Archive for March 15th, 2010
Question: If the government could succeed in forcing you to buy a product from a private entity with Healthcare Rationing, what else could it force you to buy?
Here’s a question for legal minds out there, that we’ve been unable to resolve here at Buzzquarters.
It took a constitutional amendment to allow the federal government to collect income tax.
It couldn’t just decide one day it wanted to take money away from people. It had to amend the Constitution to do that.
Because, otherwise, what it was trying to force upon people was illegal.
Nowhere in the Constitution is a provision that allows the federal government to force citizens to buy products. The government can’t make you buy corn, no matter how much Iowa might want you too. The government can’t require you to purchase 75 pounds of sausage annually, no matter how much Chicago might want you to, or how much Rahm Emanuel lays awake at night drooling for thick, juicy, enormous sausage. The government cannot make you buy kittens, no matter how adorable they are, or how many of them out there need good homes.
The government cannot force you to purchase health insurance.
As we understand the Constitution, it would as illegal as the government trying to force you to buy Coke or Pepsi, or spend your money on anything else it wants you to spend it on.
But, we wonder, if the government WAS allowed to force you to buy the product that is health insurance, what else could it force you to buy?
Could it mandate specific items…manufactured in the home districts of Democrats up for re-election…or put onto store shelves by companies who were big-time Democrat donors?
The owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers is a big Obama supporter. Could the federal government require everyone in Pittsburgh to buy Steelers tickets, with everyone else in the nation required to own at least one Steelers ballcap?
Martha Stewart is a big Dem donor. She has a line of cheap crap at K-Mart. Will we all have to buy that as well?
Penny Pritzker, of Hyatt Hotels, is besties with the Obamas. Will Democrats require us all to stay at Hyatts, instead of Republican-supporting (and Mormon!) Marriotts?
Where would this slippery slope end?
What are your thoughts on this?
Cleveland Public Schools get a mention on Big Government
BigGovernment ran a little blurb on Cleveland Public Schools — which, at various times, in repeated surveys, were ranked “worst on any known planet”.
When Sebastian was in his early 20s, he used to volunteer in Cleveland Public Schools as a reading tutor, by way of the Big Brothers/Big Sisters program. One of the schools he tutored in was Citizen’s Academy, which was a privately-run charter school near the cultural institutions of University Circle.
Everything was brand-new in the school. The city, under Public School Chief Barbara Byrd Bennet, paid a massive – MASSIVE – amount of money to a private company to create new schools, since the old ones were beyond terrible. Byrd Bennet is one of the most inept, corrupt, and vile human beings any of us have ever had the displeasure of meeting. Just a highlight of her personality, once, sometime in 2000 or 2001, the weekend of her daughter’s wedding, she and her daughter raised hell in Jake’s Bar at the Marriott in downtown Cleveland, carrying on like a circus act, yelling at customers and staff, drunk as skunks, demanding free everything under that “Don’t you know who I am?” banner…followed quickly, when met resistance, by “Well, that’s just RAAAACIST!”. It was painful to watch, considering THIS was who the City put in charge of the SCHOOLS.
Disgusting.
Sebastian still tells the stories, to this day, of what it was like to tutor at Citizen’s Academy.
There were multiple, armed-guard checkpoints of entry, leading down twisting halls in a building we think was once part of Mt. Sinai hospital. Children ran through the halls screaming and yelling, with absolutely no discipline. The teachers all spouted liberalisms and, in hushed tones, repeatedly said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have an expectation of excellence that requires you to moderate your behavior and lower the volume of your speech while in the hallways”.
Ineffective, liberal robots.
It was pure chaos in those hallways every time Sebastian set foot in that school, with the liberals just repeating over and over the same sayings they all used to ineffectively talk to the kids — none of whom listened.
It was worse in tutoring sessions.
Sebastian had fourth and fifth graders, and the kids could not read “cat” or “dog”. WORSE, they didn’t WANT to read, and couldn’t have cared less what the letter “c” was or what was the difference between “o” and “g”. He’d sit there, patiently, asking a kid what each letter in a word was, trying to get the kid to sound the letters into “cat” or “dog”, with no luck. He’d try all the reading tricks the liberals told him to use, like engaging the kids in stories about the sentence to try to help them visualize things. Not one of them wanted to learn. One little boy, memorably, did launch into a spirited tale of how he wanted to get a dog someday, even though he couldn’t read what a “dog” was, because “I want one so I can kill my neighbor and the dog would eat him”. He wanted a big pitt bull or rottweiller and actually knew the name “presa canario”, a breed we only know because two of them attacked (and ate) a lesbian lacrosse teacher, in her apartment building hallway, in San Francisco a number of years ago.
