Obamacare's First Death Panel

Real life thuggery. 'Nuff said. Thankfully it was only attempted murder.

Three people posed as insurance agents hawking President Obama's health-care reform plan to gain entry to a Long Island home, where they pistol-whipped, shot and robbed two women and a man, authorities said.

Vance Jackson, 46, of Yonkers, and Benjamin Thompson, of Brooklyn, were arraigned yesterday in Central Islip on attempted-murder and burglary charges.

A female accomplice, Natalie Taylor, 26, of Nyack, is expected to be arraigned today. The men were nabbed about a mile from the Huntington crime scene in an SUV, and Taylor was apprehended a few hours later, police said.

Prosecutors said Thompson and Taylor approached a home on Virginia Avenue at around noon Friday, and then began to talk about Obama's policies, while Jackson pushed into the door seeking cash.

Taylor allegedly pistol-whipped one woman, and Thompson shot another in the foot as Jackson led the man upstairs to retrieve some cash.

"When he didn't get enough money, he shot the man twice in the neck, once in the back, and once in the chest," said a Suffolk County prosecutor at the men's arraignment.

Hat Tip: Sweetness & Light

Trick or Treat Helicopter Ben!

Fast on the heels of Bloomberg's lawsuit against the Federal Reserve to disclose the failing entities to which it lended vast amounts of money, now comes word of when we can expect to see HR 1207, Ron Paul's bill to Audit the Federal Reserve, hit the floor of the House. When I first wrote about this bill and why it is so important in late April, urging people to get on board and contact their representatives, the bill had 91 co-sponsors, and stood alone as the first effort in tackling the Fed. A mere four months later, HR 1207 now enjoys 282 co-sponsors, and it's companion bill in the Senate, S 604, has attracted 23 co-sponsors.

Meanwhile, responding to the Judge Preska's verdict in US District Court, the Fed is hapless:

Fed lawyer Kit Wheatley told Preska in a conference call today that she did not know how long it would take for the Fed board to search the New York Fed for records.

“We really don’t know what’s in New York,” Wheatley said. “We don’t control the system of record-keeping in New York.”

The Standard

The Fed’s lawyer went on to say that she did not know what records would fall under a “delegated function,” which would be a task assigned to the New York Fed.

Preska interrupted Wheatley, saying that “Ms. Wheatley, I held that’s not the standard. You didn’t search under the regulation. You’re supposed to search under the regulation.”

While their bumbling lawyers stumble about searching for ways to continue to allow the organization to operate in the shadows, other representatives of the Federal Reserve offer nothing but excuses as defense for their existence.

“Experience in the banking industry has shown that when customers and market participants hear negative rumors about a bank, negative consequences inevitably flow,” Norman Nelson, vice president and general counsel for the group, said in the document.

You don't say, Norman? You mean to tell us that when businesses factually and functionally operate as failures, there are negative consequences? We are not talking about rumors here. We are talking about institutions receiving funds from the Fed for the purpose of even remaining in business at all. They made decisions that the free market dictated should end their businesses, and the Fed gave them the money to stay alive, whether they could show a capacity to be a profitable business venture in the future or not. The Fed did this by increasing the money supply, staging the market for de facto inflation, thus devaluing everyone's money. To save businesses they very likely should not have been saved, the Fed robbed us all. This is why this is public interest.

“Our argument is that the public interest in disclosure outweighs the banks’ interest in secrecy,” said Thomas Golden, a lawyer with New York-based Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP who represents Bloomberg.

Preska’s Aug. 24 ruling rejected the Fed’s argument that the records should remain private because they are trade secrets and would scare customers into pulling their deposits.

“What has the Fed got to hide?” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who sponsored a bill to require the Fed to submit to an audit by the Government Accountability Office. “The time has come for the Fed to stop stonewalling and hand this information over to the public,” he said in an e- mail.

Rest assured, the Federal Reserve will be appealing the ruling. But no matter what, time is most definitely not on its side. For even if the Fed can manage to delay disclosing these records due to court order, it appears to be merely a matter of time until they must disclose all of their transactions as a matter of law. In fact, given Barney Frank's recent meeting below (HT: BTB), the idea of trick-or-treating as Helicopter Ben might not seem so far fetched.

Chicagobama

Abraham Miller pens an article today for American Thinker that begins to shed a much brighter light on the surge of Chicago machine politics to the national stage than has really been shone thus far. To be sure, I have blogged about some of Obama's tactics, particularly his dealings with and treatment of the media. Basically, when asked questions that require actual thought and real leadership-style answers, he all too conveniently relies on Mayor Daley's approach of berating the press.

The light that Miller shines in his article, while being brighter for being on American Thinker (as compared to my small efforts), is also more focused on the real machinations of the behemoth that is Chicago. A professor of politics specializing in ethnic politics, Miller has studied Chicago extensively, and is able to focus us in on what really matters. While many of us debate the high level business concerns, Miller brings us back to street level, explaining the down-and-dirty nature of this political machine:

Talk-radio host Sean Hannity can trumpet medical savings accounts on one day and talk about the forty percent of Americans who don't pay taxes the next, and he will be immune to the inconsistency because Hannity's listeners are taxpayers. But a medical savings account means nothing if you don't pay taxes.

