The Administration is simply grabbing power left and right...
The Obama administration is considering new environmental rules that would, in effect ban recreational fishing in the United States, according to ESPN. This move is apparently being contemplated under pressure from environmental groups.
"The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing the nation's oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.
"This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is "fluid" and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn't issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.
"That's a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning."
The excuse for this contemplated ban is the notion that recreational fishing as well as commercial fishing is depleting the stock of fish in American waters. This notion is disputed by fishing groups, which fear not only that a ban would prohibit Americans from pursuing a traditional form of recreation, but also devastate the industry that supports recreational fishing. Angling groups maintain that there is no basis in science for an attempt to ban recreational fishing.
If the ban is ordered, it would likely come via executive order rather than an attempt to have Congress pass legislation. Various environmental groups are demanding that such an executive order be issued as soon as possible.
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How crazy will they get before the average American wakes up and realizes that most incumbents must be shown the door in 2010 if there is any hope of preserving the country we have known?
One of my friends said, "Remember, back in the Middle Ages, only the lords could hunt. Anyone caught poaching on the lord's hunting lands could be punished any way the lord desired - including execution.
Now only the elites (environmental, political, academic, etc.), who will be very careful to "preserve" nature's balance, will be able to fish.
Hunting is next."
True. The Obama Administration is nationalizing businesses and land and water rights and going full-bore after health care. It is a much like a hostile takeover in business. But in this case it is likely that Obama Administration is just collecting power much as totalitarian governments prefer to do. Armed takeovers are messy. Frog-in-the-pot slow-but-sure elimination of our rights and property is the sly way.
Look at Europe!
As is true in all socialist countries, there will be one standard of health care for you and me — and then a higher standard for the ruling class.
The most important amendment Republicans must propose for Obama’s Medi-Grab bill is a very easy one:
Resolved: that all federal and state employees must enroll in ObamaCare, without exception.
Any violation of this amendment will be punishable by a fine, imprisonment, and/or loss of federal or state employment. Enforcement of this provision will be overseen by a popularly elected commission, whose proceedings will be open to the public via the worldwide web.
“All federal and state employees” includes every member of Congress and the executive branch — those who currently have the finest medical insurance available in the country today (courtesy of you and me).
This is the key test for the Medi-Grab bill. Any member of Congress who votes against it reveals his or her true stand on America’s founding principles. Anyone who votes for it shows that he or she actually gets it. There are many terrifying parts of this Medi-Grab bill, but this is the simplest litmus test.
It’s so simple that everyone in the country can understand it. It’s do-or-die in terms of the integrity and honesty of the takeover of one-sixth of the economy that Obama is so determined to drive through Congress.
Socialist regimes reveal their true nature by the special treatment they give to their permanent ruling class; they deny such treatment for ordinary schlubs like you and me. The worst corruption in socialist regimes flows from that simple two-caste system. In Europe, the ruling class hardly bothers with elections any more. The same people just turn over in their lifelong careers, or they just stay in the tenured bureaucracy.
The so-called European Parliament is elected by the voters, all right, but it does not have the power to legislate — or even to investigate the all-powerful EU bureaucracy, which is unelected. The European Parliament is therefore an elaborate front. In typical fashion, the EU has a special term for that: the “democracy deficit.” It is regrettable, to be sure. Only trouble is, nobody does anything about it, and they won’t because the dual caste system is the key power grab whereby all sovereign power in European nations is now flowing into the EU — like so much water draining out of a bathtub.
Obama’s medical takeover bill is a monstrosity in many ways, but the biggest danger comes from the separate treatment it reserves for the ruling left compared to us ordinary folks. Obama’s Medi-Grab will force ordinary people into a medico-legal corral. But it exempts members of the ruling left, and by creating a political monopoly over medical care, it ensures that we must all go begging, hat in hand, to the bureaucracy for our very survival.
If Obama wins, Europe is our future. In Britain, Gordon Brown does not go to his local NHS clinic to get substandard medical care, nor does he go to the scandalously dirty hospitals in the Midlands. In Brussels, the European Union bureaucrats would just sneer at medical care for ordinary folks. They get nothing but the best. That hypocrisy is all over the American ruling left as it is emerging today: Obama and Al Gore both attended special upper-class schools from early on in life. Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. They are special, these well-born rulers, not like you and me.
Real power in Europe now flows from the Brussels bureaucracy, which issues a mighty and endless tide of top-down decrees for regular folks to obey. EU decrees cannot be overturned by the voters, because the judiciary is just another appointed arm of the EU bureaucracy. They cannot be resisted, on pain of very real bureaucratic penalties. The left controls the media (like the BBC) as well as the schools. The European Parliament is therefore a sort of Hollywood movie set: the real power holders don’t bother with elections, and the elected Members of Parliament have no power. Simple, clean, tyrannical. This is not an accident. It’s the key to the way they operate. That is Obama’s goal.
When a blog reporter (the only honest kind of reporter today) challenged Rep. Fortney (Pete) Stark in his office on a YouTube video, Mr. Stark’s first question was: “What college did you go to?” The congressman simply resorted to insults when the reporter answered: “the University of Puerto Rico.”
Notice Pete Stark’s standard: it’s not what you know, but whether you went to an elite college. Stark never answered the basic economics question, needless to say. In his mind, he didn’t need to. Behold, the ruling class of America.
The American left adores Europe. But Europe today is bowing down to another permanent aristocracy, not much different from the 19th century version. The results are plainly visible in the shoddy and unhygienic conditions at the National Health Service hospitals and clinics in the UK, compared to the special treatment given to the political class. They are visible in the long waiting lists for life-saving cancer and cardiac operations — for ordinary folks, that is. This is what the “death panels” (presided over by the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence in Britain) are about: they reserve expensive treatments for the politically powerful and well-connected. Expensive treatments for ordinary folks are not considered to be “cost-effective.” As Robert Reich has said so clearly about these critical treatments, “It’s too expensive … so we’re going to let you die.”
That’s because there’s only so much money in the national medical kitty, and it is distributed according to your high-quality life expectancy. If you are severely depressed, suffer from a disabling illness, or are just old, your life is worth that much less. The young (who need little care) are allocated more of the nation’s medical kitty, because they have greater life expectancy at a higher quality of life — at least according to the health bureaucrats. Down Syndrome fetuses are aborted, according to the same logic, at the very beginning of life. You see, Down Syndrome kids may live a long time, but they don’t have high-quality lives. So they just abort them.
I’ve personally attended a European lecture given by an utterly arrogant chief of an acute care unit. He explained his criteria for pulling the plug on unconscious patients at a major European university hospital. His answer was: budget. His ward was budgeted to keep people on life support for a maximum of two weeks. After that, it’s “goodbye, Sally” — we need your bed for another case.
That is what Obama has in store for us. Unless you are Obama or Hillary, of course. It’s the value of our lives versus theirs, and we won’t have a voice in that decision.
Not after ObamaCare passes.
James Lewis is a scientist by trade, and carps as a hobby about the passing parade of human fraud and folly.