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H.R. 3962 Summary

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H.R. 3962 Full Text

by: Garry Reed

Immortality is just around the corner, right up the street, behind the Curb Your Dog sign. Or maybe it's a mere 20 years away. So says American scientist Ray Kurzweil in a Telegraph.co.uk article.

Advances under Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating Returns" in such areas as genetic engineering and computer sciences and nanotechnologies will not only help our biological bits function longer but will make it possible to replace our vital organs. It seems that life-extending goodies like artificial pancreases and neural implants are already available.

"So we can look forward to a world where humans become cyborgs, with artificial limbs and organs," Kurzweail is quoted as saying.  Unless, of course, the Evangelical Right grabs the reins of government and forcibly puts an end to this blatantly evil science on the basis that immortality will prevent the Apocalypse and the Second Coming and the establishment of the Kingdom of God, which means that unrighteous evildoers must be Left Behind for the good of God's Plan (and for the good of people who call themselves True Believers who will certainly not kill themselves off.)

Unless, of course, the Green Left grabs the reins of government and forcibly puts an end to this blatantly evil science on the basis that immortality will create a population explosion and prevent environmental sustainability, which means that evil earth-destroying humans must be killed off for the good of Gaia (and for the good of people who call themselves Green who will certainly not kill themselves off.)

Unless, of course, some other arrogant self-appointed rabble of world-savers grabs the reins of government with the intention of saving the world by destroying it.

Libertarians, being non-authoritarian, being live-and-let-live, being voluntaryists, being believers in free will and individual liberty and personal responsibility and life-oriented and positive and rational (at least those descended from Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism) will mostly embrace and welcome the prospect of living forever.

But libertarians won't be grasping after the reins of government. That would be counterproductive seeing as how all governments are premised on coercion and therefore fundamentally destructive. Government doesn't enhance life, it demeans life.

Libertarians understand that free people freely exchanging ideas in a free market will discover and implement the actions necessary to overcome the problems of the evangelicals and the environmentalists and all the other authoritarian ideologues.

And then, if free people equipped with brainbots and biosynthetic colons and Rearden Steel hamstrings and micro-organo elastopolymer erectile extensions can figure out how to make a non-coercive non-government institution that does nothing but protect individual's rights and property, we can all re-elect Ron Paul for non-president in 2112.

Wanna live forever? Join the optimists. Join the libertarians.

by: Thomas Craig

Republicans... ENOUGH!  I am exhausted from hearing arguments against healthcare reform from people who clearly have no clue what they are talking about.  Before you go off on how you don't want a public option because it is socialist, perhaps you should consider our streets, libraries, law enforcement, and countless other aspects of our lives.  I am against the public option but not because I am afraid it will be a socialist move.  I think it would be great to provide health insurance to every American.  I, personally, would love to have a public option for my family and I to join in.  (I am aware of the contradiction I just made.) 

The reason I am against the public option is because I don't trust the government to run it properly.  Everything that the government runs becomes a bureaucratic and financial nightmare.  I am not willing to sacrifice the well-being of 250 million Americans for the sake of covering the 50 million (or whatever the number is this week) with low quality healthcare.  We cannot afford the public option plain and simple.  Even if we could afford it, I would not trust the government to change the oil in my car let alone oversee my health insurance.

We need to stop complaining about socialism because it emboldens the liberal base and allows them to point their fingers at you and make you look like a sophmoric flag-waving buffoon.  As I mentioned above, we already have many aspects of our lives socialized.  From now on, when somebody asks you about why you are against the public option, explain to them exactly why.  Ask the person to name you one program or department that the government oversees that is not a financial and bureaucratic nightmare.  When they realize that they are not able to name one, tell them that that is exactly why you don't support the public option.

by: Peter Suderman

The public option has been in critical condition all summer, but, like Jason Voorhees, it stubbornly refuses to stay dead. Indeed, in the last week or so, it's been gaining support. And now Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has announced that he's moving forward with a public option that allows individual states to opt out:

Reid announced this afternoon that he plans to push ahead with a public health insurance option that includes an opt-out provision for states—even though he's currently short several votes for passage, according to people close to the situation. 

"It's the fairest way to go," Reid said at a news conference, where he said he’ll send the state opt-out plan to the Congressional Budget Office. States would have until 2014 to opt out. 

Reid, who spoke with virtually every member of his 60-member caucus this weekend, currently has between 56 and 57 votes for a proposal to create a national insurance plan but allow states to opt out of it, according to Democratic aides. 