Another student had the most bizarre name we’ve ever heard for a human; it was stranger than “Temptress”, “Lemonjello and Orangello”, and “Winner and Loser” from the Freakonomics chapter on bizarre names for children in the inner city.
On Sebastian’s student roster, one day he noticed he was assigned to tutor someone name “K-9Nia”.
“Excuse me, I’m supposed to find a student for tutoring, but I don’t know if this is a girl or a boy, and I think someone put their student ID number or a computer password where the name should be,” Sebastian told the woman working behind the counter in the school office.
She looked at the roster and said, “Nope, that’s a girl, and that’s her name”.
“What’s her name?”.
“K-9Nia”.
“What?”
“K-9Nia”.
“How do you say that?”
“Kuh-neen-eee-ya”, the woman behind the counter overemphasized, with the DUH! unspoken.
Of course, that’s how you pronounce a name that has both a hyphen and the number nine in it.
Kuh-neene-eee-ya.
No wonder the kids at that school can’t read. Their own names make no sense, and have nines in them. How are they supposed to read “cat” and “dog” when they are looking for the numbers mixed with letters and hyphens?
For the record, K-9Nia was a VERY sweet little girl. She shrugged her shoulders when asked what various letters were, had no concept of phonics, and couldn’t read more than five words out of a 30 page book, but she was darling and polite, and very shy.
We always hope she beat the system, learned to read, and is in law or medical school right now, but after reading the Freakonomics chapter on what happens to people with bizarre names, and after observing the Cleveland Public Schools up close, we don’t expect very much good came into her life.
Why HuffPo is insane to believe Rahm Emanuel would ever be Mayor of Chicago.
The next Mayor of Chicago after Richard Daley: openly gay Israeli Ron Huberman (whom 80% of Chicago believes is really black, but isn't)
The latest delusion over at The Huffington Post is that Rahm Emanuel will be Mayor of Chicago in 2015. Now, he may WANT that, but there’s no way in Hell that will ever happen. Here’s why.
Mayor Daley DOES intend to run for re-election in 2011.
The reason we know this is because he’s starting up another pie-in-the-sky, obsessive project near Millennium Park that will not be anywhere finished by 2011. He would not be starting new fights on this unless he believed he’d die in office like his father…sometime well past 2011…in the 2020s or so.
The project is “the world’s greatest sculpture garden”.
Daley intends to build it in the hideous slice of exposed railroad tracks that sits like an open sore just south of Millennium Park, and adjacent to the new Modern Wing of the Art Institute. Remember, all of Millennium Park was once hideously ugly exposed railroad tracks, until Mayor Daley created the world’s largest rooftop garden by building a gorgeous public park over those tracks. It cost a fortune of private and public money, and didn’t cover all the ugliness of those train tracks that still cut right through the hear of Chicago along Michigan Avenue.
The Art Institute covered more, but not all, of these ugly tracks by building the Modern Wing; this actually makes the remaining exposed tracks to the north of the Art Institute look even uglier…hence Daley’s new obsession with covering them up — with a sculpture garden open to the public, which would complement both Millennium Park and the Art Institute.
The hangup is the money.
It’s not just a matter of building something over these tracks…apparently, the tracks themselves need to be lowered to achieve Daley’s dream. That’s going to cost hundreds of millions.
From what we hear in development circles in Chicago, Daley’s is going after this project hard-core, just like he went after Millennium Park and that Modern Wing for the Art Institute…and just like we went after the new Children’s Museum for Grant Park to replace an ugly field house in Daley Bicentennial Park, named after his father. The Sculpture Garden is the new Daley obsession.
Talk here in Chicago is that the Olympics disaster almost — ALMOST — convinced Daley not to run for another term in 2011. But, the dust from that debacle has settled, and Daley believes he has no challenger for re-election, so why retire? He wants to die in office like his father, and become one of, if not THE, longest serving mayors in American history.
WHEN Daley dies in office, the inheritor of Daley’s regime will not be anyone like Rahm Emanuel.
The anointed heir is currently Ron Huberman, the gay head of Chicago’s public schools, who is the golden boy of the Daley Machine. Easy on the eyes, an Israeli, charming, and gay, it doesn’t matter how competent he is: the guy was a beat cop who put himself through graduate school at night, ran the Chicago Transportation Authority for fifteen minutes, and was quickly rushed into management of the school system. Next up, he’ll probably be given an even more high-profile, resume building position from Daley…all with the eye of grooming him to be mayor after Daley, since even Daley realizes what a waste of space his own son, Patrick, truly is.
