Watch and enjoy. It is amazing to see how much in denial Barack Obama is in the fact that his nationalized health care plan went down the drain, especially after all the absolute promises he made to people that it would pass…by the end of 2009!
Posts Tagged Obamacare
Churchill Was Right
Oct 17
I recently watched a movie called “Into the Storm” which followed Sir Winston through the years before the war through the end of the war. Towards the end of the movie, Churchill gave a speech on the radio about the perils of Socialism that I found very interesting. Here is the text of the actual speech:
My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward in the main by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of this century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
Look how even to-day they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the archcaucus boss.
How is an ordinary citizen or subject of the King to stand up against this formidable machine, which, once it is in power, will prescribe for every one of them where they are to work; what they are to work at; where they may go and what they may say; what views they are to hold and within what limits they may express them; where their wives are to go to queue-up for the State ration; and what education their children are to receive to mould their views of human liberty and conduct in the future?
A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects – and that is what I am speaking of – could not afford to suffer opposition. Here in old England, in Great Britain, of which old England forms no inconspicuous part, in this glorious Island, the cradle and citadel of free democracy throughout the world, we do not like to be regimented and ordered about and have every action of our lives prescribed for us. In fact we punish criminals by sending them to Wormwood Scrubs and Dartmoor, where they get full employment, and whatever board and lodging is appointed by the Home Secretary.
Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. A Free Parliament – look at that – a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire. Have we not heard Mr. Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterwards to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations? As for Sir Stafford Cripps on “Parliament in the Socialist State,” I have not time to read you what he said, but perhaps it will meet the public eye during the election campaign.
But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist to-day will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.
No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk – the common people, as they like to call them in America – where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?
I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed. I stand for the rights of the ordinary man to say what he thinks of the Government of the day, however powerful, and to turn them out, neck and crop, if he thinks he can better his temper or his home thereby, and if he can persuade enough others to vote with him.
But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.
Winston CHURCHILL, The First Conservative Election Broadcast, 4 June 1945. Quoted in CAPET, CHARLOT & HILL, p. 201-2
During the war, the US and Great Britain implemented government controls over many sectors of their respective economies as a war-time measure. After the war, the US repealed most of those restrictions. However, in England, the Left successfully convinced the British public to embrace these restrictions. In 1951, Conservatives regained control of the government but did not undo the Welfare State Labor had established because the British had come to accept and demand government control of their lives.
In reading Sir Winston’s speech, I was struck with just how prescient his criticisms were. And given the recent flap about Rush Limbaugh and the St. Louis Rams plus the President’s declaration of war against Fox News, I was particularly struck by Churchill’s statement::
“No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk – the common people, as they like to call them in America – where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?”
How else could we describe the efforts of the Left in this country to label any and all criticism as “racist”, “sexist”, “homophobic” and “domestic terrorism?” The Hate Crimes legislation that recently passed establishes the category of “thought crimes” where people are punished for their politically incorrect opinions. There are already ominous precedents for how the Left will wield this new law. The Left gleefully crushed Carrie Prejean, Miss California, for honestly answering a question a leftist judge asked of her when he didn’t like what she had to say. As mentioned earlier, Rush Limbaugh was libeled with false accusations of racism based upon fabricated quotes all because he had the unmitigated gall to want to invest some money in an NFL team. And even after the quotations were identified as fabrications, members of the Left and their friends in the media simply stated, in effect, “well, we know Limbaugh has those thoughts so, they’re still true.” Members of the Duke LaCross team were tried and convicted of raping a black woman before any trial was ever held by left-wing professors and a Democrat prosecutor who was up for re-election. The accused players were white and from affluent families and the victim was black so, they were guilty, no evidence needed. And here to, when the players were exonerated of wrong doing, Leftists insisted that even though these particular young men didn’t actually do anything wrong, they were still guilty because of all the crimes whites and society have perpetrated on blacks over the years. Is this not precisely what Winston Churchill was warning of in 1945?
