op-ed article

"Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many 'czars' appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent? Did you think that another 'czar' would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers -- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish? Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called 'experts' deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments? Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones? Does any of this sound like America? How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough. How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? ... How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin. Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to 'change the United States of America,' the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country. ... Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year -- each bill more than a thousand pages long -- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question -- and the biggest question for this generation." --economist Thomas Sowell

Originally Posted by Conrad

"Just one year ago, would you have believed that an unelected government official, not even a Cabinet member confirmed by the Senate but simply one of the many 'czars' appointed by the President, could arbitrarily cut the pay of executives in private businesses by 50 percent or 90 percent? Did you think that another 'czar' would be talking about restricting talk radio? That there would be plans afloat to subsidize newspapers -- that is, to create a situation where some newspapers' survival would depend on the government liking what they publish? Did you imagine that anyone would even be talking about having a panel of so-called 'experts' deciding who could and could not get life-saving medical treatments? Scary as that is from a medical standpoint, it is also chilling from the standpoint of freedom. If you have a mother who needs a heart operation or a child with some dire medical condition, how free would you feel to speak out against an administration that has the power to make life and death decisions about your loved ones? Does any of this sound like America? How about a federal agency giving school children material to enlist them on the side of the president? Merely being assigned to sing his praises in class is apparently not enough. How much of America would be left if the federal government continued on this path? ... How far the President will go depends of course on how much resistance he meets. But the direction in which he is trying to go tells us more than all his rhetoric or media spin. Barack Obama has not only said that he is out to 'change the United States of America,' the people he has been associated with for years have expressed in words and deeds their hostility to the values, the principles and the people of this country. ... Nothing so epitomizes President Obama's own contempt for American values and traditions like trying to ram two bills through Congress in his first year -- each bill more than a thousand pages long -- too fast for either of them to be read, much less discussed. That he succeeded only the first time says that some people are starting to wake up. Whether enough people will wake up in time to keep America from being dismantled, piece by piece, is another question -- and the biggest question for this generation." --economist Thomas Sowell

While I don't care much for Obama, I think this guy is stretching it a bit. I do think we need to worry about things, but it's obvious this guy is very biased and trying to make it look as worst case scenario as possible. While that may be good to "expect the worst", we also have to be realistic, so I think he is taking it a bit far with some of his comments. But we should all get out there and make an impact if we want something to change.

Originally Posted by eric84

While I don't care much for Obama, I think this guy is stretching it a bit. I do think we need to worry about things, but it's obvious this guy is very biased and trying to make it look as worst case scenario as possible. While that may be good to "expect the worst", we also have to be realistic, so I think he is taking it a bit far with some of his comments. But we should all get out there and make an impact if we want something to change.

The first point in the article is the most important...that authority is being given to unelected officials for powers that are not constitutional. We're in a free-for-all of "everything that can be done to undermine constitutional limitations will, no, MUST be done."

I agree about his bias. While he's from JBS, he's more GOP instead of being as independent as he would need to be. While he is stretching it, we have suffered from a history of ignoring the "unlikely" (my word) scenarios that later become someones opportunity for power, sometimes as was the objective in the first place. When we say/think "be realistic" as you said, the unfortunate effect of telling people that is that they stop expecting the worst, which you also said it may be good to do. We need to understand that a worst case scenario IS possible, while not happening now, but being created now. Solution? DOn't allow the possibilities. Law is supposed to be written narrowly, not broadly. The real problem is in what is able to be done by certain administration, not whether or not they're already practicing it. The solution is to not open loopholes in the first place. I think that's why he goes to the extreme.

SO think about Congress passing an unconstitutional bill. Their job is not to do so, but they do so anyway and it gets enforced as law (which local law enforcement is not required to do, but does out of ignorance) and the courts neglect to clean up the problem. That's where we are now. So worse yet, along the same lines, we write laws that are not precisely defined and leave elbow room for power expansion. That's how the UN charter was written, and deliberately so, which is why they keep declaring jurisdiction over one thing after another (see ICC).

I think this guy is trying to scare people into understanding a simpler idea. We need to stop accepting the excuse of "no one will ever do that" (where that = exercise a particular loophole or weakness in a system). In fact, years later, "that" is what ends up happening (e.g. removal of the Glass-Stiegal act, spelling?). If not years....remember the bailout money last octobre that instantly disappeared with Bernankie and Ketchakari (sp?) saying "what [issues]?" only months later. That was just theft. Now they're in charge.

(Side note, don't forget the summer '08 kidnapping of Obama's press corps? That was a federal crime that went unpunished. Why give these people any elbow room?)