supported the legislation.

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Canada’s Boy Scouts Warn BSA Of Homosexual Infiltration by Bradlee Dean

“The notion that we need to protect homosexuals more than we need to protect children…has been a disturbing trend.” Brian Rushfeldt, president, Canada Family Action. As you may know, the radical homosexual lobby is using totalitarian methods in an attempt to bully the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) into submission by changing their long-standing policy of banning homosexuals from admission into the BSA. It would do well for the American people to look across the border to Canada and see the disastrous consequences of such a decision. In 1998, Canadian Scouts (CS) decided to allow females, atheists, agnostics, homosexuals, bisexuals, and transsexuals to join the CS. In 1999, they approved the establishment of an all-homosexual troop, which now marches in Canada’s “gay pride” parades. Within five years, scouting membership dropped over 50 percent, many scouting camps and offices were closed, and staff was laid off. More importantly is the tragic sexual abuse by leaders in scouting. Brian Rushfeldt, president of Canada Family Action, stated, “They have secret files (here in Canada) as they do down there (in the U.S.) of guys that had abused kids that they hadn’t reported. There were investigations into the abuse of boys, which never really produced anything in Canada.” The Boy Scouts of America currently has a problem with Scout leaders abusing boys. There have been over 2,000 cases of abuse. So, let's bury our heads in the sand and ignore that mingling adults with these proclivities has NO unintended consequences!

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The Freedom (Not) to Associate

The phrase "freedom of association" does not appear in the Constitution (although the First Amendment protects the right to peaceably assemble).  Nonetheless, the Court has recognized to separate types of association that are constitutionally protected: (1) intimate association (protected as an aspect of the right of privacy) and (2) expressive association (protected as as an aspect of the First Amendment's protection of free speech).

Freedom of association cases are interesting in that they bring into conflict two competing views of the world: rights-oriented liberalism that holds that a person's identity comes from individual choices (and that government ought to create a framework of laws that remove barriers to choice) and communitarians, that holds that a person's identity comes from the communities of which an individual is a part (and that communities are an important buffer between the government and the individual).

The leading case on the right of an association to establish and apply its own membership rules is the 1984 case of Roberts v. United States Jaycees.  In Roberts, the Court recognized that the power to determine its own membership is central to the free speech rights of expressive organizations. (Imagine how the speech of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League might be affected if it could be forced to admit as members anti-Semites.)  In January 2000, the Supreme Court decided a closely-watched case involving New Jersey's decision that the Boy Scouts of America are a public accommodation that can be compelled to admit homosexuals. A 5-4 majority of the Court found unconstitutional New Jersey's decision prohibiting the Boy Scouts from terminating the membership of a gay scoutmaster.  The Court held that the First Amendment protected the Boy Scouts, as an expressive organization promoting the view that homosexuality is an unacceptable lifestyle, from excluding scouts on that basis.  The four dissenters questioned whether views with respect to homosexuality were at all central to the Scouts' expressive purposes. Associational rights are viewed differently by the Court when an organization is not being denied outright the right to determine its own membership, but is only being denied public benefits because of its exclusionary policy.

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Former Special Forces Commander: DOD Could Have Flown Rescue Team From Tripoli to Benghazi; DOD: State Dept. Decided Whether and What to Fly By Terence P. Jeffrey

Retired Army Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin--formerly commander of U.S. Special Forces Command and deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence—told CNSNews.com that, if it had been asked, the Defense Department could have sent a plane to Libya on Sept. 11, 2012, to transport a rescue team of U.S. security personnel that instead ended up taking a chartered private plane from Tripoli to Benghazi that night. “There is no question that we could have moved an airplane in there and we could have also put boots on the ground at the embassy,” Gen. Boykin told CNSNews.com. “State should have coordinated with DOD and said: We’ve got to have an airplane,” said Gen. Boykin. “The Department of Defense could have provided an airplane in there. All they had to do was ask.” [ the question remains, what really happened and why the request was not made.  Our own government is stonewalling us!]

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Obama Has Presided Over Weakest Multi-Year Economic Recovery Since WWII  By Matt Cover

President Barack Obama has presided over the weakest multi-year economic recovery since the end of World War II, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Since the end of the last recession in June 2009, the economy has grown only 7.5 percent--compared with the double-digit increases the economy experience in other multi-year post-World War II growth cycles. Using inflation-adjusted GDP figures from BEA and business cycle dates from the National Bureau of Economic Research (the organization used by the government to date when recessions and recoveries begin and end), CNSNews.com calculated how much the economy grew in each recovery since 1949, the earliest full recovery period for which BEA data is available. In three and a half years from the end of the last recession in June 2009 until the fourth quarter of 2012, the economy grew only 7.5 percent, increasing from $12.7 trillion to $13.6 trillion. The absolute worst post-war recovery lasted just 12 months, from July 1980 to July 1981 when the economy grew just 4.4 percent before falling into recession again until November of 1982.  Obama’s is by far the worst multi-year recovery since World War II, including recoveries of similar lengths that occurred in the 1950’s and 1970’s.

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49% Think They Personally Pay More Than Their Fair Share in Taxes

Half of Americans still think they pay more than they should in taxes and question the fairness of the current tax system.  A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 49% of American Adults believe that, compared to people who make more or less than they do, they pay more than their fair share of taxes. Twenty-nine percent (29%) disagree and don’t think they pay more than their fair share. Twenty-three percent (23%) are not sure. Incredible that 29% are not sure; low information voters?

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To dare, is to lose one’s footing momentarily.  To not dare, is to lose oneself  -Soren Kierkegaard

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57% Say Economic Concerns Bigger Threat Than Terrorists, Military Attack

Bottom of Form

While politicians in Washington wrangle about the new secretary of Defense and a reduction in growth of the military budget, most voters see economic concerns as a much bigger threat to the nation. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters believe economic challenges represent the biggest threat to the United States. Half as many (27%) see terrorist attacks as the biggest threat. Only six percent (6%) believe the biggest concern comes from conventional military attacks

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