Sir Winston also once said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” He is/was absolutely right. Socialism does not seek to build up but to tear down. Where there are poor, their solution is not to give the poor the tools and ability to improve their situation but to make the rich suffer for the crime of being successful. It is, as Churchill said in his speech, “a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy…”. It denigrates the human soul by forcing it to accept it’s surroundings and the notion that only an exterior force can improve his or her life.
Consider this parallel as well:
…a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire. Have we not heard Mr. Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterwards to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations?
Democrats in Congress have hit upon the very same idea to pass healthcare legislation. Max Baucus’s bill is an outline and nothing more. Once passed, details of the legislation will be filled in. And how about his comment about “the abject worship of the State”? Today, the Left doesn’t just worship the state but many have literally proclaimed Obama to be their “Messiah.” This is not a change to a new, better path as Mr. Obama has claimed. His idea of “hope and change” is the very same threat Mr. Churchill warned us of 64 years ago and if we do not stop it, it will be very difficult to remove from our nation’s character.
Churchill was right.
My friends, I must tell you that a Socialist policy is abhorrent to the British ideas of freedom. Although it is now put forward in the main by people who have a good grounding in the Liberalism and Radicalism of the early part of this century, there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. It is not alone that property, in all its forms, is struck at, but that liberty, in all its forms, is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism.
Look how even to-day they hunger for controls of every kind, as if these were delectable foods instead of war-time inflictions and monstrosities. There is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the archcaucus boss.
How is an ordinary citizen or subject of the King to stand up against this formidable machine, which, once it is in power, will prescribe for every one of them where they are to work; what they are to work at; where they may go and what they may say; what views they are to hold and within what limits they may express them; where their wives are to go to queue-up for the State ration; and what education their children are to receive to mould their views of human liberty and conduct in the future?
A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and its aspects – and that is what I am speaking of – could not afford to suffer opposition. Here in old England, in Great Britain, of which old England forms no inconspicuous part, in this glorious Island, the cradle and citadel of free democracy throughout the world, we do not like to be regimented and ordered about and have every action of our lives prescribed for us. In fact we punish criminals by sending them to Wormwood Scrubs and Dartmoor, where they get full employment, and whatever board and lodging is appointed by the Home Secretary.
Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise, but upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils. A Free Parliament – look at that – a Free Parliament is odious to the Socialist doctrinaire. Have we not heard Mr. Herbert Morrison descant upon his plans to curtail Parliamentary procedure and pass laws simply by resolutions of broad principle in the House of Commons, afterwards to be left by Parliament to the executive and to the bureaucrats to elaborate and enforce by departmental regulations? As for Sir Stafford Cripps on “Parliament in the Socialist State,” I have not time to read you what he said, but perhaps it will meet the public eye during the election campaign.
But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist to-day will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are short-sighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.
No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance. And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk – the common people, as they like to call them in America – where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?
I stand for the sovereign freedom of the individual within the laws which freely elected Parliaments have freely passed. I stand for the rights of the ordinary man to say what he thinks of the Government of the day, however powerful, and to turn them out, neck and crop, if he thinks he can better his temper or his home thereby, and if he can persuade enough others to vote with him.
But, you will say, look at what has been done in the war. Have not many of those evils which you have depicted been the constant companions of our daily life? It is quite true that the horrors of war do not end with the fighting-line. They spread far away to the base and the homeland, and everywhere people give up their rights and liberties for the common cause. But this is because the life of their country is in mortal peril, or for the sake of the cause of freedom in some other land. They give them freely as a sacrifice. It is quite true that the conditions of Socialism play a great part in war-time. We all submit to being ordered about to save our country. But when the war is over and the imminent danger to our existence is removed, we cast off these shackles and burdens which we imposed upon ourselves in times of dire and mortal peril, and quit the gloomy caverns of war and march out into the breezy fields, where the sun is shining and where all may walk joyfully in its warm and golden rays.
