Home Schoolers Arrested in New York: Fascism In America

In a move designed to send a message to parents, a couple were arrested and ticketed for homeschooling their children and failing to register their them with the school district in Montgomery County, New York.

“Richard Cressy, 47, and Margie Cressy, 41, both of the town of Glen, never registered their four children or their home-schooling curriculum with the local school district, said the Sheriff’s Office,” reports WRGB, a CBS affiliate in Albany, New York. “The Superintendent of the Fonda-Fultonville Central School District confirmed the four children, ranging in age from 8 to 14, had not been registered with the school district for the last seven years.”

The couple may lose custody of their children. The case has been turned over to the Montgomery County District Attorney and the Child Protective Unit.

Local and state governments around the country have moved to criminalize homeschooling and force children to attend dangerous public schools. In 2008 in California, an appeals court ruled that parents do not have a constitutional right to home-school their children.

	Germany’s mandatory education laws are based on Hitler’s ‘Reichsculpflicht Gesetz’ (federal compulsory attendance laws) which were passed in 1938.

Earlier this year, a German couple asked for asylum in the United States after the German government ruled that homeschooling their children was illegal. Uwe Romeike and his family moved to Tennessee after the state threatened to fine him and take away his children. Romeike, an evangelical Christian, objects to German school textbooks containing language and ideas that conflict with his family’s values.

Provisions in the California Education Code require “persons between the ages of six and eighteen” to be in “public full-time day school,” or a “private full-time day school” or “instructed by a tutor who holds a valid state teaching credential for the grade being taught.” The 2nd Appellate Court in Los Angeles argued that “keeping the children at home deprived them of situations where they could interact with people outside the family.” In other words, that court ruled that parents have no right to decide who their children interact with socially and that decision will be left to the state and bureaucrats.

The ruling dramatically affects more than 200,000 homeschooled children in California.

A study conducted in 2002 revealed that public schools are infested with drugs. Half of all teens — and 60 percent of high school teens — report that drugs are used, kept, or sold at their schools. Students at these schools are three times more likely to smoke, drink, or use illicit drugs than students whose schools are substance-free, according to the study.

According to officials in New York and California, parents have no right to protect their children from drugs or shelter them from social brainwashing contrary to their values.

As noted by Michael Farris, chairman and general counsel of the Home School Legal Defense Association, judges around the country are responding to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). “In the 2002 case of Beharry v. Reno, one federal court said that even though the convention was never ratified, it still has an impact on American law,” Farris explained on the LifeSiteNews website. “The fact that virtually every other nation in the world has adopted it has made it part of customary international law, and it means that it should be considered part of American jurisprudence.”

The CRC was adopted by the United Nations in 1989 but not ratified by Congress. If passed, it “would have a negative impact on domestic law and practice in the United States. Article VI of our Constitution makes treaties – and remember, conventions are viewed as treaties – ‘the supreme law of the land.’ The CRC would be treated as superior to laws in every state regarding the parent-child relationship. This would include issues regarding education, health care, family discipline, the child’s role in family decision-making, and a host of other subjects,” writes Michael Smith for The Washington Times.

Many believe under Obama the treaty will eventually be signed and legally binding for millions of parents in the United States.

Article 29 of the CRC limits the right of parents and others to educate children by requiring that all such schools support both the charter and principles of the United Nations and a list of specific values and ideals (for instance, the “principle” of world government, the demonstrably bogus climate change agenda, population reduction, in short the entire globalist program).

“Every conceivable sphere of human activity is being analyzed and then planned for so that it will come under the ultimate control of the United Nations. It is becoming a world legislature, world court, world department of education, world welfare agency, world planning center for industry, science and commerce, world finance agency, world police force, and world anything else anyone might want — or might not want,” wrote Ezra Taft Benson in An Enemy Hath Done This.

The Copenhagen summit on climate change revealed that the United Nations is a front organization for the global elite and its transparent humanist facade will be done away with after world government is established. The United Nations, by and large, is a debating club for leaders and dictators of impoverished third world nations.

