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But this hasn’t left the Left at a loss to explain Nidal Malik Hasan’s horrific killing spree. It was caused by all the things liberals don’t like — guns, for example. To quote Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, whose corrupt machine politics helped produce our Community Organizer in Chief:

Unfortunately, America loves Guns. We love guns to a point where that uh we see devastation on a daily basis. You don’t blame a group.

Likewise, it was America’s unfortunate love of air travel that caused Hasan’s colleagues to fly passenger airliners into buildings full of innocent people on September 11. You don’t blame a group, unless that group is normal Americans.

If anything good can come of the Islamic atrocity at Fort Hood, it is that liberals in both the government and the media have now squandered the absolute last of their credibility. It simply isn’t possible for them to deny any longer that their depraved ideology puts them on the side of the savages who are trying to destroy us.

On a tip from Charlie G. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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It has come to this, America. Democrats have decided that if you don’t agree with their policies, you are to be fined. And if you don’t pay the fine, you are a criminal and will be sentenced to jail. That’s right, Democrats are criminalizing dissent.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has decided to leave language in her heatlhcare bill that criminalizes and prescribes jail time for any American that does not want to buy private healthcare insurance. Think of this, America. I am telling you that the U.S. Congress has decided to force you to buy the product of a privately owned corporation! The power of the U.S. federal government has never been used to purchase something from a private company but here comes San Fran Nancy to do just that. But, let’s face it. She is only taking her cue from the big guy and his “Chicago way” sort of political thuggery.

The Joint Committee on Taxation issued a letter (Download pdf file) in reply to Representative Dave Crump’s inquiry about the matter of the criminal penalties of refusing to buy healthcare insurance should Pelosi’s version of Obamacare pass.

In reply the JCT outlines the exact language in the bill that proves that Pelosi and her Democrat leaders want to turn YOU into a federal criminal if you don’t want to buy her health insurance. Criminal penalties include:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.
• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

Is it Constitutional? Apparently they just don’t care.

But what does it matter if the Constitution is violated by members of the Democrat Party? After all, they will rewrite the Constitution to suit their transitory criteria with which they’ll pass whatever bill they want to push. The Constitution serves as no obstacle at all to their ambitions.

Here is a prime example. CNSNews asked Senator Burris if he saw this power to coerce the people to engage in preferred commerce in the Constitution:

CNSNews: Federally, if you look at it from a federal standpoint, what area specifically of the Constitution would give Congress the power to mandate an individual to have health insurance?”

Burris: Well, that’s under certainly the laws of the–protect the health, welfare of the country. That’s under the Constitution. We’re not even dealing with any constitutionality here. Should we move in that direction? What does the Constitution say? To provide for the health, welfare and the defense of the country.

So, Burris has decided that “health” is in the Constitution? Certainly the words “general welfare” appear there, but health does not. But, pffft. What do these “words” mean? Why should we let laws and tradition stand in the way of getting votes for a welfare program. With glittering jewels of ignorance like accidental Senator Burris crafting America’s policies, it is no wonder we are fast losing our nation to enemies of democracy, freedom, liberty and the American way.

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If PelosiCare passes, the bill has some very stiff penalties for those refusing to participate. Rep. David Camp (R-MI) requested official word from the Joint Committee on Taxes. If you do not buy what PelosiCare is selling, fines of up to $250,000 and up to 5 years imprisonment, including both civil and criminal trials, may be in your future.

The following information is taken from a letter to Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the ranking member of the Committee on Ways and Means Republicans. Camp asked for clarification of penalties to be imposed if a taxpayer chooses not to purchase at least a $15,000 policy – which Camp says is the “lowest cost family non-group plan under the Speaker’s bill” in 2016.

