Commentary

A dysfunctional federal government; a Republican Legislature cooperating with the Obama Administration in imposing ObamaCare upon the citizens of Idaho; a culture in which abortion, pot smoking and homosexuality have been “mainstreamed” by a relentless media and corrupt political class.

Every sit back and wonder if you are the crazy one?

David Kupelian has a provocative column running on WorldNetDaily which is well worth your time:

“How America Morphed Into Bizarro World”.

Regular prayer is in order during these days of profound moral confusion.  Despair and silence are not.

We’re now about two weeks from the official launch of Obama’s health care revolution. It is anyone’s guess as to what will actually transpire when the enrollment period begins. But the last couple of weeks have not been pretty.

A review of the headlines shows that public opposition is growing, while the nation’s political class – particularly Republicans – continues to fiddle. Organized Labor has risen up to raise serious objections to ObamaCare and the devastation it will wreak upon existing health insurance plans they fought so hard to secure. But their friends in the White House have rejected pleas for an extra-legal fix of the problems caused by Obama and Democrats in Congress.

Instead, Obama has spent his time figuring out how to help members of Congress and their staffs get special exemption from the provisions of the very law they are imposing upon the American people. The greed and self-seeking of our national political class is simply disgusting.

Meanwhile, we learn that health care rationing is being implemented as an essential part of ObamaCare. The state of California, which seems to have a more advanced system in place to implement this “obamanation” than other states, has announced a package of plans to be available on its insurance exchange. Insurance companies are severely restricting the doctors and hospitals they will cover as part of their “networks”.

One doesn’t have to be rocket scientist to figure out that pushing more people to fewer health care providers will increase wait times and discourage people from seeking health care until problems become acute.

And then there is the news that Sebelius will order doctors and hospitals to collect “behavioral and social” data on patients. This data will become part of our permanent “Electronic Health Record” , stored and maintained by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Such data records will be linked to public health departments. In addition to data on gun ownership, this database will seek to track sexual patterns.

The more we learn about this scheme, the worse it gets. In fact, it seems a kind of madness has gripped has gripped our political class. The corruption of our Constitution and the ensuing threat to our privacy and personal liberty is so very painful to witness.

It would seem that the only clear option for the average American is to resist ObamaCare by refusing to participate in Obama’s exchanges. Perhaps Idahoans can “vote with their feet” next month when Governor Otter reveals his version of ObamaCare. If few people cooperate, maybe we can force an admission by the ruling class that Americans will not be hogtied.

The Dean of the Conservative Movement in America took time on his show this morning to challenge the prevailing humanitarian superiority of Obama’s Administration following the presidential address last night to the nation. President Obama rightly called upon America’s attention to the outrage of a government using chemical weapons against civilians – including children.

But Limbaugh pointed to Obama’s stark hypocrisy on the use of chemical weapons by recalling the permanent American war against babies in the womb, largely financed by unwilling taxpayers. Millions of America babies are killed each year through the use of chemical weapons in the form of RU-486 and the “Morning After Pill”; yet few voices of outrage are raised in alarm.

(Where is Senator Huff & Puff – a.k.a., John McCain – on this issue of huge moral import?)

Perhaps the difference is that we don’t have handy pictures of those American babies, bundled in piles for the world to see.

It is too easy to turn away from the American slaughter of the innocent. They pass silently and privately into death, shrouded by a conspiracy so that we don’t have to confront our own holocaust.

Please read Limbaugh’s powerful commentary for yourself.

As the world watches Obama succumb to the superior diplomatic skills of Vladmir Putin, the federal and state bureaucracies grind on with their blind mission to animate the monster of ObamaCare. Over 10,000 pages of new regulations, in addition to the hills of paper being created by Idaho’s own health insurance exchange bureaucracy.

We now learn that virtually every company in America is being forced to help Obama implement his mad scheme: A company with even a single employee must notify – in writing – each employee about the health insurance exchange and the availability of federal subsidies. Failure to do so could result in a $100 per day fine. So, at the point of a bayonet, private employers will join the ranks of Hollywood and the NFL in a high-stakes propaganda effort in selling the Obama Exchanges as they launch early next month.

Welcome to the new America.

Even as more bricks fall upon the private sector, Republican leaders in Congress continue to shy away from a direct confrontation with Obama over the menace of his health care scheme. Rather than use the power of the purse to shut down ObamaCare, Speaker Boehner and his cohorts intend to finance ObamaCare through a continuing resolution. But to appease their conservative base, Republicans in Congress will pass yet another piece of legislation to repeal ObamaCare – safe in the knowledge that such legislation will not become law, will not interfere with the grinding forward motion of the federal government’s plan to consume the nation’s health care system.

One is tempted to pronounce such GOP stratagems pure cynicism.

The last line of defense against ObamaCare will be the American people themselves. Long before the next election, the public will get its best shot at derailing the president’s scheme by avoiding the insurance exchanges altogether. In about a month, we will begin to see whether the public is participating in the exchanges in large enough numbers to make ObamaCare anything close to functional.

A wholesale avoidance of the Obama exchanges might be enough to embolden the House Republicans to use the power they have under the Constitution to defend our birthright of liberty.

Boomers Too “Special” to Die Naturally?

By Wesley J. Smith

Oh good grief. We Baby Boomers are such a pain. It’s always about us: Me. Me. Me.

And now, according to Time, we are supposedly going to change “how we die.” (“A Good Death: How Boomers Will Change the World a Final Time.”)

For eons, folks grew old, endured the symptoms, and died when it was their time-according to God’s will, some would say, even if it involved fighting through lingering illness, pain and suffering, or years of mental or physical incapacitation. A “good” death was about having lived long enough to see grandchildren, put one’s affairs in order, and pass away surrounded by a loving family.

Well, that’s because earlier timesdid not have the medical means to do otherwise. But supposedly, nowwe are different:

Boomers don’t see it that way. To them, a good death is more about a good life. When they can’t have that any longer, it’s time to pull the plug. This will be the first generation to broadly eschew painful life-extending procedures and make the most of palliative care to live better in fewer days, and then die with dignity.

But that’s not true. Hospice, which allowed for this approach, has been with us for more than forty years. My dad died in 1984 under hospice care, eschewing life-extending treatment and dying pain free from metastatic colon cancer. We Boomers aren’t pioneering this approach in the least!

But here is where things could get dangerous. Apparently to “die with dignity” is to kill ourselves: Boomers are supposedly going to lead the way into assisted suicide:

Suffering people have long sought an early end, of course, and many have done so quietly-or not so quietly in the case of patients of euthanasia advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian. But we are now seeing the beginnings of a broad movement that will change the game for good. “People are starting to think about aid-in-dying as the next civil rights movement,” says Goldstein. “Death with dignity is the final frontier of human rights and freedom of expression.”

So what was once a taboo subject-how to die-is now in open discourse. The “death café” movement encourages people to meet and discuss the concept of a good death. This dialogue is being fed in part by less rigid adherence to organized religion, which has strong views surrounding death and dying, and advances in medicine and technology that make it easier to feel you can control pain and symptoms and the way you die.

Okay. I get it. Nothing new here. Just tired advocacy for assisted suicide masking itself as the newest news about the Boomers.

Boomers are not a great generation. To the contrary, we did shamefully little considering how much we were given.Too busy patting ourselves on the back, perhaps, and breaking the china.

Frankly, I think we are going to leave quite a mess. And if we do open the spigots to assisted suicide, it will be to our everlasting shame.