Linking Our Way to Hell

Reading the links with this post should give you a clue to the direction our Country is headed.

"It is a quite special secret pleasure
how the people around us fail to realize
what is really happening to them"
-- Adolph Hitler

It's hard to focus on one thing I want to write about this morning. Everything is moving at breakneck speed so it's hard to focus on one subject. Everyone has commented on the changes being made by the Obama Administration at such a fast pace that it is dizzying.

The Stimulus Bill was passed, unread by anyone except the group that wrote it, at hyper speed and it laid the ground work for such an array of change that it hard to know where to start. Dose any one truly believe that Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid or anyone from Congress wrote this pièce de résistance. The budget was passed almost as fast.

Do I start with Health care and the fact that the ground work for online medical records and health care rationing was laid in the Stimulus bill...

The Democratic politicians pushing this bill have far-reaching ambitions. The legislation (PDF) (on page 244, for the curious) hands to a still-to-be-named health care bureaucrat the "goal of utilization of an electronic health record for each person in the United States by 2014." Selecting official standards will be left to the Department of Health and Human Services (page 265).
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10161233-38.html

From Betsy McCaughey writing for Bloomberg:
The bill’s health rules will affect “every individual in the United States” (445, 454, 479). Your medical treatments will be tracked electronically by a federal system. Having electronic medical records at your fingertips, easily transferred to a hospital, is beneficial. It will help avoid duplicate tests and errors.
But the bill goes further. One new bureaucracy, the National Coordinator of Health Information Technology, will monitor treatments to make sure your doctor is doing what the federal government deems appropriate and cost effective. The goal is to reduce costs and “guide” your doctor’s decisions (442, 446). These provisions in the stimulus bill are virtually identical to what [Tom] Daschle prescribed in his 2008 book, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.” According to Daschle, doctors have to give up autonomy and “learn to operate less like solo practitioners.

or Energy and the fact that energy monitoring and rationing was laid in the Stimulus bill...

Smart meter From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Example of a smart meter in use in Europe. The meter has the ability to reduce load, disconnect-reconnect remotely, and interface to gas & water meters.

A smart meter generally refers to a type of advanced meter (usually an electrical meter) that identifies consumption in more detail than a conventional meter; and optionally, but generally, communicates that information via some network back to the local utility for monitoring and billing purposes (telemetering).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_meter

or the Economy and the fact that the groundwork for higher taxes was laid in the Stimulus bill...

From an Article by Newt Gingrich in Time Magazine:
If the country's No. 1 priority is to create jobs, then a hidden $1,300-per-family energy-tax increase in the guise of a cap-and-trade system is absolutely destructive. Herbert Hoover raised taxes in 1932, and it further crippled the economy. The war-on-wealth rhetoric (Obama talks about punishing companies that send jobs overseas; Vice President Joe Biden said he wanted to throw CEOs "in the brig"; Senator Claire McCaskill referred to CEOs as "idiots") and policies of this Administration and the Democratic Congress are making it difficult to stabilize the stock market and much harder to get successful people to invest in American jobs.
If we want to keep money in the U.S., then sending it overseas for oil and gas is counterproductive. Yet the Obama budget includes a 13% excise tax on offshore oil and gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, threatening the domestic oil and gas industry at a time when we should be encouraging it to return resources home to America.
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1884571,00.html
These are just two of the hidden taxes in the Stimulus bill.

Do I mention that Obama's Economic Advisory Committee is going to reap Billions if all his policies are adopted?

The board will remain in tact for at least two years.

Members of the board to be announced: Austan Goolsbee as staff director and chief economist; William H. Donaldson, SEC Chair, 2003-05; Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., president and CEO, TIAA-CREF; Robert Wolf, chairman and CEO, UBS; David F. Swensen, CIO, Yale University; Mark T. Gallogly, founder and managing partner, Centerbridge Partners L.P.; Penny Pritzker, chairwoman, Pritzker Realty Group; Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO, GE (parent company of NBC News); John Doerr, partner at Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Jim Owens, chairman and CEO, Caterpillar Inc.; Monica C. Lozano, publisher & chief executive officer, La Opinion; Charles E. Phillips, Jr., president, Oracle; Anna Burger, chairwoman, Change to Win; Richard L. Trumka, secretary-treasurer, AFL-CIO; Laura D'Andrea Tyson, dean, Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley; Martin Feldstein, professor of Economics, Harvard.

From the Washington Times:
President Obama's newly named Economic Recovery Advisory Board, the real-world Americans being asked to help solve the nation's financial crisis, includes a union executive who took the Fifth in a federal probe, a billionaire whose failed bank pioneered the subprime mortgage market, and deep-pocket donors who gave or gathered nearly $1.2 million for the president's campaign.
In all, 11 of the 16 board members donated or raised money for Democrats in the last election, according to a Washington Times review of campaign finance records. They include the president and chief operating officer of the American arm of UBS Investment Bank, the Swiss-based bank now at the center of a widening tax evasion probe by the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service.

Do I comment on his Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner's, appetite for power or the White Houses' desire for control for that matter?

The Obama administration is considering asking Congress to give the Treasury secretary unprecedented powers to initiate the seizure of non-bank financial companies, such as large insurers, investment firms and hedge funds, whose collapse would damage the broader economy, according to an administration document.

The government at present has the authority to seize only banks.

Is the Census power grab a topic? Is it the attack on Rush Limbaugh or the AIG executives being attacked not only on Capital Hill but in their own driveways? Is ACORN really a threat to fair elections and AIG Executives? Is it Obama's hatred of American Capitalism? Should I ask why I believe Barney Franks and Chris Dodd are responsible for Freddie and Fannie? Do I comment on the end of the War on Terror? Is it this mornings' firing of General Motors CEO? Is it the Administration's meddling in every aspect of our lives? Is it the lies and misdirection of this President, promising one thing but delivering something entirely different?

Eureka! That is the issue...er....those are the issues. All of the above.