Posted on 08/16/2013 6:29:31 AM PDT by Reaganite Republican
Levin aims to change the rules of the game…
Number one on both Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
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It’s brilliant, he’s truly a founding father in my opinion.
Here are some talking points to bring up at your next Town Hall Meeting, phone call, letter, or e-mail:
1.) If we stop donating to the RINOs, then we just MIGHT have a chance that they will actually change their anti-Conservative actions.
Remember, in politics, “Lack of Money speaks louder than words.”
2.) If teeth are lacking in the US Constitution for swift and effective punishment of Constitution violators, then it really is time to SHUT DOWN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT.
3.) What more will it take for Articles of Impeachment to be issued for B. Hussein Obama?
4.) When can we expect to read that you have resigned from Congress?
16 bucks at Walmart
The Constitution, as originally written, provides a remedy—Checks and Balances—for our present circumstances.
However, the Constitution, as originally written, is being disregarded by both parties. The Republican “leadership” in the House is especially derelict, given the mandate they received in 2010.
What makes anyone think that a written re-affirmation of Constitutional principles will change anything?
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but the time for talking has passed. I think the country has reached the point of stout ropes and even stouter trees.
(And FU if you think that’s racist!)
I am really getting behind this... WHO ELSE is attempting anything even remotely effective?
He’s right, it won’t happen overnight... but what he’s proposing needs to be put in motion without abandoning any other fronts vs the progs
The GOP was more frightened by 2010 than the Democrats were.
Whatever is not ignored outright, is deformed and gratuitously distorted far beyond and apart from its very CLEAR intent.
How US voters and the MSM (supposed watchdog of the public interest) can idly tolerate these continuing and increasingly dangerous errors, omissions and crimes against the Constitution and its fundamental meaning is beyond me.
“What makes anyone think that a written re-affirmation of Constitutional principles will change anything?
Not to be a Debbie Downer, but the time for talking has passed. I think the country has reached the point of stout ropes and even stouter trees.
“
If you aren’t willing to do this, then the idea that you will remotely hang someone from a tree is just the type of hot air that hasn’t accomplished anything for the past 10 years.
The state legislatures are our only hope now. The window of opportunity is closing. When the AMNESTY TSUNAM
I hits, it will turn RED STATE BLUE. Whatever is to be done, must be done now. This can no longer be an intellectual discussion—it has to be a movement.
A list of reforms needed at present should include (at minimum) the following:
The first item of meaningful political reform HAS TO BE runoff elections or instant runoff elections for all public offices. Nobody should ever fear to vote his first choice, at least on a first ballot, and nobody should ever hold any public office with less than 50% of the vote.
There should be a None-Of-Above choice on all ballots for public office and if that choice ever wins, then the other candidates should be barred for life from holding ANY public office and the parties sponsoring them should be barred for at least ten years from sponsoring candidates for that particular office. The penalty for running dead wood for public offices should be severe.
There should also be some mechanism to prevent utterly unqualified people from holding high offices. Certainly a candidate for president or vice president, or for US Senator or member of the House of Representatives should need to obtain the same basic and simple secret level security clearance which anybody would need to be a guard at the gate of any military base in our land. That isn't asking for much but it would have spared us from the last two democrat presidents.
Another item on such a list would be a provision that when a president is impeached and removed, his VP goes out the door with him and the office is either vacant until the next election or an emergency election is held to fill the office for the remainder of the current term. Granted removing a president should be difficult but it should not be impossible and if we couldn't remove Slick, we'd not have been able to remove Hitler or Nero either.
Another item on such a voters' bill of rights should be something which would eliminate voting fraud for all time.
Our entire voting system is fubar and needs to be replaced and a fraud-proof system would not be that hard to devise; it would involve biometrics and p2p networking and the idea that ANYBODY could do his own vote tally and that all tallies should match. It also should involve the idea that a person could have total assurance that his vote did not disappear or get counted for the other guy. What I'd envision would be keeping my vote on MY computer with a fingerprint reader like you see on all govt computers i.e. a record of my contact info and a biometric reading and a national database to check biometrics for me and everybody else, and a p2p network to allow ANYBODY to do his own tally by calling for votes the same way you'd ask or a copy of "you aint nothing but a hound dog" on Kazaa, and all tallies should produce the same number within statistical limits.
