A relationship not worth sustaining anymore. Enough political correctness already!
I see where Obama is concerned about spending. You can tell this by how concerned he is about spending $40 billion to send the additional troops to Afghanistan as requested by General McChrystal. He didn’t mind giving Citibank $45 billion in the bailout of the banks. What are they doing with these funds? They are not loaning it out for businesses – bonuses maybe, and buying gold and investing for more money! Then of course Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got billions and billions and are now asking for more. However, now they are going into rentals, keeping those who bought houses they couldn’t afford inside those homes. I understand many of them are free rentals and Fannie and Freddie will be doing the repairs and maintenance. Good use of taxpayers money…. I think not!
Obama and the Democrats are using all of their time and efforts to pass a budget busting, physically irresponsible bill. With their health care bill, they have put in a part to have people who don’t get their insurance, when passed, face massive fines and jail time. Unconstitutional is the softest expression I can use to describe this. I can’t use the language that would really apply. There are other things in this bill that are covered up with double-speak. There is no tort reform. Lawyers give the Democrats half of their campaign funds. There is also no putting into place policies that would allow crossing state lines by insurance companies to encourage competition by the insurance companies. This might also allow them to compete with the plan by the Democrats to have government take over health care in total. What a tragedy that would be.
See this article:
From :
During an , President Obama said that penalties are appropriate for people who try to “free ride” the health care system but stopped short of endorsing the threat of jail time for those who refuse to pay a fine for not having insurance.
“What I think is appropriate is that in the same way that everybody has to get auto insurance and if you don’t, you’re subject to some penalty, that in this situation, if you have the ability to buy insurance, it’s affordable and you choose not to do so, forcing you and me and everybody else to subsidize you, you know, there’s a thousand dollar hidden tax that families all across America are — are burdened by because of the fact that people don’t have health insurance, you know, there’s nothing wrong with a penalty.”
Under the House bill those who can afford to buy insurance and don’t’ pay a fine. If the refuse to pay that fine there’s a threat – as with a lot of tax fines – of jail time. The Senate removed that provision in the Senate Finance Committee.
Mr. Obama said penalties have to be high enough for people to not game the system, but it’s also important to not be “so punitive” that people who are having a hard time find themselves suddenly worse off, thus why hardship exemptions have been built in the legislation.
“I think the general broad principle is simply that people who are paying for their health insurance aren’t subsidizing folks who simply choose not to until they get sick and then suddenly they expect free health insurance. That’s — that’s basic concept of responsibility that I think most Americans abide by,” Mr. Obama said, “penalties are appropriate for people who try to free ride the system and force others to pay for their health insurance.”
The President said that he didn’t think the question over the appropriateness of possible jail time is the “biggest question” the House and Senate are facing right now.
Read more from Jake Tapper’s interview with President Obama .
-Sunlen Miller
We have had free speech in this country since it was founded. Even Father Charles Coughlin and the German Bund, prior to World War II, were allowed to speak antisemitism and communism against Jews and others they hated. The Muslims in this country are allowed to speak openly, espousing their views currently. FDR put in internment camps for the Japanese people, some Germans and Italians during World War II and now, because of political correctness, no Muslims may be questioned, even if they espouse views encouraging other Muslims in other parts of the world to hate and portray violence on America and its citizens. They cannot be questioned and so our world towers were attacked by Muslims. This is what caused the Fort Hood terrorist act and an effort is being made to place this terrorist act as the work of a madman. BULLSHIT!
The Third Reich would not allow anyone to speak in dissent and Americans voiced our disapproval. Now, in this country, efforts are being made to stifle dissent. It isn’t anymore “Loose lips sink ships,” but “Dissent cannot be voiced by American citizens because loose lips can sink an administration.” That is horrible. See the following article:
In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
The grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Web site “not to disclose the existence of this request” unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.
Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department’s subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their and – work toward “promoting social and economic justice” and “social change.”)
The (PDF) from U.S. Attorney in Indianapolis demanded “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to “include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information,” including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers’ Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
“I didn’t think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention,” Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.
Under long-standing , subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that “no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media” without “the express authorization of the attorney general” – that would be current attorney general – and subpoenas should be “directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter.”
Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: “We have no comment.” The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.
, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based , replied to the Justice Department on behalf of his client in a (PDF) outlining what he described as a series of problems with the subpoena, including that it was not personally served, that a judge-issued court order would be required for the full logs, and that Indymedia did not store logs in the first place.
Morrison replied in a saying the subpoena had been withdrawn. Around the same time, according to the EFF, the group had a series of discussions with assistant U.S. attorneys in Morrison’s office who threatened Clair with possible prosecution for obstruction of justice if she disclosed the existence of the already-withdrawn subpoena — claiming it “may endanger someone’s health” and would have a “human cost.”
, the executive director of the , said a gag order to a news organization wouldn’t stand up in court: “If you get a subpoena and you’re a journalist, they can’t gag you.”
Dalglish said that a subpoena being issued and withdrawn is not unprecedented. “I have seen any number of these things withdrawn when counsel for someone who is claiming a reporter’s privilege says, ‘Can you tell me the date you got approval from the attorney general’s office’… I’m willing to chalk this up to bad lawyering on the part of the DOJ, or just not thinking.”
Making this investigation more mysterious is that Indymedia.us is an aggregation site, meaning articles that appear on it were published somewhere else first, and there’s no hint about what sparked the criminal probe. Clair, the system administrator, says that no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are recorded for Indymedia.us, and non-IP address logs are kept for a few weeks and then discarded.
EFF’s Bankston wrote a to the government saying that, if it needed to muzzle Indymedia, it should apply for a gag order under the that clearly permits such an order to be issued. Bankston’s plan: To challenge that law on First Amendment grounds.
But the Justice Department never replied. “This is the first time we’ve seen them try to get the IP address of everyone who visited a particular site,” Bankston said. “That it was a news organization was an additional troubling fact that implicates First Amendment rights.”
This is not, however, the first time that the Feds have focused on Indymedia — a Web site whose authors sometimes blur the line between journalism, advocacy, and on-the-streets activism. In 2004, the Justice Department asking for information about who posted lists of Republican delegates while urging they be given an unwelcome reception at the party’s convention in New York City that year. A Indymedia hosting service in Texas asking for server logs in relation to an investigation of an attempted murder in Italy.
Bankston has written a of the exchange of letters with the Justice Department, which he hopes will raise awareness of how others should respond to similar legal demands for Web logs, customer records, and compulsory silence. “Our fear is that this kind of bogus gag order is much more common than one would hope, considering they’re legally baseless,” Bankston says. “We’re telling this story in hopes that more providers will press back and go public when the government demands their silence.”
Update 1:59pm E.T.: A Justice Department official familiar with this subpoena just told me that the attorney general’s office never saw it and that it had not been submitted to the department’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. for review. If that’s correct, it suggests that U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison and Assistant U.S. Attorney Doris Pryor did not follow requiring the “express authorization of the attorney general” for media subpoenas — and it means that neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor Acting Attorney General Mark Filip were involved. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an internal investigation by the ; my source would not confirm or deny that.
There has been a current example of money buying votes by the Obama administration for the passing of the House health care bill. Buying votes and earmarks have destroyed any confidence in our elected officials. Jesus drove the money changers from the temple. Now those politicians sit in Washington. The only danger to them is the voters. I hope they come through. Let’s hope there is no march on Washington by the unemployed.
