Degenerates

Via Webster: opaque – (oh-payk’) – adj.

1 : exhibiting opacity : blocking the passage of radiant energy and especially light
2 a : hard to understand or explain b : obtuse, thickheaded

I cannot disagree with that second definition when it comes to the obtuse, thickheaded blockheads in Congress.

Via The Patriot Post:

If By ‘Transparent’ You Mean ‘Secret’…

After much bribery and arm-twisting, the Senate managed just before Christmas to pass its version of ObamaCare by a 60-39 vote (amazingly, without a single GOP “aye”). Now, the bill heads for conference deliberation televised by C-SPAN, just as the cable channel offered and Barack Obama promised numerous times.

Or not.

Democrats let slip this week that there would be no typical conference committee on the competing House and Senate versions of the health bill, as “leaders” opted instead for private negotiations with “key” congressmen and senators, none of whom is Republican. Once an agreement is reached, each legislative chamber will vote again and send the unified bill to the president.

Without a conference committee, a rule requiring public access to the conference report for at least 48 hours before a vote would conveniently not apply. That means even more liberty-stealing treachery can be slipped into the bill with little notice. Funny how the “public option” doesn’t mean that the public gets to know what’s in the bill.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) nevertheless had the gall to declare, “There has never been a more open process for any legislation in anyone who’s served here’s experience.” In response, Wall Street Journal columnist James Taranto mocked, “Has a more false or awkwardly worded statement ever come out of anyone who has served as speaker of the House’s mouth?” [more]

In poll after poll, the voice of the American people is clear: They don’t like the government-run health care experiment that the Obama-Pelosi-Reid Democrats are ramming through Congress because they think it’ll raise taxes, raise costs, increase the deficit, and reduce quality of care.

Hat Tip to Damsel for the photo – taken in Tombstone Arizona (clickenbiggen machen).

Abraham Miller describes how Obama’s Syndicate strives to deliver socialized medicine to all (and I mean ALL) persons in the U.S. Graphic and article courtesy Patriot Post.

“Chicago politics is not about ideology. It is about, ‘Who Gets What, When, and How,’ to quote the inimitable Harold D. Laswell, one of the outstanding political theorists of the last century. The sine qua non of Chicago politics is power, getting it and keeping it. Everything else is incidental. Even corruption is a byproduct of power and is functional only if it enables you to stay in power. In Chicago politics, you don’t make waves, you don’t back losers, and you ‘don’t talk to nobody nobody sent.’ Chicago politics is always about hierarchy and centralization. … If you want to understand Obama’s health care policy, you need to start where Obama starts. You need to start with Chicago.

You need to look at constituent interests. Obama won in 2008 because, among other things, he mobilized the electoral periphery. He mobilized young voters and minority voters, people who traditionally had a lower probability of showing up on Election Day. Chicago politics is about mobilizing the vote. ‘Vote early and often’ is the city’s sardonic refrain. Obama needs his newly socialized base. He needs them to keep coming to the polls. In the vein of Chicago politics, he needs to deliver benefits to them. Unrewarded, the electoral periphery will revert back to apathy. Health care is a reward to this base of people who are on the economic as well as political periphery.

Obama understands that his objective is to provide his base with the spoils of power — in this case insurance. … If all that Obama wanted were to insure those who fall between the cracks, he could put them into the same wonderful program that Congress created for itself by subsidizing their premiums. This would neither require a thousand pages of legislation nor a new series of bureaucracies. But building a new power base resulting from the mobilization of the political and economic periphery requires redefining the nation’s health problems as the nation’s health catastrophe. Health reform is Chicago politics on a national level.”

— University of Cincinnati emeritus professor of political science Abraham Miller