Daley has essentially adopted Huberman as a new son.
While the next Mayor after Daley will probably be a Jewish gay man, it will not be Rahm Emanuel. No matter how much Emanuel dares to dream that could be him in Daley’s office.
We think Emanuel will go into the corporate world and make a lot of money after the Obama Administration ends in 2013. Really, we think Emanuel will leave much sooner than that…and could be gone by summer.
A more likely turn of events for Emanuel is running for Senate in Illinois once Alexi Giannoulias pulls out of the race. Right now, it feels like either Emanuel or Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan will be Giannoulias’ appointed replacement. There’s still an outside chance that David Hoffman could get the nod, but he’s no friend of the Daley Machine, so we’ve been told not to count on it.
Daley will very much indeed pick Giannoulias’ replacement. Emanuel is part of the Daley Machine. So, if he wants it, he’d get the edge over a Madigan.
If not for Huberman, could Emanuel be the next Mayor?
We still don’t see how that would happen.
Emanuel has an awful lot of secrets. For whatever reason, just like with Eric Massa, none of them have ever come up in his runs for Congress, because Republicans don’t like exposing Dem scandals, probably for fear of quid pro quo regarding closeted Republicans in the state.
But, in a Democrat primary for Mayor, things will get ugly. You should read some of the literature pumped out on the Southside against white candidates when a black person is running for anything, like Alderman or whatever.
Running for Mayor, without a Daley in the race, would be a HUGE, HUGE, DEAL…an enormous patronage controlling prize. The Southside will want a black mayor, after so many years of Daley. The weird thing is that many people think Huberman is black, so he’d actually get a pass. He looks black, but is Israeli.
Emanuel would, if he ran, have the Southside’s race-baiting aimed right at him. They’d make up all sorts of lies about him, most of which would stick. AND, they’d go hog wild talking about Emanuel being gay, telling anyone who would listen every lurid thing they ever heard Emanuel did in bathhouses or at sex parties, you name it. They would open the files on Emanuel and just LET LOOSE.
Without Daley on the scene to stop them, it would be MADNESS. A daily screaming, yelling soap opera.
We don’t see how he would survive that campaign. Especially not if Jesse Jackson Jr. declares open war and wants the Mayor’s office for himself. Then, it would be no-holds barred, battle royale here in Chicago.
Huberman would win.
Emanuel would lose.
But all of this won’t happen until Daley’s dead and buried, which won’t be for another 15-20 years.
By then, he’ll have built his Sculpture Garden, his Children’s Museum, covered up all the railroad tracks, and also maybe — MAYBE — have even built his SuperTrains to the airports from the Block 37 Station as well.
One of our new goals in life: identifying, keeping track of, and defunding all the groups ACORN is reforming as
Please read this story on MSNBC, about ACORN reforming as various new entities across the country.
It is honestly a full-time job to keep track of ACORN’s various entities…what they are up to…and who is funding them.
We think it’s a worthwhile project to keep tabs on these lunatics. As ACORN is shut down under the name ACORN, it opens up the next day as “Affordable Housing Centers of America” or other entities, where ACORN will operate exactly the same way it always has, but with a different name on the door.
The key to destroying ACORN, in all its forms, once and for all will be getting ACORN’s funding cut off. Government funding, but also funding from private individuals.
Here in Chicago, it seems a great many ACORN groups are active, rebranding, and getting their funding from wealthy Chicagoans and foundations based here.
We hope to evolve in the coming months into a nightmare for ACORN. We’re on the ground here in Chicago. The Left has already attacked us, and we aren’t all that afraid of what else they can do. So, it’s going to become one of our primary missions to do the work that journalists in the Leftist media refuse to do: expose every donor who contributes to ACORN in all its forms.
We might not be able to do anything about the government funding, but we guarantee you private individuals and foundations will stop writing big checks if the general public know what they are doing, and calls them out for funding a domestic terrorist and criminal organization engaged in voter fraud, election intimidation, and all their other illegal activities.
It’s hard to find time in a day to do everything, but keeping tabs on ACORN, and building a nationwide network of ACORN monitors that exposes ACORN’s funding sources seems like a fantastic use of all time we can devote to it. Perhaps a weekly column collecting as much as possible on ACORN and building it into a page here on HillBuzz that we can work off of and share with other moderates, independents, and conservatives to bring all of ACORN’s forms down once and for all.
What think you?
Great Merciful Zeus. CSPAN set to upload ENTIRE HISTORY to the web.
Drudge is running a blurb that CSPAN is set to upload its ENTIRE HISTORY to the web.
