I am so happy to read this news about Indiana challenging the constitutionality of the automaker bailout and subsequent takeover of General Motors that I don’t think that I can put it into words, but I am going to try.
It is about time that someone stepped up and filed a lawsuit questioning whether the government has illegally taken over a private industry. Indiana is questioning whether the president had the authority to use the TARP money to bailout the auto industry and it is headed to a federal appeals court. (The same court that Sotomayor claimed makes policy.)
Due to this lawsuit a New York court has halted the sale of Chrysler to Fiat pending testimony from Indiana which is arguing that the TARP money was not allocated to any business that was not a financial institution. Congress denied President Bush the authority to use TARP money for this purpose but he unconstitutionally did it anyway. Finally a challenge has come forward.
The administration misappropriated funds because it is stated in the law this is for financial institutions,” Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock told CNSNews.com. “Is Chrysler a financial institution? Clearly not.
I previously asked the question, “Where did the president get the authority to take over General Motors?” The answer is that he does not have that authority.
The Indiana pension funds added: “The Government’s action is not authorized by any statute, including TARP, and violates the unambiguous provisions of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (the “EESA”) and the Constitution of the United States.”
This is going to be very interesting to watch as it is played out. I have always believed that this was a power grab of epic proportions and an unconstitutional act and now there is legal action being taken against it.
In the end is anything going to change? I doubt it but maybe if Indiana wins this case the president will have second thoughts before he tries something like this again.
However there could be negative repercussions. If the court rules in favor of the government this could possible embolden the president and make it possible for him to take over even more private businesses.
We learned just yesterday that the Treasury Department bullied banks that were not in trouble to take bailout money or face the threat of a hostile takeover by the government, what is to stop the Treasury Department from threatening other institutions that the president would like to control?
While I don’t see a victory in this case changing anything in General Motors situation, hopefully a win would stop this from happening to another company.
Was the Arkansas Terrorist Acting Alone?
Yesterday a terrorist opened fire on a military recruiting center in Arkansas and killed one United States soldier while injuring another. It was reported that the terrorist was acting alone and that he was revenging the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But was he really acting alone? That is the question that I am left with after reading today’s follow up story. There may be more to this story than we are being led to believe.
Mujahid Muhammad has been under investigation by an FBI terrorism task force since he returned from Yemen. The feds knew who this man was and they were watching him. Once he was arrested he claimed that his intent was “to kill as many people in the Army as he could.”
This was not a random act of violence and now it turns out that there may be more to this story than Mujahid Muhammad being a lone “gunman” he may have had ties with radical Islamists. Certainly the FBI thought so.
How was this man ever allowed to get close to a military recruitment center? The FBI knew that this man may be dangerous and yet he was allowed to get within shooting distance. As tragic that it is that one family lost their loved one because he was doing what he felt was his duty to his country, we are lucky that this terrorist only managed to kill one American.
As I write this the president still hasn’t bothered to address the issue of this terrorist attack on United States soil, he is too concerned with our image in the Muslim community. He is overseas reaching out to the Muslim world, he doesn’t want to offend them by acknowledging the fact that a Muslim terrorist killed a soldier in the country that he is supposed to be president of.
President Obama May Tax Health Care Benefits
I wrote about this issue before but now the issue of the government taxing an employee’s health-care benefits is back on the table and so I find it proper to write about this issue once more.
The president is leaving the door open to tax the health-care benefits that employees pay for and receive through their employers. This was part of John McCain’s health-care plan and the president as a candidate vehemently opposed the idea. The president claimed that his plan was better and that he would not tax health-care benefits. The president went as far as calling McCain’s plan “radical” and also said the following:
McCain would make you pay taxes on your health benefits, taxing your health care for the first time ever, raising costs for employers who offer health care so your coverage could be reduced or dropped completely
And now he may implement that very same plan.
Most Americans have health-care and most Americans receive this health-care through their employees. Most Americans also pay a portion of those health-care benefits. If the president does adopt the McCain plan then on top of paying a portion of our health-care benefits we will be taxed so that we can help pay for the uninsured. This is a plan that the president opposed as a candidate.
By taxing these benefits working class Americans will be receiving a tax increase, thereby breaking the president’s promise that 95% of Americans will receive a reduction in taxes.
What a fraud!
Under the Freedom of Information Act, Judicial Watch was able to obtain an internal memo from the Treasury Department and what we have discovered in this document is downright disturbing.
According to the memo, last October Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson ordered nine banks that were not troubled to surrender ownership interests to the government or face regulations that would force them into government ownership. In other words the government forced these banks which were not in peril to succumb to government control or the government would wrestle control away from them.