The date stamp is November 5, 2009 and is on the letterhead of Congress of the United States, Joint Committee on Taxation and is signed by Thomas A. Barthold. Read the entire pdf letter here, as well as Rep. Camp’s comments. The following are significant snippets:

“H.R. 3962 provides that an individual (or a husband and wife in the case of a joint return) who does not, at any time during the taxable year, maintain acceptable health insurance coverage for himself or herself and each of his or her qualifying children is subject to an additional tax.” [page 1]

Among possible Civil penalties for not obeying Nancy Pelosi:
* An “accuracy” penalty of 20% of the underpayment attributable to the health care tax, based on negligence…

* A fraud penalty of 75% of the underpayment…

* A $5,000 penalty for taking a frivolous position on a tax return…

* A delinquency penalty of .5% of the unperpayment, each month, up to a max of 25% of the underpayment…

Among possible Criminal penalties for evading PelosiCare:
* A misdemeanor willful failure to pay – fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

*A felony willful evasion – fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to 5 years.

Seriously? Jail time?

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There is no shortage of rationalizations for Malik Hasan’s murder of 12 soldiers at Fort Hood.

None of their rationalizations, however, mention the fact that he came in dressed in Islamic garb, shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

ABC’s Martha Raddatz “wish[es] his name were Smith.”

Presumably so she could attack him as a Christian fascist like they did to George Tiller’s killer.

George Tiller was killed because of religious beliefs, and the media kept that theme going for weeks. Not one day of coverage here.

And that’s not to complain about media bias but to mention a big problem in this country.

Islamic terrorism kills thousands of people around the world, but no one in the West want to do anything about it.

When you have a problem, you must confront it, as I write on my new blog, Bombs and Dollars.
- Jihad on the rise in America, but America in denial about it

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Today, President Obama signed into law a bill that will dramatically expand the federal hate crimes law, enabling prosecutors to bring federal charges against people who were previously found innocent of hate crimes in state court. The hate-crimes provisions were added to a defense appropriations bill, which the President signed in a White House signing ceremony this afternoon at around 2:30 p.m.

The new law dramatically expands the reach of the existing federal hate-crimes law that was already on the books, by getting rid of the requirement that a hate crime affect federally-protected activities to be prosecuted in federal court. It also adds sexual orientation, gender, disability, and transgender characteristics to a law that was originally designed to protect racial minorities.

The hate-crimes bill was opposed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights for allowing the reprosecution in federal court of people found innocent in state court. The Commission called the new law a “menace to civil liberties” because it is an end-run around constitutional guarantees against double-jeopardy.

As explained earlier, the bill’s sponsors seek to use it to reprosecute people in federal court who have already been found innocent of hate crimes in state court, taking advantage of the “dual sovereignty” loophole in constitutional protections against double jeopardy. Civil libertarians like Nat Hentoff and Wendy Kaminer thus object to the bill on double-jeopardy grounds. Backers of the bill, like the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and Commissioner Michael Yaki, supported the bill partly as a way of prosecuting all over again people who were either found not guilty, or who were convicted only of ordinary crimes, while being acquitted of hate-crimes (like the teenagers acquitted of hate crimes in the Shenandoah incident, and the California case of Joseph Silva and George Silva).

Such re-prosecutions can be an enormous waste of money, and grossly unfair to the people who are reprosecuted, driving them into bankruptcy to pay lawyers to represent them all over again when they have already been found innocent in state court after an expensive trial. When the government re-prosecutes someone, it gains an enormous tactical advantage over the defendant from using the prior prosecution as a test-run, even if the defendant is innocent — making a guilty verdict possible even if the defendant is in fact innocent.

The bill also raises serious constitutional federalism issues under the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision.

Passage of the bill was aided by lousy reporting, in which some journalists, like Reuters, depicted the bill as simply a harmless measure to add sexual orientation to the list of protected characteristics covered by the federal hate-crimes law, ignoring its many other, far more important (and dangerous) changes to federal hate-crimes law.

Many supporters of the hate crimes bill want to allow those found innocent to be reprosecuted in federal court. As one supporter put it, “the federal hate crimes bill serves as a vital safety valve in case a state hate-crimes prosecution fails.” The claim that the justice system has “failed” when a jury returns a not-guilty verdict is truly scary and contrary to the constitutional presumption of innocence and the right to trial by jury.
But it is a view widely shared among supporters of the hate-crimes bill. Syndicated columnist Jacob Sullum pointed out in 1998 that Janet Reno, Clinton’s Attorney General, backed the bill as a way of providing a federal “forum” for prosecution if prosecutors fail to obtain a conviction “in the state court.”