If you don't pay taxes and don't have health insurance, you want a card in your wallet that says someone else is going to pay. You want a medical savings account and tort reform about as much as you want another Chicago winter in an unheated apartment.

If you grow up poor and minority, everyone else's gain is ill-gotten. You expect the people you elect to take from them and give to you. If they don't, then there is no point in electing them. You might as well stay home on Election Day.

Michele Malkin is upset that David Axelrod's firm is doing the public relations for Obama Care. Michele Malkin is a superb intellectual analyst of Chicago politics, but she has no visceral feel for it. When Mayor Richard J. Daley was confronted about the city's insurance business going to a sole-source brokerage run by his sons, he responded that there would be no point in being in politics if he couldn't throw a little business to his children. Why would Axelrod be in politics if he couldn't profit from it?

The emphasis added is my own. Here is the problem when taking the stance against healthcare. As we argue items like freedom of the marketplace, liberty of the individual, taxes and opening up competition across state lines, there remains the fact that we stray away from our visceral feel of Chicago politics. Indeed there is no greater example than Chicago for the concept of Organized Exploitation. As Miller points out, those people waiting for an insurance card are, to The Machine, simply statistics to be exploited.

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.

There is little doubt that our health care system in general requires reform. As Miller points out, along with many others, this does not require 1,000+ pages of legislation added to a government that is already nothing short of Leviathan. But, as Miller notes:

...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. Welcome to the city.

At least our skyline is gorgeous.

Bernanke Worse than Greenspan?

Peter Schiff seems to think so.

House Healthcare Scavenger Hunt

Today is a rainy day here in Chicago, and there's not that much to do. If you, like me, are in need of something to while away the hours, why not play along in the coolest new game on the intertubes? I give you the House Healthcare Scavenger Hunt. Enjoy!

Hat Tip: Doug Bandow, C4L

Ending the Fed: A Crack in the Ice

The Federal Reserve has been ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Loretta Preska to disclose information related to its "emergency lending" program.

If you'll recall, when the bank bailouts began happening, we were treated to some pretty juicy quotes when the bankers themselves were asked exactly how they were utilizing the funds they received:

"We're not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking."

-- SunTrust Banks spokesman Barry Koling on the receipt of $3.5 billion

"We manage our capital in its aggregate."

-- Regions Financial spokesman Tim Deighton on the receipt of $3.5 billion

"We've lent some of it. We've not lent some of it. We've not given any accounting of, 'Here's how we're doing it.'"

-- JPMorgan Chase spokesman Thomas Kelly on the receipt of $25 billion

Almost unimaginably, Bloomberg was unsatisfied with these types of responses, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request aimed at the Fed, which has since become a lawsuit.

The Fed has refused to name the financial firms it lent to or disclose the amounts or the assets put up as collateral under 11 programs, most put in place during the deepest financial crisis since the Great Depression, saying that doing so might set off a run by depositors and unsettle shareholders. Bloomberg LP, the New York-based company majority-owned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, sued on Nov. 7 on behalf of its Bloomberg News unit.

“The Federal Reserve has to be accountable for the decisions that it makes,” said Representative Alan Grayson, a Florida Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, after Preska’s ruling. “It’s one thing to say that the Federal Reserve is an independent institution. It’s another thing to say that it can keep us all in the dark.”

The judge said the central bank “improperly withheld agency records” by “conducting an inadequate search” after Bloomberg News reporters filed a request under the information act. She gave the Fed five days to turn over documents it told the reporters it located, including 231 pages of reports, and said it must look for more at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, which runs most of the loan programs.

While I will imagine that the Fed is going to appeal this as far as it possibly can in order to stall the process, if not turn it back, this is a fantastic blow to the shadowy organization. The Bloomberg article calls it what it is: a wake-up call to the American people.

“The public deserves to know what’s being done with the money,” said Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “This ought to be a wake-up call for the public that they need to be far more educated about this.”

I've been educating myself about the Federal Reserve more and more since I began writing this blog back in January, following primarily the effort to begin the process by Auditing the Federal Reserve via HR 1207. Will you educate yourselves?

Here are some of my posts about the Fed to get you started:

America: Freedom to Fascism
Change We Can Believe In
Truth on Taxation
Federal Reserve: WTF?
History in the Making: HR 1207
Our Monetary Policy is Eroding Our Freedom

Start Googling. The history of the Federal Reserve is fascinating enough in and of itself to keep you interested. And if you have even the tiniest stream of desire for a true republic, for actual liberty, you will begin to devour information about this organization and our monetary system voraciously. Who knows, you may even look into the book many are saying will be one of the most important of our time.

White Folk Are Ready to Riot

I suppose even posting this makes me an EXTREEEEEEEEEEME RACIST!!!!!

But it's pretty damn funny and I just can't help myself.