The talking points indicate that Paulson then told the nine bank CEOs that the government was going to use $250 billion of the $700 billion approved by Congress to shore up the financial industry through the “Troubled Asset Relief Program” (TARP) to buy stock in banks all across the country and that the nine banks these CEOs represented had no choice but to allow the government to buy their stock–or else.
This was one of President Bush’s last acts as president and when you read something as frightening as the government forcing nine banks to give in and accept government control or else, is it any wonder that those who supported President Bush right up to the end, like myself, soured on him just before he left office?
Now our current president is following President Bush’s lead and taking it to another level. The government is buying up once private industries such as GM, AIG, and the like; soon the health-care industry will follow. More and more companies and industries are being taken over by the government and this has to stop now!
We are watching the United States being Europeanized right in front of our eyes and we are helpless to stop it.
New Hampshire Governor Signs Gay Mariage Bill, But Senate Rules Were Broken to Pass the Bill
Today the governor of New Hampshire, John Lynch, signed gay marriage into law, gay marriages will go into effect on January 1st of next year and all of the same sex couples who currently have civil unions will have their civil unions converted to marriage.
As a person who believes in both the United States and New Hampshire constitutions I am perfectly willing to accept gay marriage as law even though I do not agree with it, and am not happy about it, as long as the New Hampshire constitution and the rules of procedure in the state house and congress are followed. The people voted in the pro gay marriage politicians and as such I will abide by the will of the people who voted these people into office. (Although I am not sure the will of the people was represented here because if it were, why would the governor have lied about his position on the issue; more on that later.) I will extract my revenge, and hopefully a majority of New Hampshire voters will also, at the voting booth next November.
My biggest problem with the new gay marriage law, or should I say my two biggest problems with the way the gay marriage bill became law are both procedural issues.
First, Governor Lynch campaigned as being a moderate who opposed gay marriage. He has spent the last several years claiming that he opposed gay marriage, but we found out a few weeks ago that he would sign gay marriage into law. The governor is a liar. People who voted for him by a 75% majority thought that he was opposed to gay marriage. While that may not have been the number one reason they voted for him, it was part of the package that they thought they were getting with this governor. They were wrong because he has been hiding his true liberal leanings behind a shroud of moderatism. (I know it isn’t a word, but I take a little poetic license here.)
The questions remain, why did the governor feel that he had to lie about his position? Would he have been elected if people knew his true position on gay marriage? And was the will of the people really served on this issue? We will never know the answer to that last question because a bill that would have allowed New Hampshire voters to weigh in on the issue in the form of a non-binding ballot question was killed. We will never know how the voters really feel about this issue. Perhaps next November we will find out, but it is too late now.
Second, the state Senate broke senate rules to pass the bill that eventually made it to the governor’s desk. Rather than go into detail myself about the political games that were played in order to pass the bill I have reprinted a New Hampshire Union Leader editorial in full that describes the indiscretion below:
Legislators vote today on amending the same-sex marriage bill so it meets Gov. John Lynch’s approval and can become law. It’s telling, however, that Senate President Sylvia Larsen had to violate Senate rules to get this language passed.
Senate rules require that all committee of conference votes be unanimous. They also require that committees of conference contain senators from each party. When Sen. Sheila Roberge, R-Bedford, refused to sign the conference report approving the amendment to the same-sex marriage bill, Sen. Larsen removed her from the committee and replaced her with Sen. Matthew Houde, D-Plainfield. Voila! The language was passed.
Supporters of same-sex marriage talk all day long about fairness. But to get their bill through, they intentionally violated Senate rules written to guarantee minority approval of controversial legislation. Gov. John Lynch ought to veto the bill for that reason alone. A matter as divisive as this should pass into law by force of persuasion, not by sleight of hand.
Knowing that the lone vote that would have killed the bill was a Republican the state senate threw the Republican off of the committee and replaced her with a Democrat making the committee, which is required to be bipartisan strictly partisan. This was done willingly, knowing that it was a clear violation of state senate rules. The bill was passed and the rest is history.
We, the voters of New Hampshire now know that our governor is a liar and that senate rules mean nothing when it comes to passing a liberal agenda. Our governor has failed us and now so has the senate. If we cannot trust the governor to tell us the truth and we cannot trust the senate to follow their own rules what are we left with?
You can claim that this is a civil rights issue all that you want, even though the state can deny marriage licenses to heterosexual couples, but that still does not justify the backhanded and illegal way that this bill was passed onto law.
Georgia officials have been taking the time to make sure that the people in their state who vote are actually citizens of the United States. They have been verifying the status of voters by checking social security numbers and drivers licenses to ascertain whether the people who are trying to vote in their state are actually eligible to vote.
That doesn’t seem like a radical idea to me but evidently it does seem like a radical idea to the Department of Justice, which has ordered Georgia to stop verifying the eligibility of the state’s voters.