Winston CHURCHILL, The First Conservative Election Broadcast, 4 June 1945. Quoted in CAPET, CHARLOT & HILL, p. 201-2
The Heritage Foundation reports that Congressional leaders, desperate to pass Mr. Obama’s Health Care plans, have come up with an idea on how to get it passed with the minimum of scrutiny and debate. Don’t put it in writing before the vote. Instead, they have put forward a “shell” of the legislation which is nothing more than a theoretical concept of what they want to do. No details. No actual legislation. Just an outline. And they want to attach it to an unrelated bill to get it through.
From the Heritage Foundation’s article:
STEP ONE: The Senate Finance Committee will finish work on the marking up of Senator Max Baucus’ (D-MT) conceptual framework for legislation by this Friday. Baucus has not unveiled final legislation and, according to the Associated Press, he added some new language to the mark up today. AP reports that “under pressure from fellow Democrats, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee decided to commit an additional $50 billion over a decade toward making insurance more affordable for working class families.”
Senators have not been provided any real legislation and are offering amendments this week to Baucus’ 200+ page outline. It is expected that at the end of the process the Senate Finance Committee may produce a bill longer than the 1,000 page House bill that proved so controversial over the August recess. Many Senators are upset that they don’t have final language for a bill, yet still they sit in a Committee Hearing Room this week marking up a draft document that is not in the form of legislative language. The plan is to have this document voted out of the Senate Finance Committee by Friday.
STEP TWO: Next, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will take the final product of the Senate Finance Committee and merge it with the product of the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP) Committee. This was the late Senator Kennedy’s (D-MA) bill, introduced by Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA), which passed the HELP Committee on July 15, 2009 on a party line vote. Remember, most Senators will still not know what they voted for in the Finance Committee.
STEP THREE: Senator Reid will then move to proceed to H.R. 1586, a bill to impose a tax on bonuses received by certain TARP recipients. This bill was the bill passed by the House in the wake of the AIG bonus controversy and is currently sitting on the Senate Legislative Calendar. Reid will move to proceed, and he will need 60 votes to act on this bill. After the motion is approved, he will then offer a complete substitute bill purportedly including the combined Senate HELP and Finance Committee products. This means that the entire health care reform effort will be included as an amendment to a TARP bill that has been collecting dust in the Senate for months.
STEP FOUR: For this strategy to work, the proponents would need to hold together the liberal caucus of 57 Democrats, 2 Independents (Senators Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Bernie Sanders of Vermont), and a potential new member replacing the late Senator Kennedy. This scenario would most likely be implemented after the Massachusetts state legislature gives Governor Deval Patrick the power to appoint a new Senator and that Senator is seated by the Senate. According to CQ, the state legislature may pass a bill and present it to Governor Patrick by next week.
Once the Senate passes a bill and sends it to the House, all the House would have to do is pass the bill, without changes, and President Obama will be presented with his health care reform measure thereby transforming within a few weeks 1/6th of the US economy. If this plan does not work, the Senate and House Leadership may consider using reconciliation to pass the legislation.
Click here for further details.
So, if you just loved the stimulus bill that was passed without members having read the bill, you will absolutely adore this Healthcare Bill that they want to pass before it even exists. Keep it up Democrats, 2010 is coming and we are taking notice of your complete lack of respect for us, established law and the Constitution. 2010 could be 1994 times ten.
Patients with terminal illnesses are being made to die prematurely under an NHS scheme to help end their lives, leading doctors warn today.
By Kate Devlin, Medical Correspondent
Published: 10:00PM BST 02 Sep 2009In a letter to The Daily Telegraph, a group of experts who care for the terminally ill claim that some patients are being wrongly judged as close to death.
Under NHS guidance introduced across England to help doctors and medical staff deal with dying patients, they can then have fluid and drugs withdrawn and many are put on continuous sedation until they pass away.
But this approach can also mask the signs that their condition is improving, the experts warn.