Charlotte Iserbyt, who served as Senior Policy Adviser in the Office of Educational Research and Improvement in the U.S. Department of Education during the Reagan administration, has documented how public education is designed to dumb down children and prepare them for “socialism,” that it is to say a world government dictated by an elite who are not “socialist” in the commonly held sense of the word. For the elite, socialism is the perfect control mechanism.

Millions of people now understand the agenda of the U.S. education system and are actively removing their children from the brainwashing and social conditioning – in addition to violence and drug addiction – factories known as public schools.

New York and California, operating under the color of law, are attempting in a feeble manner to intimidate home school parents.Future generations will be reduced to non-thinking and irrational jellyfish capable of only following orders which they don't know they are receiving.

Some government suites are a cult and they want to force you to join or ostracize you out of 'society'. In order to do this, they are turning our children into little Manchurian candidates.

Obama; A Liar Or Just Inept....

Just when we thought we might get the opportunity to shed some light on the process of building the single largest expansion of federal government in history, Obama's promise of transparency via C-Span for Health Care negotiations and debate has been flippantly brushed aside. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, piqued with White House pressure to accept the Senate health reform bill, threw an expected rhetorical elbow Tuesday at President Barack Obama, shirking his commitment to his 2008 campaign promises.

A leadership aide said it was no accident.

Pelosi emerged from a meeting with her leadership team and committee chairs in the Capitol to face an aggressive throng of reporters who immediately hit her with C-SPAN’s request that she permit closed-door final talks on the bill to be televised.

A reporter reminded the San Francisco Democrat that in 2008, then-candidate Obama opined that all such negotiations be open to C-SPAN cameras.

“There are a number of things he was for on the campaign trail,” quipped Pelosi, who has no intention of making the deliberations public.
People familiar with Pelosi's thinking wasted little time in explaining precisely what she meant by a “number of things” — saying it reflected weeks of simmering tension on health care between two Democratic power players who have functioned largely in lock step during Obama’s first year in office.

Senior House Democratic leadership aides say Pelosi was pointedly referring to Obama’s ’08 pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, which she interprets to include a tax on so-called Cadillac health care plans that offer lavish benefit packages to many union members.

The House aides, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Pelosi has been miffed with Obama’s tilt toward the Senate plan and his expectation that the House would simply go along with the Senate bill out of political necessity.

Pelosi has repeatedly expressed her frustrations about the inclusion of the Cadillac tax in the Senate bill and has sparred with Obama about the issue during face-to-face meetings. Her hope now, House aides say, is to get the administration to accept a tax that starts on family plans worth $28,000 — $7,000 more than the threshold favored by Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

The White House has shown a clear preference for the Senate product in the months-long, bifurcated health care debate. And Reid holds the two best trump cards in the form of Sens. Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman, two wavering moderates who have already threatened to vote against a final compromise if it deviates significantly from legislation the Senate passed late last year.

All year, liberal Democrats have been clamoring for Obama to get more involved in the health care negotiations, hoping he would weigh in to push their top priority — the public option. The president is now promising to take a much more active role in these final negotiations — his staff will convene a meeting with House and Senate aides as early as Wednesday to start laying the groundwork for the talks. But that might not be a good thing for the speaker or her liberal colleagues because of the White House preference for the Senate bill.

During a White House meeting Tuesday, Obama told the speaker and other congressional leaders that he would like to see them approve a final bill by his State of the Union address, set for late January or early February. Earlier in the day, House Democrats weren't convinced they could meet that deadline — and seemed ambivalent about whether they even wanted to try.

“We want our final product — as I’m sure everyone in the House and Senate would agree — to insure affordability for the middle class,” Pelosi told reporters after her leadership meeting.Democrats in the House are intent on forcing their counterparts in the Senate to shift money from other programs to make mandatory insurance coverage more affordable.

Reid struggled for months to corral all 60 members of his caucus to move a health care bill through the Senate. That gave individual senators, such as Lieberman and Nelson, the influence to command major concessions from the rest of their colleagues. Their demands, particularly Lieberman’s insistence on scrapping the public option, rankled Democrats in the House.

