Lou Dobb's departure from CNN is meaningless to the Americans capable of thinking out of the flock

The clear thinking individuals who realize and understand the line between commentary and reporting will continue to accept Lou's opinions for what they are --food for thought, and certainly independent of the network he represented. Opinions provoke thought, and when presented by experienced news professionals like Lou, or Bill O'Reilly, the ideas often reveal relevant facts that are otherwise overlooked, distorted, and dismissed by mainstream media.

Of course opinions have no merit or value without challenge, focus, and scrutiny. Just ask that feller, Glenn Beck. Take a look at the news outlets providing commentary from both sides and you'll discover a reliable AND successful source for fact-based news.

So, let the open-minded tune in to few possibilities, and the others, well....just stay with your thinning flock as they approach that perilous cliff ahead (at least you wont get eaten by the big bad wolf). Keep up the excellence Lou!

Guns

Americans don't love guns. Americans love freedom. American's cherish their right to own and to use firearms, if necessary, to defend those freedoms.

This truth is so basic that even left wing moonbats should understand it: Guns don't kill people, people kill people. There's another little old saying that I like more. "If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns." Actually, that's not quite correct. Only the government and the criminals will have guns.

And another little reminder: Blaming guns is the easy way out. If you blame guns for violence in the inner city, you don't have to address the black culture of violence. If you blame guns for Ft. Hood, you don't have to address the Islamic culture of violence. You focus on objects, not people, and objects don't vote. You're safe in your left wing Utopian fantasyland.

Pay The $15,000 or go to jail

You think the new health care bill is free? Bwah! If you or an employer refuses to comply with the bill once it becomes law, you will be fined and can be sent to jail. No? Read on!

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses. Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.”

[page 3 of the bill. Go look it up!]

What It Means

I'm reposting something i read on Roger Kimball's blog. Very much to the point.
==============================================================

What It Means

Yesterday, in the dead of night, the U.S. House of Representatives took a small step for Nancy Pelosi and a giant step for despotism.

Freedom, David Hume famously observed, is seldom lost all at once. More often, it leaks out slowly. The petty tyranny of good intentions colludes with the bureaucratic imperative to stymie individual initiative and barter liberty for the sake of central control.

Last night, it happened by a slender margin: 220 votes to 215. Thirty-nine Democrats voted against the 1900-page bill. One Republican — first- and (I suspect) last-term Anh Cao of Louisiana — voted for it. You can see the entire roster of votes at http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2009/roll887.xml. Did your congressman just vote to further impoverish the country, rob you of choice in managing your medical care, and arrogate to Washington decisions that should be left to the individual? Consult that list and remember next year and in 2012.

Pace Nancy Pelosi, you do not have to put up with this economically disastrous assault on freedom. You still — just barely — have a say in how you are governed. Please do not fritter it away. Slowly, now not slowly, your prerogatives are being whittled away as bureaucrats in Washington tell you what, and what not, to eat, how to light and heat your house, how much money you may make, what sort of car your must drive, how you must, and must not, educate your children, what sort of medical care you must, and must not, arrange for yourself.

I have in this space several times argued that the Obama administration’s efforts to take over health care is only incidentally concerned with enlarging or improving access to medical care. At bottom, it is about enlarging Washington’s control over your life.

David Harsanyi, in an excellent column at RealClearPolitics, provides a partial inventory of diminishment:

• The word regulation appears 181 times.
• Tax is there 214 times.
• Fees, 103 times.

More regulation. Higher taxes. More fees. Is that what Nancy Pelosi means by “affordable health care”?

The economically ruinous dimension of this $1 trillion boondoggle names only part of the pain. There’s also the element of government coercion. As Harsanyi points out,

The word “shall” — as in “must” or “required to” — appears over 3,000 times. The word, alas, is never preceded by the patriotic phrase “mind our own freaking business.”

No, indeed. Minding your own business is not what the Obama administration or Nancy Pelosi is about. Lenin put it well 1917: “What socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything.” Last night, those who would be your masters in Washington took another step toward usurping one-sixth of the U.S. economy and arrogating to themselves control over your medical care. Here’s the question: are we sheep? Or are we free citizens?

I hope, I pray, that a critical mass of people will line up behind the second alternative. Obama speaks of Hope and Change. His hope is to transform the United States into a hamstrung socialist redoubt. His idea of change is to bleed the United States of its wealth, its military might, and the legacy of individual liberty that has made it a cynosure of freedom the world over. We do not have to let him and his czars and enablers do this to us. But the hour is late. If we do not vigorously challenge this government putsch at the polls, the chains now being forged may well be too heavy, too crippling, to be shaken off.

Originally posted at http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerkimball/2009/11/08/what-it-means/