As a result the scheme is causing a “national crisis” in patient care, the letter states. It has been signed palliative care experts including Professor Peter Millard, Emeritus Professor of Geriatrics, University of London, Dr Peter Hargreaves, a consultant in Palliative Medicine at St Luke’s cancer centre in Guildford, and four others.
“Forecasting death is an inexact science,”they say. Patients are being diagnosed as being close to death “without regard to the fact that the diagnosis could be wrong.
“As a result a national wave of discontent is building up, as family and friends witness the denial of fluids and food to patients.”
The warning comes just a week after a report by the Patients Association estimated that up to one million patients had received poor or cruel care on the NHS.
The scheme, called the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), was designed to reduce patient suffering in their final hours.
Developed by Marie Curie, the cancer charity, in a Liverpool hospice it was initially developed for cancer patients but now includes other life threatening conditions.
It was recommended as a model by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (Nice), the Government’s health scrutiny body, in 2004.
It has been gradually adopted nationwide and more than 300 hospitals, 130 hospices and 560 care homes in England currently use the system.
Under the guidelines the decision to diagnose that a patient is close to death is made by the entire medical team treating them, including a senior doctor.
They look for signs that a patient is approaching their final hours, which can include if patients have lost consciousness or whether they are having difficulty swallowing medication.
However, doctors warn that these signs can point to other medical problems.
Patients can become semi-conscious and confused as a side effect of pain-killing drugs such as morphine if they are also dehydrated, for instance.
When a decision has been made to place a patient on the pathway doctors are then recommended to consider removing medication or invasive procedures, such as intravenous drips, which are no longer of benefit.
If a patient is judged to still be able to eat or drink food and water will still be offered to them, as this is considered nursing care rather than medical intervention.
Dr Hargreaves said that this depended, however, on constant assessment of a patient’s condition.
He added that some patients were being “wrongly” put on the pathway, which created a “self-fulfilling prophecy” that they would die.
He said: “I have been practising palliative medicine for more than 20 years and I am getting more concerned about this “death pathway” that is coming in.
“It is supposed to let people die with dignity but it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Patients who are allowed to become dehydrated and then become confused can be wrongly put on this pathway.”
He added: “What they are trying to do is stop people being overtreated as they are dying.
“It is a very laudable idea. But the concern is that it is tick box medicine that stops people thinking.”
He said that he had personally taken patients off the pathway who went on to live for “significant” amounts of time and warned that many doctors were not checking the progress of patients enough to notice improvement in their condition.
Prof Millard said that it was “worrying” that patients were being “terminally” sedated, using syringe drivers, which continually empty their contents into a patient over the course of 24 hours.
In 2007-08 16.5 per cent of deaths in Britain came about after continuous deep sedation, according to researchers at the Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, twice as many as in Belgium and the Netherlands.
“If they are sedated it is much harder to see that a patient is getting better,” Prof Millard said.
Katherine Murphy, director of the Patients Association, said: “Even the tiniest things that happen towards the end of a patient’s life can have a huge and lasting affect on patients and their families feelings about their care.
“Guidelines like the LCP can be very helpful but healthcare professionals always need to keep in mind the individual needs of patients.
“There is no one size fits all approach.”
A spokesman for Marie Curie said: “The letter highlights some complex issues related to care of the dying.
“The Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient was developed in response to a societal need to transfer best practice of care of the dying from the hospice to other care settings.
“The LCP is not the answer to all the complex elements of this area of health care but we believe it is a step in the right direction.”
The pathway also includes advice on the spiritual care of the patient and their family both before and after the death.
It has also been used in 800 instances outside care homes, hospices and hospitals, including for people who have died in their own homes.
The letter has also been signed by Dr Anthony Cole, the chairman of the Medical Ethics Alliance, Dr David Hill, an anaesthetist, Dowager Lady Salisbury, chairman of the Choose Life campaign and Dr Elizabeth Negus a lecturer in English at Barking University.
A spokesman for the Department of Health said: “People coming to the end of their lives should have a right to high quality, compassionate and dignified care.