Georgia must now stop verifying whether the people who are voting in their state are actually citizens of the United States. It really doesn’t come as a surprise that the Department of Justice for this president would make such a ruling. After all, the president has close ties with, and is proud of his association with, ACORN, a group whose sole purpose is to illegally register voters. It is only natural that this administration would have a problem with a state requiring that a person be eligible to vote before they are allowed to vote.
Cell Phone Elbow, The Next Big Crisis?
Now that the contrived swine flu hysteria has fizzled out what is the next big crisis that Americans need to confront? Is it the president saying that Iran deserves nuclear technology? No. Is it the government taking over a private automobile industry and creating the new “peoples car?” No. Is it the economy or health-care? No.
The next big crisis is “cell phone elbow.” That’s right, people who talk on their cell phones are going to get “cell phone elbow.” Oh the horror!
When cell phone users hold the phone to their ears, they stretch a nerve that extends underneath the funny bone and controls the smallest fingers. When talkers chat for a long time in that position, it “chokes the blood supply to the nerves. It makes the nerves short-circuit. The next thing you know, there’s tingling in the ring and small finger,”
The elbow is a joint, a joint is meant to bend. But now bending your elbow to talk on the phone is dangerous. Bending your elbow will stretch a nerve and will cause your fingers to tingle, leading to death. Okay, I am exaggerating but come on, let us be just a little bit real here.
Bending your elbow to talk on the phone puts much, much less stress on the elbow than hard, physical labor does. Have we become so wussified in America that just talking on a phone weakens our muscles and ligaments to the point where we face irreversible damage to our bodies? What would happen to people in this country today if they had to work the land as our forefathers did?
I thought that I had heard it all when I wrote about “Phantom Vibration Syndrome” in November of ’07 but this takes the cake.
This story about a missile possibly being fired at an American passenger airplane last Friday is more than a little frightening.
A pilot reported to the FAA that a rocket or missile was fired at his plane and came within 150 feet of actually hitting the plane. This pilot was a former military pilot and as such is not likely to overreact to an object coming in close proximity to his aircraft.
The area was searched for evidence on the ground of a missile launch but nothing as been found. At least not yet (or at least not being reported). This news coupled with the terrorist attack in Arkansas yesterday that left one military recruiter dead should have people wondering what is going on. Unfortunately both of these stories are being vastly under-reported, almost negligently under-reported.
Terrorist Kills Military Recruiter in Arkansas
This is a story that does not seem to be getting the attention that is should get. Yesterday a terrorist shot and killed one military recruiter and injured another in Arkansas.
Mujahid Muhammad has been charged with 15 counts of committing a terrorist act. This is a terrorist act that has been carried out on our soil and our military was targeted. I guess that this isn’t getting much publicity because the terrorist acted alone, he was not a part of any terrorist cell as far as we know, and he only managed to kill one American.
But one terrorist killing one American on American soil is one terrorist and one victim too many and is not a story that should be swept under the rug.
Muhammad is a recent convert to the peaceful religion of Islam and he was so upset about the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that he decided to exact his revenge by targeting and killing American soldiers right here in America. This was not a random act of violence but a premeditated act of terrorism and this man should be tried and sentenced to death. Who knows how many people he would have killed if he wasn’t apprehended minutes after the attack.
The media seems content to call this man a “gunman” instead of what he really is, but I am not. This man is a terrorist.
President Obama Says Iran Should Have Nuclear Power
The president has now stated that Iran is entitled to have nuclear technology. He has added the stipulation that Iran must promise that they will only use the technology for peaceful purposes. Does anyone really think that this is a good idea?
Let us not forget that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist and has promised to wipe the “stinking corpse” off the face of the earth. Does this sound like a sane world leader who can be trusted with nuclear technology? Does this sound like someone who can be trusted to use nuclear technology for only good purposes?
He has made this statement while taking a hard line stance with Israel. Certainly Israel has to be concerned about where this president’s loyalties lie. One has to wonder how the 77% of the Jewish voters who voted for this president are now feeling about their decision.
He has been coddling our enemies while estranging our allies. He seems either totally naive about world affairs or just indifferent. He feels that by “reaching out” to Iran the country will love us and respect us when in reality he is seen as weak by Iran and is being rolled by Ahmadinejad. He is being laughed at, but there is one country that is not laughing and that country is Israel. We are in the process of legitimizing a dictator while distancing our most important ally in the Middle East. This is a recipe for disaster.
On a side note: if nuclear power is such a great option for Iran why is it that nuclear power isn’t a viable option in the United States as an alternative energy? More nuclear plants here would lessen our dependence on foreign oil.