But Reid said he will not send the "trigger" option to the CBO—which endangers the support of Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), who has not signed on to the opt-out idea. Snowe wants a public insurance option to kick in only if private insurers don’t expand coverage fast enough. 

Asked about Snowe's lack of support, Reid said: "We are going to have to move forward on this." 

A month ago, I would have said there's no way any bill with a public option can pass. Now, I'm not so sure. This may simply be a way for Democratic leaders to appease the liberal base. But it also might be a serious attempt at passing a bill with a public option.

Strangely enough, however, one of the most prominent frustrations for Democratic leadership at this point appears to be... the White House. Yes, Obama has consistently had good things to say about the inclusion of the public option (though he's never demanded it be included). But lately, he's waffled about which particular flavor of public option he favors. According to Ezra Klein, that's proven irksome for Senate Democrats trying to figure out what, exactly, the administration supports.

I'm also hearing a lot of irritation from congressional Democrats at the mixed signals being sent by the White House. If the White House wants to advocate for the trigger, fine. If the White House wants to advocate for the public option, fine. But for the White House to host one meeting where they signal that they're uncomfortable with Reid's decision to push the envelope on the public option and then make a big effort to walk that meeting back after the left gets angry is confusing everybody.

...Since the administration is considered the most important actor here, no one knows quite how to structure their strategy so long as the White House refuses to fully show its cards.

The problem with this notion, it seems to me, is that it assumes the White House supports a very particular policy. But as I've pointed out before, what Obama really supports is the passage of a bill—any bill, just so long as it can more or less legitimately be called "health-care reform." Now, it's obviously impossible to know for certain what the White House's thinking is. But my guess is that what he supports isn't so much one version of the public plan or another, but instead, whatever flavor of the public plan is most likely to result in successful passage—and thus, political victory.

by: Radley Balko

"There's no way to rule innocent men.The only power government has is the power to crack down on criminals.Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them.One declares so many things to be a crimethat it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

--Ayn Rand 

Violent crime is down America, across the board, spanning two decades. Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that the incidence of reported rape had hit a 20-year low. Homicides are down, as are juvenile violence and crimes committed against children. Crime rates have been plummeting since the early 1990s to such an extent that explaining the drop has become something of an obsession among criminologists and sociologists.

Part of the drop can of course be explained by mass incarceration—America leads the world in the percentage of its population behind bars. Putting one in every 100 citizens in jail causes its own problems, and there's plenty of debate over just how much that incarceration has contributed to the fall in violent crime. But there's no question that we've put lots of people in prison over the last 20 years, the crime rate has fallen, and part of the public likely believes (with some justification) that there's a link betweent the two.

But there's something else going on too, picked up in the blogosphere last week by George Washington University political science Professor John Sides. According to Gallup, since 2002 the percentage of the American public who think violent crime is on the rise has been increasing, even as actual violent crime rates continue to fall. Sides notes that from 1989 to 2001, perception and reality somewhat went hand in hand. But 2002 to 2003 saw a 19 percent leap in public perceptions that violent crime was on the uptick, and the figure has been going up in the years since—to 74 percent today. What's going on?

From the time Richard Nixon made crime a national political issue in the 1970s, we've been conditioned by politicians and public officials to live in perpetual fear. Our baseline is that there's too much crime, and that we aren't doing enough about it. Despite that, there was an actually drop in public worry about crime that began in 1992 and continued until 2002. As noted, that drop corresponded with an actual decline in the national crime rate, something that hadn't happened in 30 years. That crime rates going down for the first time in a generation was something new, something worth noticing. The 1990s were also generally an optimistic decade. The economy was humming. We weren't engaged in any major wars. We didn't have many worries, period.

Post-2002, the national mood soured. Terrorism, obviously a form of violent crime, was all over the news. The economy slowed down. Illegal immigration once again became a national issue, along with the false assumption that undocumented immigrants bring violent crime. And so we returned to a state of fear, though the crime rate continued to fall.

These fluctuations in the Gallup poll are interesting, but it's worth noting that the percentage of respondents who believe violent crime is on the rise has dipped below 60 percent only three times since 1991. This, again, despite the fact that violent crime has been in decline over the entire period.

Fear makes for easy politics. It both wins votes and primes us to give government more power at the expense of personal liberty. And that's certainly true when it comes to crime. With the possible exception of an incumbent mayor, politicians only benefit from exaggerating the threat of violent crime. Senators, Congressmen, and even governors are rarely held responsible when the crime rate goes up. But they do win votes by proposing new powers for police and prosecutors to bring it down.