But the fact is that House Democrats have little recourse to impose their will in negotiations with the Senate unless they make realistic demands.

Party leaders were even forced to break from the traditional means for negotiating with the Senate because it would create additional roadblocks for Reid — and give Republicans more chances to derail the bill.

On Tuesday, the speaker and her colleagues were both forced to defend charges from their own rank and file that these abbreviated negotiations betrayed their own campaign promises to make deliberations public.

The two chambers use different methods to pay for the final bill, and House Democrats seem willing to accept the Senate proposal to tax high-end health care plans as long as they can raise the threshold for plans that qualify.

But they would have to find a way to pay for the lost revenue. One idea being circulated is to raise the amount of money wealthy Americans would be forced to pay for Medicare. The Senate bill already uses the tax to raise that money, and it touches on the House plan to impose a surtax on people with the highest annual salaries.

In the end, three points should be made regarding this circus of a process. President Obama clearly no longer commands the respect he thinks he deserves. The current congressional leadership will sink to almost any depths to accomplish their ridiculous goals in this current fluxing economy. Not enough attention has been paid to who truly benefits from these proposed plans, such as pharmaceutical companies and supplemental insurance companies such as AARP.

An additional point is to once again mention that this ambivalent congress has no intention of taking part in the new health care system, and they have allowed themselves exemption from any penalty or tax to help pay for this monstrosity of a bill.

Climategate~ "Oops, did I say that?"

For those who thought the exposed emails from Britain’s University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit would come and go without much play, think again. Surely the skeptics and even the agnostics wouldn’t miss an opportunity to jump on such devastating revelations, but the fact is ClimateGate is having immediate and possibly long-lasting effects all over the world.

In Australia, the emails could literally shift political powers in the land down under:

“Australian Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull has been replaced by a climate sceptic, Tony Abbott, after ten of its most senior politicians resigned over its support for the Government’s plans for fighting global warming. They were, it seems, fired up by the hacked communications from the University of East Anglia. But this is not the end of it. The sceptics coup is likely to lead to a general election before long, fought on climate change.”

In the UK, the head scientist at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) is stepping down:

“The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.”

Back in the United States, Penn State University will investigate the role of Michael Mann in ClimateGate, a professor at PSU and one of the climate researchers at CSU involved in the email threads:

“Penn State officials, who will not discuss the matter, are investigating the controversy. If anything requires further inspection, the school will handle it, a spokesman tells the Daily Collegian. A panel will read every E-mail leaked and determine if climate change critics have any ground for their accusations, the report says.”

And Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) is calling for hearings:

“In a letter to Sen. Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat who chairs the environment committee, Inhofe said the e-mails could have far-reaching policy implications for the United States. Both Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency are taking action to curb global warming based on a report that uses data produced by the Climate Research Unit.”

The American public has already cooled off on the idea of combating global warming with costly cap and tax legislation; the exposed emails are bound to raise even more eyebrows. Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal offers another reason. It’s not necessarily about going green but more so about getting green:

“The European Commission’s most recent appropriation for climate research comes to nearly $3 billion, and that’s not counting funds from the EU’s member governments. In the U.S., the House intends to spend $1.3 billion on NASA’s climate efforts, $400 million on NOAA’s, and another $300 million for the National Science Foundation. The states also have a piece of the action, with California—apparently not feeling bankrupt enough—devoting $600 million to their own climate initiative. In Australia, alarmists have their own Department of Climate Change at their funding disposal.

And all this is only a fraction of the $94 billion that HSBC Bank estimates has been spent globally this year on what it calls “green stimulus”—largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes—of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit handsomely.”

Time will tell how the rest of ClimateGate plays out, but it’s only been a short amount of time since the story broke and a number of significant events have emerged since and certainly more are likely to follow. Clive Cook says it best: “The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

The main point of this argument is not to disprove that there environmental climate issues. We can all agree that good stewardship of or planet is necessary. More importantly, let us be sure we are treating this with true empirical science rather that expedient conjecture and tampered findings when considering how to implement global organizations and governing bodies which will pose a serious economic threat to jobs and industry everywhere.

