Month: July 2009

House Dems Censor Republicans on Health Care

Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) made public last week an e-mail from the Franking Commission — a bipartisan panel that oversees messages from lawmakers — asking him to change the phrase “government run” health care to “public option.” This was reported in a report by CNS News Service.

Carter unveiled the e-mail at a press conference on Capitol Hill on Thursday. At the same conference, Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said his colorful chart on “Obamacare” ­– which was voted into the record on the floor of the House earlier this month – was rejected by the Franking Commission for use in his communications with constituents.

According to Carter,

“Now, why can’t I say what I feel about a plan that I’m being asked to vote upon, that has been debated on the floor of the House on multiple occasions, where multiple numbers of people have used the term ‘government run health care plan?’” Carter asked at the press conference last week.

“In fact, I would submit to you, when you look at this chart, how could you not say it’s a government-run health care plan?” he said.

“Why does the Franking Commission have the right to prevent me from freely speaking what I think my folks back home ought to hear and instead tell me I have to speak what the president said last night?” Carter said, referring to President Barack Obama’s televised press conference at the White House last Wednesday.

“I think that is an abridgement of free speech,” he said.

Republicans are going to fight back.

“Why are they so afraid of this chart?” Carter said. “Why are they so afraid of a simple phrase that one member of Congress might say on a telephone town hall? Could it be that they know what this health care plan is?”

John Stone, communications director for Carter, told CNSNews.com that Republicans are not finished fighting what they call censorship by the Franking Commission.

“We plan to take it to the [House] floor on Monday night,” Stone said. “There is going to be a massive protest.”

“And if they try to stop it with a motion to adjourn, we’re going to go outside and hold our speeches,” Stone said. “We will not be silenced.”

Healthcare Is Not A Right

The following is an article by Congressman Ron Paul. What he says is very important so I am reproducing it in full for your review.

Healthcare is a Good, Not a Right
Congressman Ron Paul, 14th District, Texas

Political philosopher Richard Weaver famously and correctly stated that ideas have consequences. Take for example ideas about rights versus goods. Natural law states that people have rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. A good is something you work for and earn. It might be a need, like food, but more “goods” seem to be becoming “rights” in our culture, and this has troubling consequences. It might seem harmless enough to decide that people have a right to things like education, employment, housing or healthcare. But if we look a little further into the consequences, we can see that the workings of the community and economy are thrown wildly off balance when people accept those ideas.

First of all, other people must pay for things like healthcare. Those people have bills to pay and families to support, just as you do. If there is a “right” to healthcare, you must force the providers of those goods, or others, to serve you.

Obviously, if healthcare providers were suddenly considered outright slaves to healthcare consumers, our medical schools would quickly empty. As the government continues to convince us that healthcare is a right instead of a good, it also very generously agrees to step in as middle man. Politicians can be very good at making it sound as if healthcare will be free for everybody. Nothing could be further from the truth. The administration doesn’t want you to think too much about how hospitals will be funded, or how you will somehow get something for nothing in the healthcare arena. We are asked to just trust the politicians. Somehow it will all work out.

Universal Healthcare never quite works out the way the people are led to believe before implementing it. Citizens in countries with nationalized healthcare never would have accepted this system had they known upfront about the rationing of care and the long lines.

As bureaucrats take over medicine, costs go up and quality goes down because doctors spend more and more of their time on paperwork and less time helping patients. As costs skyrocket, as they always do when inefficient bureaucrats take the reins, government will need to confiscate more and more money from an already foundering economy to somehow pay the bills. As we have seen many times, the more money and power that government has, the more power it will abuse. The frightening aspect of all this is that cutting costs, which they will inevitably do, could very well mean denying vital services. And since participation will be mandatory, no legal alternatives will be available.

The government will be paying the bills, forcing doctors and hospitals to dance more and more to the government’s tune. Having to subject our health to this bureaucratic insanity and mismanagement is possibly the biggest danger we face. The great irony is that in turning the good of healthcare into a right, your life and liberty are put in jeopardy.

Instead of further removing healthcare from the market, we should return to a true free market in healthcare, one that empowers individuals, not bureaucrats, with control of healthcare dollars. My bill HR 1495 the Comprehensive Healthcare Reform Act provides tax credits and medical savings accounts designed to do just that.