The result has been a one-way ratchet effect on crime policy. We're perpetually expanding police and prosecutorial power, a process only occasionally slowed by the courts. Congress and state legislatures rarely take old criminal statutes off the books, but they're always adding new ones. A 2008 report from the Heritage Foundation estimates that at the federal level alone, Congress has been adding about 55 new crimes to the federal criminal code each year since the 1980s. There are now about 4,500 separate federal crimes. And that doesn't include federal regulations, which are increasingly being enforced with criminal, not administrative, penalties. It also doesn't include the increasing leeway with which prosecutors can enforce broadly written federal conspiracy, racketeering, and money laundering laws. And this is before we even get to the states' criminal codes.

In his new book, the Boston-based civil liberties advocate and occasional Reason contributor Harvey Silverglate estimates that in 2009, the average American commits about three federal felonies per day. And yet, we aren’t a nation of degenerates. On the contrary, most social indicators have been moving in a positive direction for a generation. Silverglate argues we're committing these crimes unwittingly. The federal criminal code has become so vast and open to interpretation, Silverglate argues, that a U.S. Attorney can find a way to charge just about anyone with violating federal law. In fact, it's nearly impossible for some business owners to comply with one federal regulation without violating another one. We're no longer governed by laws, we're governed by the whims of lawyers.

Whatever one may think of Ayn Rand's political philosophy or ethics, her criminal justice prophecy has proven unsettlingly accurate: In our continuing eagerness to purge American society of crime, we've allowed the government to make us all into criminals.

by: Harrison Price

He gave away SDI to the Russians for their “help” in getting sanctions passed against Iran.  The Russians gladly took the SDI concessions then said nyet on Iran.  Obama is delaying making a decision on Afghanistan saying the whole presidential “voting thing” needs to be cleared up first.  And he picked a fight with Fox News which David Carr of the New York Times warned:

that the White House war on Fox “may present a genuine problem for Mr. Obama, who took great pains during the campaign to depict himself as being above the fray of over-heated partisan squabbling.”

“While there is undoubtedly a visceral thrill in finally setting out after your antagonists, the history of administrations that have successfully taken on the media and won is shorter than this sentence,” Carr wrote over the weekend. “So far, the only winner in this latest dispute seems to be Fox News. Ratings are up 20 percent this year.”

The question one has to ask themselves is: “What is Obama’s problem?”

This article clears up that question very nicely:

President Obama’s presidential campaign focused on “making” the news media cover certain issues while rarely communicating anything to the press unless it was “controlled,” White House Communications Director Anita Dunn disclosed to the Dominican government at a videotaped conference.

“Very rarely did we communicate through the press anything that we didn’t absolutely control,” said Dunn.

“One of the reasons we did so many of the David Plouffe videos was not just for our supporters, but also because it was a way for us to get our message out without having to actually talk to reporters,” said Dunn, referring to Plouffe, who was Obama’s chief campaign manager.

“We just put that out there and made them write what Plouffe had said as opposed to Plouffe doing an interview with a reporter. So it was very much we controlled it as opposed to the press controlled it,” Dunn said.

Continued Dunn: “Whether it was a David Plouffe video or an Obama speech, a huge part of our press strategy was focused on making the media cover what Obama was actually saying as opposed to why the campaign was saying it, what the tactic was. … Making the press cover what we were saying.”

You may see the video here.

Sir Barack Obama, Imperial Leader cannot be questioned.  I think they do that in North Korea, too (and a few other places with whom Obama has opened up a “dialog”).

via email- author unknown

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert. Congress said, "Someone may steal from it at night." So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.

Then Congress said, "How does the watchman do his job without instruction?" So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions, and one person to do time studies.

Then Congress said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?" So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One to do the studies and one to write the reports.

Then Congress said, "How are these people going to get paid?" So They created the following positions, a time keeper, and a payroll officer, Then hired two people.

Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?" So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.

Then Congress said, "We have had this command in operation for one Year and we are $18,000 over budget, we must cutback overall cost."

So they laid off the night watchman.

NOW s l o w l y, let it sink in.

Quietly, we go like sheep to slaughter.

Does anybody remember the reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY ... during the Carter Administration?

Bottom line. We've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency ... the reason for which not one person who reads this can remember!

Ready??

It was very simple ... and at the time, everybody thought it very appropriate. The Department of Energy was instituted on 8-04-1977. TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.

Hey, pretty efficient, huh???

AND NOW, IT'S 2009 -- 32 YEARS LATER -- AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS "NECESSARY" DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR. THEY HAVE 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES; AND LOOK AT THE JOB THEY HAVE DONE!

THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY, "WHAT WAS I THINKING?"

Ah, yes -- good ole bureaucracy.

AND, NOW, WE ARE GOING TO TURN THE BANKING SYSTEM, HEALTH CARE AND THE AUTO INDUSTRY OVER TO THE SAME GOVERNMENT?

HELLOOO ! Anybody Home?

by: Andrew Moylan

Today, NTU released a coalition letter that we circulated that was signed by 20 state and national groups in opposition to an attempt to deceive the American public about the true costs of health care reform. Tomorrow evening, the U.S. Senate will vote on S. 1776, the so-called "Medicare Physicians Fairness Act." This legislation, worth $247 billion (all racked up on the deficit, of course, as it contains no spending reductions elsewhere) is, plain and simple, an attempt to reduce the apparent costs of the comprehensive health care reform bills before Congress.

Here's how they plan to do it. Remember the Baucus bill, which received a CBO score of $829 billion in cost over ten years? The CBO said that legislation would actually reduce the deficit by a small amount. I'm sure that was music to President Obama's ears, as he has stated time and again he wouldn't sign a bill that increased the deficit.

But S. 1776 would immediately reverse a portion of the Baucus bill that was included specifically to reduce its apparent cost for analyses like what the CBO did. It would increase reimbursements to physicians through Medicare by a whopping $247 billion over the next ten years, reversing cuts to those reimbursement rates the Baucus bill used to artificially deflate its score.

So, by splitting this provision off into a different piece of legislation, leaders in Congress are trying to have their cake and eat it too. If they were to pass the Baucus bill, the President would sign it and rightly claim that it didn't increase the deficit (because they raised taxes slightly more massively than they raised spending). But at the same time, S. 1776 would pass into law and ring up another quarter trillion dollars in deficit spending on the side, outside the context of the "comprehensive" health care bill.

Put it this way, when the Washington Post agrees with NTU on something like this, you know something's awry.

by: James Pethokoukis

The state of the dollar probably hasn’t been a first-tier political issue in the United States since, say, the presidential election of 1896. Back then, it manifested as whether or not America would stay on the gold standard or switch to a bimetallic one. (The William Jennings Bryan “cross of gold” speech and all that.)

The aftershocks of the global financial crisis may now be propelling the dollar back to the political forefront. The greenback’s continuing slide makes it a handy metric that neatly encapsulates America’s current economic troubles and possible long-term decline. House Republicans for instance, have been using the weaker dollar as a weapon in their attacks on the Bernanke-led Federal Reserve.

For more evidence of the dollar’s return to political salience, look no further than the Facebook page of Sarah Palin. The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee — and possible 2012 presidential candidate — has shown a knack for identifying hot-button political issues, such as the purported “death panels” she claims to have found in Democratic healthcare reform plans. In a recent Facebook posting, Palin expressed deep concern over the dollar’s “continued viability as an international reserve currency” in light of huge U.S. budget deficits.

She might be onto something here, politically and economically. A recent Rasmussen poll, for instance, found that 88 percent of Americans say the dollar should remain the dominant global currency. Now, the average voter may not fully understand the subtleties of international finance nor appreciate exactly how a dominant dollar has benefited the U.S economy. But they sure think a weaker dollar is a sign of a weaker America.

And that’s the political problem for the Obama administration. Its benign neglect of the dollar is another example of an economic policy — along with TARP and the $787 billion stimulus — that the White House thinks is helping the economy, but many Americans find wrongheaded.

In his New York Times column today, Paul Krugman makes the usual case for a weaker dollar: It helps U.S. exporters and is a necessary part of a global economic rebalancing. And there is some truth in that, particularly the idea that Rising Asia will result in a less-dominant dollar. Then again, a devalued currency hasn’t exactly been a proven path to prosperity. (Ask Jimmy Carter.)

But Krugman too easily dismisses the idea that the dollar’s decline could tumble out of control. Former Clinton economic officials such as Robert Rubin and Roger Altman have been making the case that investor concern about budget deficits could lead them to abandon the dollar. As Altman argued in a Financial Times op-ed piece today: “The dismal deficit outlook poses a huge longer-term threat. Indeed, it is just a matter of time before global financial markets reject this fiscal trajectory. That could lead to a punishing dollar crisis.”

Now many Democrats and liberals, like Krugman, don’t want to hear such talk, fearing a rerun of the Clinton era when the progressive policy agenda was sacrificed on the altar of budgetary rectitude.

But that is a tremendous political and economic gamble, one that may result in taunting Republican cries of “Who lost the dollar?”