The Latest Milestone in Chinese Tyranny

For the last two decades, those committed to warm ties with Beijing have tried to tell Americans that the development of capitalism in China—albeit a capitalism that must operate in a system in which the rule of law and property rights are a matter of government fiat—would eventually transform the totalitarian system. But today, as theNew York Times reports, another milestone has been passed in which such hopes have been revealed as utterly unfounded.

The Chinese capital was the setting on Wednesday for the trial of Liu Xiaobo, one of the country’s leading human-rights advocates. Liu faces up to 15 years in prison for calling for open elections and free speech. His role in promulgating Charter 08, a manifesto in favor of Chinese political freedom, is the chief reason for the government’s latest attempt to silence Liu. As the Times notes, the document’s language that states “We should end the practice of viewing words as crimes” is itself viewed as a crime by the Communist Party.

The persecution of Liu is something of a history of China’s abuse of human rights since 1989. At the time of the Tienanmen Square demonstrations in 1989, he was a visiting scholar at Columbia University but returned home to join the hunger strikers. When the Chinese army struck, he was arrested and held for 21 months without trial. In 1996, he was sent to the laogai—China’s gulag—for three years for calling for the release of others still imprisoned for their participation in the Tiananmen events. Since then he has been a thorn in the side of the Communist Party but the charter, which evokes similar protests by Czech opponents against the Soviet empire, has motivated the government to try and put him away again. Reporters were barred from the trial, as were other dissidents who bravely came to support Liu. This is all we know of the proceedings:


Liu Xiaoxuan, the defendant’s younger brother, was one of two family members allowed in the courtroom. After the trial adjourned, he tried to recall details of the proceedings — court officials had prevented those in the room from taking notes — and he repeated his brother’s final words, spoken to a judge. Mr. Liu, according to his brother, said that he came from a long line of persecuted thinkers and hoped he would be the last. “He said that if he was sent to jail, it might bring others freedom of speech,” Liu Xiaoxuan said.

It would be nice to think that were true. But neither the Obama administration—which allowed Beijing to humiliate the president during his recent trip there—nor its predecessors have had any interest in the fate of Chinese dissidents or the drive for pushing the world’s largest tyranny to change its behavior. The Chinese authorities have stepped up their suppression of freedom in the last year with a vengeance. Yet most Americans either don’t care or still actually believe the propaganda about the Chinese not caring about freedom, which business interests put forward about China and democracy. As with the successful campaign to stifle concerns about Chinese human rights that preceded the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government can count on the self-interest of the business community and the indifference of Washington to allow it to continue its abuses with impunity.

Yet the attempt by Liu to courageously invoke the example of those who challenged the seemingly unshakable grip of Soviet communism in 1977 ought to remind us all that even the most powerful of tyrants can be resisted and toppled. Provided, that is, that dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo be not forsaken by the forces of freedom elsewhere. Just as the West once embraced men like Vaclav Havel and Natan Sharansky, Americans must not allow Liu’s oppressors to triumph in silence.

By: JONATHAN TOBIN

If new Healthcare Bill is so great, why doesn't leadership want it for themselves?

Look who gets exempted!!

Why is Senator Reid trying to exempt Congressional staffers? Read below the email from my FNC colleague Trish Turner:

From: Turner, Trish
To:
Sent: Tue Dec 01 17:16:35 2009

Subject: URGENT: SenReid tries to exempt Congressional staffers from new healthcare reform

Members would get their insurance thru the new exchanges, but according to a new carve-out found by CRS (exposed by Grassley staff here), congressional staffers would be EXEMPT.

Note --- Grassley plans an amendment to reverse this to the original intent of the Senate Finance Cmte bill…..ALL members AND their staff get healthcare from the new exchanges.

From: Office, Press (Finance-Rep) [mailto:Press_Office@finance-rep.senate.gov]

Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 5:05 PM

Subject: more: Senate leadership staff carved out of health care exchanges, Grassley finds

As an addendum to the news release, here’s more on the language change:

“Official office” in the Reid bill refers to members’ personal offices, not any office associated with a committee or leadership position.

