Oct/090
The Battle for Victory
Gen Stanley McChrystal
It’s sad when you see a general who want to do everything he can to win a war and protect his troops, that pleads to the Commander in Chief of the US to allow him the resources to accomplish this, only to be turned down and scorn for presenting his views.
I don’t believe that McCrystal will resign his post. He should and most likely will continue to do the best job that the President will let him do.
My plea would be that if we are not willing to do what it takes to win, then pull our troops out of danger and let the terrorist claim victory. At least this way they are not over there for no reason dyeing.
Hit the Jump to see the Source article:
Sep/090
Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?
We The People
By INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 4:20 PM PT
http://www.ibdeditorials.com/IBDArticles.aspx?id=337992265461227
Federal Powers: Where in the U.S. Constitution does it say the government can force people to buy health insurance? And by what authority does it prohibit the purchasing of insurance across state lines?
A key part of the administration’s plan to reform health care is what is called the “individual mandate” — a requirement that everyone must have health insurance either through his or her employer or purchased individually.
A good chunk of the uninsured are that way of their own volition. They are young and healthy and feel they have better things to do with their money at this point in their lives. Forcing them is the only way to get them covered, but it’s not clear where the constitutional authority to do that comes from.
The Constitution specifically enumerates the powers given to each branch of government and says that any powers not mentioned revert to the states and to the people. Nowhere does it say that the feds can compel you to buy health insurance. But then, this is the administration that claims the right to a de facto nationalization of the banking system and auto industry, to set executive compensation and to fire corporate officers.
With regard to health care reform, the administration seems to be operating under a distorted version of the Commerce Clause that has been grossly misinterpreted over the years as allowing the feds to regulate and control just about everything. Because the sum total of millions of individual health decisions has a collective economic impact, the reasoning goes, government has the authority, even the duty, to regulate those decisions. It does not.
Former New Jersey Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano, a constitutional scholar now a Fox News analyst, says the power to “regulate” interstate commerce is just that and only that. He says that when James Madison used the word “regulate,” he meant “to keep regular.” Madison intended the government to function like a modern-day referee in football — to throw a flag once in a while and moderate disputes, but not call the plays.
The irony here, says Napolitano, is that at the same time the government wants to force people to buy insurance, it forbids them from doing so across state lines. In other words, he says, “Congress refuses to keep commerce regular when the commercial activity is the sale of insurance, but claims it can regulate the removal of a person’s appendix because that constitutes interstate commerce.”
David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, who served in the Justice Department under both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post that in United States vs. Lopez in 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Congress can only regulate human activity that is truly commercial at its core. One does not go to a doctor to engage in commercial activity.
The Commerce Clause allows for the regulation of economic activity across state lines that involves the production, distribution or consumption of commodities. The Supreme Court has specifically rejected the idea that Congress can regulate noneconomic activities simply because through a chain of collective events they might have some impact down the road.
The government does not have the power to regulate individual Americans simply because they are there and you think their individual decisions are unwise. There are other concerns, such as whether the mass collection of medical records violates the Fourth Amendment’s right of people “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.”
The states are starting to rebel. In July, Texas Gov. Rick Perry indicated that he might join those invoking the 10th Amendment to fight a federal takeover of health care. “I think you’ll hear states and and governors standing up and saying ‘no’ to this type of encroachment on the states with their health care,” Perry said.
If passed into law, the House’s health care reform plan will be tested. We hope the Supreme Court will once again find that H.R. 3200, and any bill like it that imposes similar mandates, violates the Constitution.
Sep/091
Summers: Unemployment Will Remain ‘Unacceptably High’ for Years
Obama UnEmployment
September 11, 2009 6:30 PM
In preparation for President Obama’s speech on regulatory reform on Monday — the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Bros. — Dr. Larry Summers, the chair of President Obama’s National Economic Council, today briefed reporters on the state of the economy and the administration’s policies.