Netanyahu Rejects Obama Request To Stop Building in East Jerusalem

In the eastern Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, there is a compound that was legally purchased by American businessman Irving Moskowitz in 1985. All papers are in order. The site originally belonged to the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator and mentor of Yasser Arafat, and later became the Shepherd Hotel. Plans now are to replace the hotel with a housing complex of some 20 to 30 apartments, to be purchased by Jewish families.

But Mahmoud Abbas was disturbed about these plans, because this would “shift the demographic balance” in the city. Which is to say that he covets eastern Jerusalem and wants to see it stay predominantly Arab.

(Clarification: It is predominantly Arab not because this was the historical situation, but because Jordan rendered the area Judenrein from 1949-67.)

Reports are that Abbas complained to the Americans. And what happens when Abbas protests? Seems that the American president jumps. Michael Oren, Israeli ambassador to the US, was summoned to the State Department and told that the Obama administration wanted us to stop the building.

“Nothing doing,” Oren told them.

What’s important here is that, not only will Israel refuse, but that PM Netanyahu was reportedly incensed about this, saying that Obama had “crossed a red line.” The issue here is very clear:

Jerusalem united is undisputedly our sovereign capitol. Jews are allowed to build, and live, anywhere in the city. “This has always been Israel’s policy and this is the policy of the current government,” declared the prime minister.

“…There is no prohibition against Arab residents buying apartments in the west of the city and there is no prohibition barring the city’s Jewish residents from buying or building in the east of the city. That is the policy of an open city that is not divided.”

“Thousands of Arab families build houses in Jerusalem, in the [primarily Jewish] neighborhoods of Neve Yaakov and French Hill, and I’ve never heard any comment on the matter from the United States or Europe. I’m trying to put this delicately: It would be very strange if Jews were discriminated against in Jerusalem of all places, especially in light of the fact that it is not an isolated site; this is the heart of the city, very close to the Government Compound and Israel Police Headquarters.”

Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein said,

“A demand to cease construction in a neighborhood situated only several meters from the Hebrew University proves how dangerous it is to be dragged into a debate on settlement freeze, which will lead us to a total demand to freeze our normal lives throughout the entire State of Israel.”

The municipality of Jerusalem also weighed in on this issue, with a statement that reflects a principle of enormous significance:

“The Local Planning Committee of the Jerusalem Municipality operates according to equal criteria for all issues of construction permits, without regard to race, creed, gender, religion, or national identity of the resident or property owner.”

Imagine if Israel tried to prevent Arabs from building legally in the city. It seems that the world finds this acceptable only where Jews are concerned. And the Palestinians deign to refer to Israel as apartheid?

The YNET news site has an article on this issue in which it quotes Prime Minister Netanyahu:

“Our sovereignty in Jerusalem is indisputable. We can’t agree to such a demand in east Jerusalem.”

“I wish to make this clear – the united Jerusalem is the capital of the Jewish people in the State of Israel,” he added.

Leo Rennert writes in The American Thinker

In a Washington Post op-ed intended to catch President Obama’s attention, former Israeli Prime MInister Ehud Olmert urges the U.S. administration to stop obsessing about Jewish settlements and instead focus on Palestinian leader Mahmdoud Abbas’s obstructionism in rejecting any realistic two-state solution.

By lining up with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu against Obama’s misbegotten diplomacy, Olmert demolishes a central tenet of the president’s view of Israel’s approach to peacemaking. Obama has made no secret of the fact that he views Netanyahu’s Likud party as the main Israeli obstacle to the peace process. His administration calculated that, if Likud and Netanyahu could be marginalized — in Israel as well as among most American Jews — Obama would be able to get greater concessions from Israel to move toward a two-state solution.

Olmert’s article demolishes this scenario by making it clear that it’s not just Likud that opposes a total freeze on construction in existing settlements, but that this is a widely held view across the entire Israeli spectrum. Olmert’s Kadima party is just as much at odds with Obama on this as is the Likud.

It’s also a signal to American supporters of Israel, including the Jewish community, that it’s time to press Obama to focus on Abbas’s rejectionism as the main obstacle — not Netanyahu.

All of this leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the US should stop meddling in the internal affairs of a sovereign country. The US would never interfere in the internal decisions of any other country. What gives it the right to do so in Israel?