THE FINANCE COMMITTEE BILL (based on Grassley Amendment):

On page 81 "an employee whose pay is disbursed by the Secretary of the Senate or the Clerk of the House of Representatives."


THE REID BILL:


On page 157 "employees employed by the official office of a Member of Congress, whether in Washington, D.C., or outside of Washington D.C."

For Immediate Release

Grassley exposes carve-out in Reid health care bill

Iowa senator prepares amendment to reverse carve-out, also include White House in new health care exchanges

Senator Chuck Grassley said it is unacceptable that staff of Senate leadership and committees is now exempted from the requirement that members of Congress and congressional staff get their employer-based health insurance through the same exchanges that would be created for the rest of the country under the Senate Majority Leader’s health care legislation.

A Grassley amendment adopted by the Finance Committee in September established this requirement for all congressional staff, along with members of Congress.

“Careful examination by the Congressional Research Service of the bill that Senator Reid brought to the floor revealed that one of the things that happened behind closed doors was that leadership and committee staff ended up being carved out from having to live under the new health care exchanges that this legislation would create and impose on the rest of the country,” Grassley said. “This creates a double standard. It’s inexcusable.”

Grassley said he’ll offer an amendment to restore his amendment, which the Finance Committee accepted without objection, and which the Congressional Research Service said made clear that leadership and committee staff would be required to access the new exchange.

Grassley said his floor amendment also will expand the requirement to include the President, the Vice President and all political appointees in the executive branch. “The President, the White House staff and cabinet secretaries are working very hard for this massive overhaul of America’s health care system. It’s only fair and logical that if this bill becomes law, these leaders should themselves be subject to the reforms,” he said.

Currently, members of Congress, congressional staff, the President, Vice President, cabinet secretaries, and political appointees participate in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. The exchange that would be established by the legislation pending in the Senate is modeled after this federal employees’ program and is supposed to give participants the same kind of choices and options for health care coverage as federal employees.

Grassley’s interest in having policy makers participate in the exchange is consistent with his long-held view that Congress should live under the same laws it passes for the rest of the country. In 1995, President Clinton signed into law the Congressional Accountability Act, which Grassley authored and fought to advance for six years before it was enacted. Grassley’s Congressional Accountability Act gives employees of the legislative branch protections under 12 civil rights, labor and workplace safety laws by making those laws apply to Congress.

Before enactment of the Congressional Accountability Act, Congress had exempted itself from these laws:

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967

The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

The Employee Polygraph Protection Act of 1988

The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993

The Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Statute

Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970

The Rehabilitation Act of 1973

Veterans’ employment and reemployment rights at Chapter 43 of Title 38 of the U.S. Code

The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act of 1989.

The Congressional Accountability Act was amended in 1998 to include certain provisions of the Veterans Employment Opportunities Act of 1998.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab??? Is There Still A War Being Waged Against Us???

"We must also engage, however, in the more difficult task of understanding the sources of such madness. The essence of this tragedy, it seems to me, derives from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers: an inability to imagine, or connect with, the humanity and suffering of others. Such a failure of empathy, such numbness to the pain of a child or the desperation of a parent, is not innate; nor, history tells us, is it unique to a particular culture, religion, or ethnicity. It may find expression in a particular brand of violence, and may be channeled by particular demagogues or fanatics. Most often, though, it grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair." Obama's response to 9/11 in September 19th 2001 issue of  The New Yorker

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was overpowered by passengers and crew as he allegedly tried to detonate explosives on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 traveling from Amsterdam as it approached Detroit carrying 290 people on Christmas Day. 

The Nigerian man charged with trying to blow up a US airliner was "a well mannered, quietly spoken, polite and able young man," when he was a student in London, a University College of London spokesman said.