This would be an absolute national treasure, because there are many moments of history we remember, clearly, as they happened in the Senate and House that we just have never been able to find a clip of.
Our favorite most-sought after moment is, of course, Maxine Waters shouting “You resign! You resign!” in 1998 to would-be Speaker Bob Livingston, after he went on and on about how President Clinton should have resigned after having an affair with Monica Lewinsky…yet Livingston was an adulterer who was poised to become Speaker after Newt Gingrich resigned.
We’ve never found that on YouTube or anywhere else on the Net.
So, having CSPAN put all its history online will be an absolute BOON for future video making.
What treasures would you look for and how would you use them if they became available?
Question: Who do you think will be eviscerated and put out as the sacrificial lamb when Healthcare Rationing collapses?
We really and truly believe cooler heads will prevail and all of the White House’s, Nancy Pelosi’s, and Harry Reid’s threats of illegally adopting “The Slaughter Rule” and ramming through Healthcare Rationing unconstitutionally, without a vote in the House, will fail spectacularly.
When it does, whose head do you think will roll?
* Nancy Pelosi, removed as Speaker, deciding at the last minute not to seek re-election in November (and possibly announcing her Parkinson’s at that time)?
* David Axelrod, who advises the current president as if Washington is Chicago, and the president was imperial Mayor Richard Daley?
* Rahm Emanuel, who just might have done to him what he had ordered done to Eric Massa, in terms of skeletons leaving closets and meeting the light of day?
SOMEONE will have to be thrown to the wolves over this debacle.
It won’t happen right away, just as Desiree Rogers, the first White House firing of this administration, wasn’t fired right away for her gross incompetence during the India State Dinner. But we think one of the three people will be out of their current positions by summer, once the Rationing Bill is finally staked, exsanguinated, diced, doused in holy water, and entombed for all time, never to rise again.
SOMEONE big has to take the fall for the mishandling of the only shot Leftists had at doing what they have been dreaming of for all these many years in the wilderness.
There will be a great gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair in the midst of the nutroots trolls, demons, and other Marxist nasties in their filthy caves and mothers’ basements. They’ll want blood and bones tossed to them.
Will they be Pelosi’s, Axelrod’s, or Emanuel’s?
Or, will it be someone not on our radar, but big enough to satisfy the blood calls?
What do you think will happen?
Question: Why did Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan go to the White House last week?
{{Actual footage from the Obama White House. It’s apparently Press Secretary Robert Gibbs in the seal costume }}
Here’s an interesting question we don’t know the answer to yet: why did Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan go to the White House last week?
To our knowledge, no other state attorneys general were at the White House…so it doesn’t seem like she was there for any sort of large meeting, summit, or attorneys general dance-off.
Madigan’s a small, surly, not very nice woman, so it can’t be that the Chicagoans transplanted to Washington missed her company so much they just “had to have her visit”.
“Ooooh, girl, you know what these parties we have every other day at great taxpayer expense REALLY need? Lisa Madigan up in here. Quick, send Air Force Three to pick Lisa up, lickety-splits. We’ll have a popcorn fight, some giggle time, talk about boys all night, and maybe get Justin Beiber to play and have all sorts of expensive food and drink. Where my Lisa at? I needs my Lisa!”.
That DOES sound like something the current President would say, though. He WOULD think Madigan was a lot of fun to be around. But he’s delusional if he thinks she’d talk about boys with him for hours. She sure knows her way around a Home Depot, though, in case any of the cabinets or credenzas in the White House have been damaged by the nonstop music video that is the Obama White House. Party every day. Spend as much taxpayer money as humanly possible. Spill on the rugs and blare music as loud as the speakers can manage.
Hope! Change! Another night at Versailles!
So, if Madigan wasn’t there for a party, and wasn’t there for an attorneys general summit, and she wasn’t there to give the current president makeup tips (because she’d need to start with getting some for herself), then why WAS she there?
Speculation in Chicago is that the White House is trying to get her to take Alexi Giannoulias’ place as the Democrat nominee for Senate in Illinois…since Giannoulias is rumored to be dropping out of the race by Easter.
We have to say, there are many, many people in Illinois who will love to work against a Madigan running for national office.
And Madigan could have had this Senate seat already, if she’d wanted it, because she could have ran for the nomination and won it against Giannoulias to begin with. But, she didn’t.
And she didn’t aggressively try to land the seat when Governor Rod Blagojevich was considering whom to appoint to the Seat in December 2008. It could have been Senator Madigan instead of Senator Burris.
So why would she want the nomination now?
Any thoughts out there?
