Conservative Strength
Do we have one voice...or will we continue to have many leaders up until the mid-term elections?
 
The nation as a whole has re-learned that elections have consequences.  We need to stay on top of the health care debate and cap and trade...we cannot give an inch...no in the name of bipartisanship.  Give the Liberals an opening and it indeed will be a very slippery slope.  We must remain steadfast and continue to examine legislation and the so-called "czars" (man, I hate that term!...it offends my sensibilities)  It is ironic how the Obama administration changes the names of issues and operations to try to make it either politically correct or palatable to the public. (Overseas Contingency Operation vs. War on Terror, health care reform vs. health insurance reform)  Then they choose the name "czar"...go figure.  Then they hire folks who have not paid their taxes and forgive them...if this had been on the other side of the aisle...the press would still be beating this drum. 

This letter was sent to the Wall Street Journal on August 8, 2008 by Alisa Wilson, Ph.D. Of  Beverly Hills , CA  . in response to the Wall Street Journal article titled "Where's The Outrage?" that appeared July 31, 2008 . As of September '09 this is still true today. The only chance to turn things around is to stay active.
_____________________________________________

   " Really? I can tell you where the outrage is. The outrage is here, in this middle-aged, well-educated, upper-middle class woman. The outrage is here, but I have no representation, no voice. The outrage is here, but no one is listening for who am I?

   I am not a billionaire like George Soros that can fund an entire political movement..
   I am not a celebrity like Barbra Streisand that can garner the attention of the press to promote political candidates. I am not a film maker like Michael Moore or Al Gore that can deliver misleading movies to the public.

   The outrage is here, but unlike those with money or power, I don't know how to reach those who feel similarly in order to effect change.


   Why am I outraged? I am outraged that my country, the United States of America , is in a state of moral and ethical decline. There is no right or wrong anymore, just what's fair.

   Is it fair that millions of Americans who overreached and borrowed more than they could afford are now being bailed out by the government and lending institutions to stave off foreclosure? Why shouldn't these people be made to pay the consequences for their poor judgment?

   When my husband and I purchased our home, we were careful to purchase only what we could afford. Believe me, there are much larger, much nicer homes that I would have loved to have purchased. But, taking responsibility for my behavior and my life, I went with the house that we could afford, not the house that we could not afford The notion of personal responsibility has all but died in our country.

   I am outraged, that the country that welcomed my mother as an immigrant from Hitler's Nazi Germany and required that she and her family learn English now allows itself to be overrun with illegal immigrants and worse, caters to those illegal immigrants.

   I am outraged that my hard-earned taxes help support those here illegally. That the Los Angeles Public School District is in such disarray that I felt it incumbent to send my child to private school, that every time I go to the ATM, I see "do you want to continue in English or Spanish?", that every time I call the bank, the phone company , or similar business, I hear "press 1 for English or press 2 for Spanish." WHY? This is America , our common language is English and attempts to promote a bi- or multi-lingual society are sure to fail and to marginalize those who cannot communicate in English.

   I am outraged at our country's weakness in the face of new threats on American traditions from Muslims. Just this week, Tyson's Food negotiated with its union to permit Muslims to have Eid-al-Fitr as a holiday instead of Labor Day. What am I missing? Yes, there is a large Somali Muslim population working at the Tyson's plant in  Tennessee . Tennessee , last I checked, is still part of the United States .  If Muslims want to live and work here, they should be required to live and work by our American Laws and not impose their will on our long history.

   In the same week, Random House announced that they had indefinitely delayed the publication of The Jewel of Medina, by Sherry Jones, a book about the life of Mohammed's wife, Aisha due to fear of retribution and violence by Muslims. When did we become a nation ruled by fear of what other immigrant groups want? It makes me so sad to see large corporations cave rather than stand proudly on the principles that built this country.

   I am outraged because appeasement has never worked as a political policy, yet appeasing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is exactly what we are trying to do. An excellent article, also published recently in the Wall Street Journal, went through over 20 years of history and why talking with  Iran has been and will continue to be ineffective. Yet talk, with a madman no less, we continue to do. Have we so lost our moral compass and its ability to detect evil that we will not go in and destroy Iran 's nuclear program? Would we rather wait for another Holocaust for the Jews - one which they would be unlikely to survive? When does it end?

 As if the battle for good and evil isn't enough, now come the Environmentalists who are so afraid of global warming that they want to put a Bag tax on grocery bags inCalifornia; to eliminate Mylar balloons; to establish something as insidious as the recycle police in San Francisco. I do my share for the environment: I recycle, I use water wisely, I installed an energy efficient air conditioning unit. But when and where does the lunacy stop?Ahmadinejad wants to wipe Israel off the map, the California economy is being overrun by illegal immigrants, and the United States of America no longer knows right from wrong, good from evil. So what does California do? Tax grocery bags.