Abdulmutallab studied at UCL's campus for an undergraduate degree in engineering with business finance between 2005 and 2008. He was also president of the university's Islamic Society between 2006 and 2007 a university spokesman explained. "During his time on the course, Mr Abdulmutallab never gave his tutors any cause for concern and was a well mannered, quietly spoken, polite and able young man," said UCL president and provost Malcolm Grant. "We are deeply shocked by the recent news concerning Mr Abdulmutallab."

"The department's association with him ended in June 2008 after he successfully graduated," Grant said in a statement.

Unfortunately, our leadership which we have trusted with our safety does not seem to be prepared for 'unseen combatants'. Take for example the President's appointee, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. Beginning with her embrace of the impotent euphemism “man-caused disasters”, to the hit job on conservatives and veterans that she was forced to apologize for, to her assertion that crossing the border illegally“isn’t a crime per se”, to her boneheaded claim that 9/11 terrorists came in through the Canadian border, Ja-No has confirmed time and again that she’s not ready for prime time. 

Why President Obama has not responded to Napolitano's job performance with a request for resignation can not be comprehended. To further illustrate this frightening situation, she also claimed that "the system worked. Everyone played an important roll" and yet the botched bombing was foiled by a faulty detonator and brave passengers, not by politically driven bureaucrats. Janet Napolitano's claims only show that the Department of Homeland Security is far from proficient under her policies and leadership.

Now we should hope that our President, Barack Obama would have more clarity on the topic. Unfortunately  in his first public comments on the attempted bombing, the President described the suspect as “an isolated extremist,” despite reports that the 23-year-old Nigerian had been trained in Yemen, a country he visited twice. The Associated Press, quoting a Yemeni government official, said "Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lived in Yemen for two extended periods of time; for a year from 2004-2005 and again from August to December this year."

Monkey P.C. policies have terribly confused and befuddled what defines a terrorist. Evil words like 'profiling' and 'terrorist' have been shuffled under the rug with this administration in the hope of reaching out and being friends with these poor and misunderstood jihadis. The 23-year-old son of a wealthy Nigerian banker, Abdulmutallab's own father called the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria to share suspisions of his sons activities in Yemen, and yet this information did not put him on a NO/FLY list. 

When asked about possible terrorist connections, Napolitano said "Right now, that is part of the criminal justice investigation that is ongoing, and I think it would be inappropriate to speculate as to whether or not he has such ties."

I feel my friend Joe Armendariz put it best when he wrote "There is nothing 'alleged' about what Abdulmutallab tried to do on Flight 253. And the punk isn't an 'isolated extremist', he is a terrorist who needs to be interrogated and even waterboarded, if necessary, so we can learn everything he knows about future planned terrorist acts on Americans."

Notice that Abdulmutallab (Like most of the terrorists we have seen) is not an ignorant, impoverished, uneducated simpleton as Obama would have us assume. The is not an act birthed from the manipulation of uninformed and desperate Muslim youth. If finding ways to reach out to the impoverished, uneducated youth of Islam is Obama's best solution, why doesn't he personally give up some of his abundant expense account (Rented Estate in Hawaii ) to reach out to these desperate youth.

Death Panels? Was Sarah Palin Right????

PolitiFact.com gave Sarah Palin their “Lie of the Year” award for warning on August 7 that the Democrat’s idea of “cost containment” implied rationing by “death panels.”

The self-described fact-checking web site of the St. Petersburg Times claimed Palin was criticizing a provision in the House bill under which “Medicare would pay for doctors’ appointments for patients to discuss living wills, health care directives and other end-of-life issues.”

The claim that Governor Palin confused one-on-one counseling between doctors and patients with any sort of “panel” was always ridiculous on its face. Indeed, that claim should itself have been a leading candidate for “Lie of the Year.” Yet Palin’s critics kept on equating death panels with counseling throughout the year, as though they could not even begin to understand plain English.

In a column called “Reporting the Lies,” Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein wrote, “Before Sarah Palin talked about death panels, no one knew about Sen. Johnny Isakson’s quiet crusade to persuade Medicare beneficiaries to adopt living wills.”

Adopting a living will requires a lawyer, not a doctor, so there must have been more to the crusade than just that. There is some reason to wonder if the crusaders intended to promote penny-pinching advice like President Obama’s famous suggestion that perhaps grandma should skip the expensive operation and take a cheap pain pill instead (generic, of course).