We should consider the possibility that, when an election is within one percentage point, we send both people to congress with half of a vote each.
There is also a question as to the extent the people should be voting on some issues directly since we now have the technology to allow that, while the founding fathers did not. You could get some of these social issues settled once and for all and out of politics, and you could limit the scope for corruption and bribery by letting the people themselves settle at least some kinds of issues.
The "War on Drugs" and the Prison/Industrial Complex should be ended immediately, along with "No-Knock Raids".
The "war on drugs" leads to
It is that final item which some would use as a pretext to eviscerate the second amendment, which is the link pin of the entire bill of rights. Consider the following from the former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Bush administration no less:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/17/weapons-ban-urged-to-rein-in-mexican-drug-war/
The former head of U.S. Customs and Border Protection called Monday for the U.S. to reinstitute the ban on assault weapons and take other measures to rein in the war between Mexico and its drug cartels, saying the violence has the potential to bring down legitimate rule in that country.Former CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner also called for the United States to more aggressively investigate U.S. gun sellers and tighten security along its side of the border, describing the situation as "critical" to the safety of people in both countries, whether they live near the border or not.
Mexico, for its part, needs to reduce official corruption and organize its forces along the lines the U.S. does, such as a specialized border patrol and a customs agency with a broader mandate than monitoring trade, Mr. Bonner said in an exchange of e-mails.
"Border security is especially important to breaking the power and influence of the Mexican-based trafficking organizations," Mr. Bonner said. "Despite vigorous efforts by both governments, huge volumes of illegal drugs still cross from Mexico..."
The problem here clearly is not guns and it is clearly a problem of economics. The drugs one of these idiots would use in a day under rational circumstances would cost a dollar; that would simply present no scope for crime or criminals. Under present circumstances that dollar's worth of drugs is costing the user $300 a day and since that guy is dealing with a 10% fence, he's having to commit $3000 worth of crime to buy that dollar's worth of drugs. In other words, a dollar's worth of chemicals has been converted into $3000 worth of crime, times the number of those idiots out there, times 365 days per year, all through the magic of stupid laws. No nation on Earth could afford that forever.
A rational set of drug laws would:
Do all of that, and the drug problem and 70% of all urban crime will vanish within two years. That would be an optimal solution; but you could simply legalize it all and still be vastly better off than we are now. 150 Years ago, there were no drug laws in America and there were no overwhelming drug problems. How bright do you really need to be to figure that one out?
The country does need medical reform, but not Obungacare.
The size of obungacare indicates to me that it is about power and not about health care. Likewise Mark Steyn notes that the job of director or head of public health has become the biggest govt. job in European countries which have public health care i.e. it would be a step upwards from PM or President or King or Grand Duke or anything else to head of health care. In other words, European health care is ultimate bureaucracy. If I had the power to I would institute a sort of a basic health care reform which would be overwhelmingly simple and which would resemble the thing we're reading about in no way, shape, or manner. Key points would be:
1. Elimination of lawsuits against doctors and other medical providers. There would be a general fund to compensate victims of malpractice for actual damage and a non-inbred system for weeding out those guilty of malpractice. The non-inbred system would be a tribunal composed not just of oher doctors, but of plumbers, electricians, engineers, and everybody else as well.
2. Elimination of the artificial exclusivity of the medical system. In other words our medical schools could easily produce two or three times the number of doctors they do with no noticeable drop off in quality.
3. Elimination of the factors which drive the cost of medicines towards unaffordability. That would include both lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies and government agencies which force costs into the billions to develop any new drug. There should be no suing a pharmaceutical for any drug which has passed FDA approval and somewhere between thalidamide and what we have now, there should be a happy medium.
4. Elimination of the outmoded WW-II notion of triage in favor of a system which took some rational account of who pays for the system and who doesn't. The horror stories I keep reading about the middle-class guy with an injured child having to fill out forms for three hours while an endless procession of illegal immigrants just walks in and are seen, would end, as would any possibility of that child waiting three hours for treatment while people were being seen for heroin overdoses or other lifestyle issues.
All of those things would fall under the heading of what TR called "trust busting". There would also be some system for caring the truly indigent, but the need and cost would be far less than at present.
By far the biggest item is that first one. I don't know the exact numbers but if you add every cost involved in our present out-of-control lawyering, it has to be a major fraction if not more than half of our medical costs. The trial lawyers' guild being one of the two major pillars of financial support for the democrat party is the basic reason nobody is saying anything about that part of the problem.
Other than that, you almost have to have seen some of the problems close up to have any sort of a feel for them.
Item 2, this is what I saw in grad school some time ago, although I do not have any reason to think much has changed. In the school I attended, there appeared to be sixty or seventy first year med students walking around and all but one or two of them would have made perfectly good doctors, they were all very bright and highly motivated. The only way the school should have lost any of those kids was either they discovered they couldn't deal with the sight of blood in real life or six months later they changed their minds and went off to Hollywood to become actors or actresses; the school should never have lost more than ten percent of them. But they knew from day one that they were keeping 35% of that class.
That system says that you know several things about the guy working on your body: You know he's a survivor, and that's highly unlikely to be from being better qualified than 65% of the other students; You know he hasn't had enough sleep (he's doing his work and the work of that missing 65%); You know he's probably doing some sort of drugs to deal with the lack of sleep... One of my first steps as "health Tsar" or whatever would be to tell the medical schools that henceforth if they ever drop more than15% of an incoming class, they'll lose their accreditation.
Item 3. My father walks into a pharmacy in Switzerland with a bottle of pills he normally pays $50 for in Fla. and asks the pharmacist if he can fill it. "Why certainly sir!", fills the bottle of pills and says "That will be $3.50." Seeing that my father was standing there in a state of shock, the man says "Gee, I'm sorry, Mr. V., you see, we have socialized medicine in Switzerland and if you were a Swiss citizen and paid into the systemn, why I could sell you this bottle of pills for $1.50 but, since you're foreign and do not pay into the system I have to charge you the full price, certainly you can appreciate that."
The guy thought my father was in shock because he was charging him too MUCH... Clearly whatever needs to be done with drugs amounts to trust busting, and not extracting more money from the American people.
Item 4. A caller to the Chris Plant show (D.C./WMAL) the other morning, an ER nurse, noted that much of the costs which her hospital had to absorb, as do most hospitals, was the problem of people with no resources using the ER as their first and only point of contact to the medical profession. She said that there were gang members who were constantly coming in for repairs from bullet holes and knife damage and drug problems, that they could not legally turn any of those people away, and that there was zero possibility of ever collecting any money from any of them, and that the costs of that were gigantic.
Clearly throwing money at that problems is not going to help anything either. Again if I'm the "Medicine Tsar", those guys would be cared for, but not at the ER or at least not the part of the ER where normal people go, and they would not be first in line. Mostly they'd be dealing with medical students who needed the practice patching up knife and bullet damage.
Immigration:
As in the case of the "War on Drugs(TM)", the only real solution is to take the profit out of it and in this case the profit is measured in votes.
We need a law and possibly a constitutional amendment requiring a person to be a US citizen for 18 years before they ever vote in a US election. That would not be difficult to justify; I had to be a US citizen for eighteen years before I ever voted in a US election and I don't see any immigrant group which appears better or more deserving of rights than I am.
In this climate the worst thing we can do is convene a constitutional convention. It would be an avenue for changes we don’t need. Half the states are either blue or purple I don’t want them pushing change.
No, what we need is to vote in people with the appropriate amount of testosterone that will vote the will of the people and also not afraid to initiate punitive proceedings against those that violate the current constitution.
What makes you think I haven’t been doing anything?
Don’t judge others on the basis of your own actions.
The Convention would be called for the specific purpose of editing/ratifying these particular amendments.
There's a way around that old bugaboo of the "runaway convention".
Levin/Lee 2016
Amen!
Right, but we cannot control what we have now and I fear opening that box to a larger uncontrollable crowd.
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