“As the president has said and (Treasury Secretary) Tim Geithner and I have said many times, these problems were not made in a week or a month or a year; they will not be fixed in a week or a month or a year,” Summers said. “The level of unemployment is unacceptably high and will on all forecasts remain unacceptably high for a number of, for a number of years.”
Summers said that while there has been substantial normalization in the economy, financial conditions in commercial real estate continue to struggle, and “the availability of capital to small businesses remain very tight and credit is in short supply.”
In news that the financial markets will no doubt find interesting, Summers said that the Obama administration officials have no interest in “prematurely withdrawing public support for credit flow” — tax dollars to encourage financial institution loans to citizens and businesses. The former Treasury Secretary for President Bill Clinton argued withdrawing support too quickly would repeat mistakes made by Japan during its fabled “Lost Decade” and the U.S. in 1937 and 1938.
There remains much work to be done, Summers said.
“Any institution too large and interconnected” to break down without causing serious economic hardship to the nation needs to be regulated, he said, adding that the same is true with any market too larger and interconnected to fail, such as derivatives.
“We will not be failsafe until it’s safe for failure,” he said.
Summers argued that it makes no sense for financial sectors to be able to pick which government agency regulates them.
“Stability is not attainable if institutions can choose their regulators,” he said, explaining that the president continues to believe what President Obama outlined in June, that it makes sense for the Federal Reserve to supervise all large, inter-connected financial firms that could pose a systemic risk to the overall system, institutions that would be subject to stricter capital requirements.
Has Wall Street learned its lesson?
Paraphrasing former President Reagan, Summers said his motto is “trust but verify – and regulate.”
He said one of the reasons greater regulation is needed is because the “imprudent put enormous pressure on the prudent” — that bad actors in the financial sector are able to generate wealth by behaving inappropriately which cause “pressure that makes it impossible for the prudent to function properly.”
But some analysts have criticized the administration’s reform proposals as weak and watered down.
“The proposals that they’re considering are very weak,” Simon Johnson, a professor at MIT and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, told ABC News’ Matt Jaffe earlier today. “There’s nothing in the administration’s proposed legislation before Congress to which the industry objects except for the consumer protection agency.”
“The reform process to fix the underlying problems has only just begun,” Peterson said. “It’s not an impossible task. It will take a long time and a lot of effort, but this administration is not focused on that. Hopefully they’ll change their mind soon and we can really get down to business, but in this political cycle it’s not happening.”
The administration’s financial regulatory reform proposals have also taken a back seat to healthcare reform, causing even more doubts about the administration’s – and the Hill’s – drive to change to system.
Summers said that rumors that the administration was seeking to “interfere with Main Street retailers” are untrue. “That argument is to the financial debate what ‘death panels’ is to the debate over health insurance.”
Summers said that the Obama administration was doing everything it could to revitalize the economy, and was doing it well.
“We have moved back from the brink of financial catastrophe,” he said. He argued that never before in history has “as profound an economic crisis been addressed so forcefully and so quickly.”
But the administration would keep working hard, he said “as long as the unemployment rate is in the 9’s” with millions of foreclosures and tens of millions of people with negative equity in their homes.
The President is not just interested in responding to crises, Summers said, but trying to build a more stable foundation, which includes investments in education, energy. This new foundation includes the regulatory reforms the president will discuss on Monday; this last year was “not the first time,” he said that financial crises disrupted millions of American lives, he said, mentioning the 1987 Wall Street crash, the Savings and Loan scandal, the bursting of the internet bubble, and others.
Earlier today, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs previewed the president’s speech, which will be delivered shortly after noon in Federal Hall.
Gibbs said that the speech will not introduce new policies.
“We’ve outlined a financial plan and are working with Congress to implement it,” he said. “I think we want to demonstrate again why it’s so important, why we need to move forward and why we can’t wait.”
President Obama has forced on ensuring “that we get our stability right, that businesses have access to stable capital and credit they need. And we’ve seen great progress on that, pulling financial insecurity back from the brink of another recession. The speech on Monday will focus on the need to take the next series of steps on financial regulatory reform to insure that what happened a year ago – there are significant safeguards.”
– jpt