“The Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP) is an established and recommended tool that provides clinicians with an evidence-based framework to help delivery of high quality care for people at the end of their lives.
“Many people receive excellent care at the end of their lives. We are investing £286 million over the two years to 2011 to support implementation of the End of Life Care Strategy to help improve end of life care for all adults, regardless of where they live.”
Commence the posts about how this is all lies from a far-right, radical, bomb-throwing newspaper, doesn’t really happen anyway and even if it does, NHS is way better than the US system, so there! (Insert rasberry sound here.) Keep in mind, dear reader, that when its Anthropogenic Global Warming, we have to believe leading scientists. I wonder if these leading scientists/doctors will be afforded the same reverence? As the Brits themselves would put it: “Not bloody likely.”
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I just came across an article from the American Thinker that I just had to pass on. It’s too long to post here so here is the link:
http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/08/this_will_never_be_a_eurosocia.html
Europe was a breeding ground for Socialism and Communism because they have a long, long history of the people being subject to the government. They were/are more accepting of having the government run their lives because that is the historical precedent for them. Serfs served kings and queens. Germans and Italians willingly subjected themselves to Hitler and Mussolini. Eastern Europeans suffered under Communism for decades after WWII, which they ultimately rejected but many became comfortable with it. It was just the way things were.
The United States was founded by people who rejected the notion of one man rule. In it’s historical context and even today, The Declaration of Independence and US Constitution were/are radical documents. The idea that man’s rights came from God and not man was a radical departure from most of the world’s concept of governance. The founders stated that government’s role should be to make sure that we are free to exercise our God given rights. This was, and still is in many cases, totally foreign to European tradition.
America was also founded on the concept of individualism. Some say this is selfish. This is not true. The freedom to improve one’s self ultimately leads to that person becoming concerned not with self but with other people and their well-being. If you can come to understand yourself you are better able to understand others. With this understanding, instead of seeing only “what’s in it for me” you come to realize that others have needs as well. Understanding yourself makes you reach out to others in compassion because you know what they are going through.
Collectivism, on the other hand, says that its about helping the little guy but actually promotes greed and selfishness. Leaders collect goods for themselves while telling everyone to sacrifice for the “common good.” Soviet leaders had nice houses and never went without food or the nice things in life while their people waited in long lines for common items like toilet paper. Soviet leaders had fancy cars while the average citizen, if they could afford it, would have to wait years to buy a poorly made Trabant. European monarchies have/had a ruling class which lives entirely apart from the people they govern, surrounded by wealth and opulence. Monarchies promote strict caste systems where upward mobility is determined by which family you were born to. If you were born to a poor family, that was your lot in life. Too bad. This government enforced inequality creates a poverty mentality amongst the populace who, naturally go into survival mode. In survival mode, you cannot think beyond your own needs thus fostering the traits of greed and selfishness.
The average person’s ability to better themselves is either severely limited or done away with entirely. Without the hope of bettering their own condition, the average person will simply give up and look towards garnering what little he or she can for his or her self. They become fatalistic. “Whatever happens to me is beyond my control so I should just accept it.” Fatalism is, from my own experiences in Chile, very much part of Hispanic culture. The expression “Si Dios quiere” (If God wills it) is an all too common expression. For that reason, Spain and South America are also fertile grounds for Socialism and Communism. In Arab countries, there is a similar phrase “Insha’Allah” or “God willing.” Arab countries as well are fertile ground for collectivism albeit in the form of religious collectivism.
In the US, the American Dream says anyone can become anything they desire to be and this has attracted the masses from around the world for over 200 years. And when someone comes to this country and makes of him or herself what they desire, legitimately, then the natural result of their success is a desire to extend that same chance to others. That is the hope and change that we all want and have wanted since the founding of this country. Not European Collectivism. We have too long a tradition of being free to accept government control of our lives and the strong protests around the country against Obamacare, etc. are proof of that. I agree and applaud the author of this article! Well done and well said!