   So, America , although I can tell you where the outrage is, this one middle-aged, well-educated, upper middle class woman is powerless to do anything about it. I don't even feel like my vote counts because I am so outnumbered by those who disagree with me.

   Alisa Wilson, Ph.D. Beverly Hills , California "


      There are a lot more out there, including myself,  who think just like Alisa Wilson.  The only difference is that she put her thoughts in an email that will reach thousands.  I would like to keep this going in the hope that, eventually, WE will again become the Majority and help to return our nation to the values it was founded upon.   How about YOU ?????

http://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/obama_holder_war_with_cia/2009/08/31/254698.html

I just don't get it.  Why does Congress...i.e. Nancy Pelosi think we must have this public option?  She seems to want to remake the system for the few without health care and make it mandatory.  Since when is government "Big Brother"?  Next they want to tell us what to eat, how much exercise, what our thermostat must be at, what kind of car, how long to live, what drugs allowed for our age...and on and on...what business is it of theirs?  If we can afford to keep out thermostat at a certain setting...leave us alone.  Stop trying to be the thought police or the food police or inserting a government bureaucrat into our health care decisions.

Here is something written by author and playwright Walter A. Meares:

The Course Ahead

The way ahead is fraught with danger to the Republic.  We are very
much at risk of being asked to vote ourselves into oblivion so we can
embrace a perfect society envisioned by those who will not yet define
it or subject it to a fair and open evaluation by the people - the voters,
those who must give their consent.  Remember our nation is founded
on the premise that governments conceived by the people derive their
just powers from the consent of the governed.

The Obama administration seems to want what Thomas Sowell calls : "economic justice".
From a Daily News article: "What does "economic justice" mean, except that you want something that someone else produced, without having to produce anything yourself in return?"

How much is one additional year of your life worth?

Or one more year of life for your father or your wife? For your child?

In Great Britain, the government has settled on a number: $45,000.

That's how much a government commission with the Orwellian acronym NICE has decided British government-run health care will pay for one additional year of life for a British subject.

Think it could never happen here? Then you need to pay closer attention to what Washington is planning for your health care.

British Government Bureaucrats Literally Decide if Your Life is Worth Living

The British single-payer bureaucrats arrived at the price of an additional year of life in the same way they decide how much health care all British people will get, through a formula called "quality-adjusted life years."

That means that if you're sick in Great Britain, government bureaucrats literally decide if your life is worth living and, if so, how much longer and at what cost.

If it's more than $45,000, you're out of luck.

A Well-Connected White House Advocate for Allocating Health Care
Based on Perceived Societal Worth

In the highest levels of the Obama Administration there is a theory of how to ration health care that is troublingly reminiscent of the British system of "quality-adjusted life years."

Dr. Ezekial Emanuel is a key health care advisor to President Obama and the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. Earlier this year, Dr. Emanuel wrote an article that advocated what he called "the complete lives system" as a method for rationing health care. You can read it here.

The system advocated by Dr. Emanuel would allocate health care based on the government's perception of the societal worth of the patients. Accordingly, the very young and the very old would receive less care since the former have received less societal investment and the latter have less left to contribute.

"Forstall[ing] the Concern that Disproportionate Amounts of Resources
Will be Directed to Young People with Poor Prognosis"

"The Complete Lives System" would also consider the prognosis of the individual.

Quoting Dr. Emanuel: "A young person with a poor prognosis has had few life-years but lacks the potential to live a complete life. Considering prognosis forestalls the concern that disproportionately large amounts of resources will be directed to young people with poor prognosis."

When fully implemented, Dr. Emanuel's system, in his words, "produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated."

"Chances that are attenuated" is a nice way of saying the young and the old are considered less worthy of health care and, under this system, will get less.

Once Government Becomes the Provider of Health Care,
Personal Decisions Become Public Decisions

The point is not that a health care rationing system like the one favored by Dr. Emmanuel will be implemented in the United States tomorrow.

The point is that, as in the British system, once government becomes the single payer or even the main payer of health care, what were once intensely personal decisions become public decisions. And as costs rise, government will look for ways to contain them.

The inevitable result of this pressure to control costs will be rationing, whether it occurs during this administration or the next. At some point, the government will be forced to deny care to those who don't meet the latest "quality-adjusted life years" cost-benefit analysis.

So the decision on what treatment to pursue that once would have been made by you and your doctor is now made for you by a bureaucrat using a formula - a formula to literally determine if your life is worth saving.

The Camel's Nose Under the Tent of Health Care Rationing

Societies don't arrive at this point overnight.

British health care was nationalized soon after World War II, but NICE, the health care rationing agency, wasn't created until the late 1990s as a way to control costs.

Today NICE routinely denies Britons life-prolonging drugs that are deemed not "cost effective" - drugs that are widely prescribed in America to treat cancer, Alzheimer's disease and other serious conditions.

The result, studies show, is that Great Britain's cancer survival rates are among the worst in Europe and lag behind the United States.