Supporters of the hate crimes bill also see it as a way to prosecute people even in cases where the evidence is so weak that state prosecutors have decided not to prosecute. Attorney General Eric Holder has pushed for the hate crimes bill as a way to prosecute people whom state prosecutors refuse to prosecute because of a lack of evidence. To justify broadening federal hate-crimes law, he cited three examples where state prosecutors refused to prosecute, citing a lack of evidence. In each, a federal jury acquitted the accused, finding them not guilty.

As law professor Gail Heriot notes, “Some have even called for federal prosecution of the Duke University lacrosse team members–despite strong evidence of their innocence.” Advocates of a broader federal hate-crimes law have pointed to the Duke lacrosse case as an example of where federal prosecutors should have stepped in and prosecuted the accused players — even though the state prosecution in that case was dropped because the defendants were actually innocent, as North Carolina’s attorney general conceded (and DNA evidence showed), and were falsely accused of rape by a woman with a history of violence (including trying to run over someone with her car) and making false accusations.

The Obama administration has long supported the hate-crimes bill, which it used as a wedge issue in the 2008 election.

As law professors like Jonathan Turley and Eugene Volokh have noted, the Obama administration recently urged restrictions on hate speech at the United Nations, joining in calls to treat such speech, protected by the First Amendment under Supreme Court rulings, as a human-rights violation in violation of international human-rights treaties. In the U.S., college hate-speech codes have been used to discipline students for criticizing affirmative action, discussing the racial implications of the death penalty, and calling homosexuality immoral. In Canada and Britain, hate speech laws have been used to punish religious criticism of Scientology and homosexuality.

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Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Congress and the Obama administration are about to take up one of the most fundamental issues stemming from the near collapse of the financial system last year — how to deal with institutions that are so big that the government has no choice but to rescue them when they get in trouble.

Sounds reasonable, right? When these huge private institutions fail, it harms lots and lots of Americans. So, what’s the answer?

A senior administration official said on Sunday that after extensive consultations with Treasury Department officials, Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, would introduce legislation as early as this week. The measure would make it easier for the government to seize control of troubled financial institutions, throw out management, wipe out the shareholders and change the terms of existing loans held by the institution.

That, by definition, would be Socialism, where the Government is seizing the means of production.

The official said the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner, was planning to endorse the changes in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee on Thursday.

Shocking, I know!

The White House plan as outlined so far would already make it much more costly to be a large financial company whose failure would put the financial system and the economy at risk. It would force such institutions to hold more money in reserve and make it harder for them to borrow too heavily against their assets.

Setting up the equivalent of living wills for corporations, that plan would require that they come up with their own procedure to be disentangled in the event of a crisis, a plan that administration officials say ought to be made public in advance.

So, what you have is the “don’t call him a Socialist” president creating plans and legislation for the Federal government to actually become involved in the running of private companies before they get into any trouble.

Feel better about which way your Freedoms are heading?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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President Obama recently shifted authority for approving sales to China of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department — a move critics say will loosen export controls and potentially benefit Chinese missile development.

The president issued a little-noticed “presidential determination” Sept. 29 that delegated authority for determining whether missile and space exports should be approved for China to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke. …

The presidential notice alters a key provision of the 1999 Defense Authorization Act that required that the president notify Congress whether a transfer of missile and space technology to China would harm the U.S. space-launch industry or help China’s missile programs. …

Section 1512 of the 1999 law requires the president to certify to Congress in advance of any missile equipment or technology exports to China that the export will not harm the U.S. space-launch industry and that “missile equipment or technology, including any indirect technical benefit that could be derived from such export, will not measurably improve the missile or space launch capabilities of the People’s Republic of China.”

Why was this law necessary? Because Bill Clinton was so far in bed with the Chicoms, he probably snores in Chinese. As a result, technology was passed along to them that may be used to vaporize American cities. But laws don’t apply to The Anointed One, who rules by fiat while his media enablers look the other way.

Henry Sokolski, director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, said restoring Commerce Department control over the sensitive exports is a “step backward.”

“It’s as though Commerce’s mishandling of missile-tech transfers to China in the 1990s never happened,” said Mr. Sokolski, a former Pentagon proliferation specialist. “But it did. As a result, we are now facing much more accurate, reliable missiles from China.”

Mr. Sokolski said he expects the U.S. government under the new policy to again boost Chinese military modernization through “whatever renewed ‘benign’ missile technology” is approved.

“It was foolish for us to do this in the 1990s and is even more dangerous for us to do now,” he said.

The director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Gary Milhollin, isn’t happy either:

It is shocking that it would be delegated to the secretary of commerce, whose job it is to promote trade, rather than to the secretary of state or the secretary of defense, who have far more knowledge and responsibility within their organizations for missile technology. … In fact, the delegation turns the present law upside down because Congress passed it after finding that the Commerce Department had improperly helped China import U.S. missile technology in the 1990s.

They needn’t worry. Comrade Obama believes in nuclear disarmament — at least for the USA, which liberals inform us is the source of all evil in the world.

On a tip from Conan. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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The Old Media wholly ignored the story, but one of the extremists that Barack Obama appointed as a so-called czar in his government had to step down when the full extent of his un-American radicalism was exposed on the Internet. Obama’s “green czar,” Van Jones, resigned when it was revealed how anti-American his rhetoric was not to mention his membership in a Marxist organization. But Van Jones isn’t the only far leftist that Obama has tried to foist on this country in places of influence.

We’ve been hearing lately about the radical homosexual agenda of Obama’s “safe schools czar,” Kevin Jennings. When he was a school teacher, Jennings once admittedly abetted a sexual relationship between a teenage male student of his and an adult man. He did not report this molestation, but smiled and advised the poor kid to “use a condom.”

There are several other examples of Obama’s radical appointees, some of whom have already had to leave their positions, and lately we’ve seen another example in Obama’s FCC “diversity czar,” Mark Lloyd.

On October 8, Glenn Beck reported that Mark Lloyd had co-authored a paper titled “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.” This slanted paper whines that AM talk radio is dominated by conservative views and suggests that liberal views should be forced upon the talk radio industry.

That left-wing idea, of course, is bad enough, but the group that Lloyd was working with to have the paper published shows ties to left-wingers, out right Marxists and other haters of this country and that connection should have disqualified Lloyd for service in the federal government.

Lloyd published his report with a group called The Center for American Progress and the Free Press both headquartered in Washington D.C. These groups claim to be “nonpartisan,” but that belies their leftist ideologies.

For instance, founder of the Free Press, Robert W. McChesney, has said some pretty harsh stuff against the U.S.A

For instance, at the end of September of 2001, right after the Twin Towers fell, McChesney said that the United States was the, “leading terrorist institution in the world today.”

In February of 2009, McChesney recommended that capitalism be “dismantled” in the U.S.A. It is typical communist boilerplate.

In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles. This is something that the great majority of the population will undoubtedly learn in the course of their struggles for a more equal, more humane, more collective, and more sustainable world. In the meantime, it is time to begin to organize a revolt against the ruling class–imposed ceiling on civilian government spending and social welfare in U.S. society.

A November, 2004 interview conducted by one Tanner Mirrlees for a magazine called “Relay, a Socialist Project Review,” McChesney called advertising “capitalist propaganda” and proposed the government “limit” it and “perhaps even eliminate it.”

Advertising is commercial propaganda… We need to do whatever we can to limit capitalist propaganda, regulate it, minimize it, and perhaps even eliminate it.

McChesney has also taken the lead in pushing for a government bail-out of the newspaper industry in order to take control of the news message.

And these are the sort of people that Obama’s “diversity czar” surrounds himself with and he isn’t the only one in Obama’s administration that does so. Sadly, the Old Media completely ignores the anti-American ideas being spouted by Obama’s so-called czars and their friends.

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