In any case, no single physician’s advice involves any panel, deathly or otherwise. Palin was clearly worried about rationing by some government-appointed group, panel or board of experts — such the (currently) powerless panel that recently suggested fewer and later breast exams, or the Senate bill’s potentially more lethal Independent Payment Advisory Board

The shameless hoax that Palin had confused individual consulting with rationing by a panel was repeated endlessly. By November, the Washington Post was treating this obvious canard as a established fact: “Proposed health-care reform legislation includes a provision that allows Medicare to pay for “end-of-life” counseling for seniors and their families who request it. The provision — which Sarah Palin erroneously described as “death panels” for seniors — nearly derailed President Obama’s health-care initiative.”

What Palin wrote about death panels clearly had nothing to do with counseling or with any other specifics in seminal House bill. What she wrote was: “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.”

How could anyone believe Palin’s sensible comment about rationing was, in reality, a senseless fear of counseling? To say so was no mistake; it was an oft-repeated big lie.

Rather than even mentioning the House bill, Palin linked to an interesting speech by “Rep. Michele Bachmann [which] highlighted the Orwellian thinking of the president’s health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the brother of the White House chief of staff.”

Dr. Emmanuel’s varied and murky remarks about using panels of experts (like himself) to ration health care are less clear or less candid than those of another bioethicist, Peter Singer of Princeton. Singer’s article, “Why We Must Ration Health Care,” was a cover feature in The New York Times Magazine on July 15 — shortly before Palin took the opposing side of this issue.

Singer’s argument (about an expensive anti-cancer drug) is that, “If there is any point at which you say, ‘No, an extra six months [of life] isn’t worth that much,’ then you think that health care should be rationed.” But the question itself is rhetorical trickery, sophistry. Even if there was certain knowledge about life expectancy with or without some treatment (which is never true), Singer has no right to any opinion about how much an extra six months of my life is worth (and vice-versa) unless he’s paying the bills.

But that, of course, is what makes the proposed expansion of insurance subsidies and Medicaid so ominous. Just as federal politicians imagine that a small minority stake in some bank entitles them to override all other stockholders when it comes to executive pay, federal politicians would surely claim that even small subsidies for anyone’s health insurance entitle them to, as Singer put it, set “limits on which treatments should be paid for.” And those politicians would surely appoint panels of experts as cover when some life-saving procedure, device or drug was ruled-out for those with insufficient quality-adjusted years left to live.

Singer wrote, quite correctly, that in “Medicare, Medicaid and hospital emergency rooms, health care is rationed by long waits. . . [and] low payments to doctors that discourage some from serving public patients.” [emphasis added]

Pending health care bills would make such government-mandated scarcity of health care much worse. There would be massive shifting of money away from Medicare toward Medicaid. But the extra Medicaid money would be spread around more thinly. States would cut benefits to the poor in order to accommodate millions of new, less-poor people lured into Medicaid, at least half of whom (7 or 8 million by my estimate) currently have employer-provided health insurance.

The Senate health bill supposedly intends to slash Medicare payment rates for physicians by 21% next year and more in future years, with permanent reductions in payments to other medical services too. It would also establish an Independent Payment Advisory Board which would be empowered to make deeper cuts which Congress could reject only with considerable difficulty. If that’s not quite a “death panel” it would surely not be pro-life in its impact.

The Congressional Budget Office says, “It is unclear whether such a reduction in the growth rate could be achieved, and if so, whether it would . . . reduce access to care or diminish the quality of care.”

Actually, it’s clear enough that the proposed Medicare cuts won’t be achieved, but that efforts in that direction will nonetheless reduce access to care and diminish its quality. The government can’t boost demand and cut prices without creating excess demand. And that, in turn, means rationing by longer waiting lines and by panels (rationing boards) making life-or death decisions for other people.

As Sarah Palin predicted, “Government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course.”

Alan Reynolds • December 22, 2009 @ 4:56 pm