In America, Rationing Begins with Comparative Effectiveness Research (CER)

In our country, the road to dehumanizing, bureaucratic health care rationing begins with something called comparative effectiveness research (CER). It sounds completely innocent. In practice, CER means comparing different treatments for diseases to see which works best. And what doctor or patient would object to that, right?

The problem is that, in the context of a government-run health care system, comparative effectiveness research becomes a way to find a cheaper, one-size-fits-all approach to medicine that will limit health care choices for patients.

But don't just take my word for it. Congressional Democrats included $1.1 billion in the Stimulus Bill for CER. Report language explaining the bill noted that the treatments found to be "more expensive" as result of the research "will no longer be prescribed" and that "guidelines" should be developed to manage doctors.

Congressional Democrats also killed several amendments to the current health care bill that would have prevented CER from being used to ration care. (To learn more about the common-sense amendments to the bill that have been blocked, click here).

The Government Has Determined You Must Take the Blue Pill

President Obama innocuously described the intended result of comparative effectiveness research like this: "If there's a blue pill and a red pill, and the blue pill is half the price of the red pill and works just as well, why not pay half price for the thing that's going to make you well?"

Listen to what the President is saying here. He's saying that the government is capable of determining which pill works best for you and should therefore only pay for that pill.

But this one-size-fits-all approach goes against everything modern medicine is learning about the genetics of the human body. Different individuals and members of different ethnic and age groups respond differently to treatments. More and more, treatment of diseases like cancer is highly individualized and based on a genetic analysis of both the patient and her disease. Science is leading us in one direction and the administration and the Congress are taking us in the other.

What if you get sick and your doctor says you need the red pill, but the government has determined that the blue pill is what works best for its budget? In a single payer health world, what do you do then?

Creating a Commission to do the Dirty Work

Government bureaucrats limiting health care choices is terribly unpopular of course, which is why politicians use terms like "comparative effectiveness research" instead of "rationing."

Another method Washington uses to avoid complicity in health care rationing is the creation of government boards or commissions - like Britain's NICE - to do the job for them.

President Obama has expressed his support for using the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), a commission created to advise Congress on Medicare, to achieve cost savings under health care reform.

Because the commission's decisions could only be over-ridden by a joint resolution of Congress, it would be virtually unaccountable to the people - and nervous members of Congress could blame the commission for unpopular decisions.

Combine this kind of a commission with the "complete lives system" advocated by White House health care advisor Dr. Ezekial Emanuel and you end up with a government rationing board literally determining which Americans should live and which should die.

Just Trust the Government

Supporters of government-run health care dismiss these worries as alarmist. They argue that because their big government health care bill doesn't overtly call for rationing, it is somehow illegitimate to talk about this danger.

But it is always legitimate to consider the long-term consequences of a government program. By refusing to have an honest debate of this issue - to explore honestly the consequences of the "painful choices" that all supporters of government health care say must be made - their argument boils down to nothing more than this:

Trust the government.

Trust the politicians who are passing 1000-page bills they haven't read.

Trust the leaders who are demonizing the citizens seeking to express their disagreement by calling them "un-American."

Trust the advisors who advocate sacrificing the weak and the old and then hide in the shadows.

Trust the government to know what's best for the most intimate, most personal part of you and your family's life: your health.

Go ask a British citizen if it's worth it.

To just shut up and trust the government.

Your friend,    Newt Gingrich

Newt's Quick Links:

• Of course, just because the big government health bill in Congress should be defeated doesn't mean that America's health system isn't in urgent need of reform. For more information about the work we're doing in health and healthcare, please visit the Center for Health Transformation.
• The Newt.org Store is running specials on autographed books. Click here.
• And don't forget Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous with Destiny and other DVDs hosted by Callista and me, also available.

If you have a great product and want to sell it...then all you need is superior product knowledge and a little faith in the product as well as yourself...

To me, it seems that the Liberal Left has none of the above.  They do not have a great product  (evidenced by the fact that they voted down John Shadegg's amendment to mandate it for all Federal employees and the Congress).  They do not have faith in it...as evidenced by the fact that they keep changing the discussion to swastikas, Nazis, right wing wackos, domestic terrorists, astro turf, tea bag movement, racists, etc.  They blame the right for attending town halls and asking substantive questions.  They blame the insurance companies.  Why do we need a villain?  They run from discussing the substance of what is in the bill...printed on the 1,000 plus pages.  One must ask oneself why?

When confronted by constituents, it seems some politicians want to avoid answering specific questions or "fudge" their answers to CYA.  The public would have a lot more confidence in the administration if the Senators and Representatives would come out and answer by documenting pages of the given bill.  After all it is their job to read and explain said bill to us their "employer".  (This is what John Shadegg did.) 

I sent an email to the White House and received a generic email by David Axelrod about having a "reality check" on OBAMA HEALTHSCARE!


This is my reply: