Category Archives: My Government

My Government refers to things related to my government.

Why It’s Taking So Long To Get People Into Trump’s White House

    • the top #NeverTrump Republican donor has an employee who works in the Office of Personnel Management in the Trump administration.

    • “What? Trump appoints John DeStefano, a longtime aide to former House Speaker John Boehner, as Director of Presidential Personnel for the entire administration!” conservative radio host Mark Levin posted on January 4, 2017.

    • DeStefano’s appointment was designed “to funnel Capitol Hill staffers loyal to the congressional Republican establishment into key jobs in the executive branch.”

    • DeStefano has zero experience in human resource functions

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

How Trump Can Take Down the Deep State in 90 Days

    • He knows that 40 odd billionaires control the two-party tyranny. He knows that while some of the billionaires play the left of center game and others play the right of center game, they are all fascists — they are all about  the 1% controlling the economy, the government, and society for their benefit and that none of them — not even Tom Steyer who once had the best of intentions — actually give a shit about the public interest. Not one of them — including Michael Bloomberg — is capable of intelligently discussing why electoral reform is root and why holistic analytics, true cost economics, and open source everything engineering (OSEE) must become the foundation for creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for the 99% not just the 1%. I have not given up on the oligarchs — if Donald Trump gets a strategy and a staff to match his brains and balls, I expect some of these oligarchs to become constructive allies. I single out Lynn Rothchild, whose concept of Inclusive Capitalism has merit but will never come to fruition as long as she is surrounded by pedophiles and sychophants.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Is Health Care a Right or a Good? – Judge Andrew Napolitano

    • failure of politicians to understand the constitutional role of the federal government

    • The premise underlying the highly partisan 2,700-page legislation is that health care is a right belonging to everyone in America and the federal government has a constitutional duty to provide it.

    • The political structure of Obamacare mandates that every person in America obtain health insurance, that every employer of more than 50 people in America pay for the health insurance of all employees who work more than 30 hours per week, that every policy of health insurance cover a large dimension of potential medical needs and that those earning under a certain annual income level receive health care at the expense of the rest of us.

    • The failure to obtain and maintain health insurance triggers a tax burden — equivalent to the annual premium on a health insurance policy — for every year one goes without coverage.

    • The regulatory structure of Obamacare orders every primary care physician to keep all medical records on personal computers, to which the Department of Health and Human Services has access. Thus, the long-revered and uniquely American value of the patient-physician privilege — the certain knowledge that your doctor will not reveal what you tell her or him — has been obliterated.

    • The legislation that Republican House leaders offered last week retained the basic premise of Obamacare — that health care is a right and the federal government has a duty to provide it — and just nibbled a bit at the edges.

    • Under the House proposal, the obligation to have health insurance would remain, but you couldn’t expect it from your employer; you might have to pay for it yourself. And the penalty for the failure to have coverage would not be a tax from the IRS; it would be a $3,000 annual surcharge from your insurance carrier when you sign up. You could buy insurance tailored to your needs, but nearly all remaining federal regulations would stay in place — including a new Orwellian one that would permit your employer to require you to undergo genetic screening.

    • This Obamacare lite has been resisted by about 30 House Republicans who reject the premise that health care is a right. Without their votes, it would not have passed last week, so the House leadership declined to hold a vote.

    • Is health care a right in America?

    • In a word, no. Rights are either natural immunities — existing in areas of human behavior that, because of our nature, must be free from government regulation, such as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as well as speech, the press, religion, travel, self-defense and what remains of privacy — or legal claims that we qualify or bargain for, such as the right to vote, which the Constitution presumes, and the right to use your property to the exclusion of all others and the right to purchase a good that you can afford.

    • But the federal government cannot create a right that the Constitution does not authorize. It can’t constitutionally transfer wealth from taxpayers or employers to others and then claim that the others have a right to the continued receipt of the transfers.

    • The Supreme Court has ruled that even Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are government largesse that Congress could terminate because no one has a right to them.

    • Of course, the federal government has been creating expectations that it calls rights for centuries. To stay in office, members of Congress bribe the rich with bailouts, the middle class with tax cuts and the poor with made-up rights to all sorts of things.
       Yet under the Constitution, health care is not a right; it is a good — like an education or a gym membership. You work hard, you decide what goods to purchase. If government gives you the good, that does not magically transform it into a right. Bravo to the courageous House Republicans who recognize this.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.