ET Williams

The Doctor of Common Sense

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The hypocrisy of Progressives who don’t want cross honoring Marines

We should love the Cross

By: Tony Perry, Los Angeles Times

January 3, 2012

Reporting from San Diego— In the early days of the U.S.
battle with the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, the four Marines from Camp Pendleton
were among those troops on the front lines in Anbar province.

The two enlisted Marines would not survive those violent
days in the spring of 2004: one was killed by “friendly fire” when a
mortar round went awry and one was mortally wounded while hurling a grenade to
repel an enemy assault, bravery for which he was posthumously awarded the
Silver Star.

The two officers survived, only later to be killed in other
battles in other parts of the country: one by gunfire while leading a raid in
Baghdad to kill or capture a “high-value” target in 2007 and one by
stepping on a buried bomb while scouting an attack position near the Syrian
border in 2005.

On Veterans Day, a retired Navy chaplain — who served with
Zurheide, Austin, Zembiec and Mendoza with the 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine
Regiment — led a small group of Marines and family members up a steep, rugged
hill at Camp Pendleton to plant a 13-foot tall cross in their memory. No one
informed the chain of command or asked for permission.

Zurheide, Zembiec and Mendoza had been among those Marines
who planted a cross in the same spot in 2003 before the battalion deployed to
Iraq.

In the years after the deaths, Marine “grunts” adopted
the hill as a place to leave messages in remembrance of those killed in action,
including coins, medals, dog tags, and bits of sand and dirt brought back from
distant battlefields.

The cross was destroyed by a brush fire in 2007. A
replacement was raised in 2008, without news coverage. When a second cross was
erected on Veterans Day, a story in The Times told of the cross and its meaning
to Marines.

Within days, two groups petitioned the Marine Corps to take down
the crosses as a violation of the constitutional separation of church and
state. Two other groups took the opposite stance.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Alpine), who served with the battalion
in Fallouja, urged the Marines to leave the cross alone. The American Civil
Liberties Union, although not directly involved in the dispute, said it hopes
the Marines will “follow the law.”

“The legal test is whether from the perspective of a
reasonable observer this would be perceived as government endorsement of religion,”
said Erwin Chemerinsky, founding dean of the law school at UC Irvine and a
constitutional scholar.

The cross, Chemerinsky noted, is an inherently Christian
symbol. But an argument could be made that because the cross is not visible to
the public and that the only people who see it are Marines, it does not serve a
religious purpose but rather a reminder to Marines of those who have fallen in
combat, he said.

“My own sense is that a cross by itself on a military
base violates” the Constitution, Chemerinsky said. “But whether a
court will see it that way is uncertain.”

The colonel in charge of Camp Pendleton has sent an
undisclosed recommendation about the cross to Marine Corps headquarters, where
the issue is being studied by lawyers and generals. A decision is expected
within weeks.

Photos: Marines’ cross honors fallen comrades

So who were these four Marines and why, years after their
deaths, do Marines feel it important that they be remembered?

Austin, 21, had joined the Marine Corps after graduating
from high school in rural Texas. He loved parties and football but quit the
team in solidarity when his cousin had a run-in with the coach.

Two days before he was killed in a firefight, Austin told
The Times: “There’s no place I’d rather be than here with my Marines. I’ll
always remember this time.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-church-state-20120103,0,877217.story

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Your Tax Dollars Pay for Illegal’s and Bums

Money Not Well Spent

By SAM ROBERTS

Hundreds of patients have been languishing for months or even years in New York City hospitals, despite being well enough to be sent home or to nursing centers for less-expensive care, because they are illegal immigrants or lack sufficient insurance or appropriate housing.

Yu Kang Fu was moved to a care center in Brooklyn last spring after spending over four years at New York Downtown Hospital.

As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost.

“Many of those individuals no longer need that care, but because they have no resources and many have no family here, we, unfortunately, are caring for them in a much more expensive setting than necessary based on their clinical need,” said LaRay Brown, a senior vice president for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. Under state law, public hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients to shelters or to the street.

Medicaid often pays for emergency care for illegal immigrants, but not for continuing care, and many hospitals in places with large concentrations of illegal immigrants, like Texas, California and Florida, face the quandary of where to send patients well enough to leave. Officials in New York City say they have many such patients who are draining money from the health system as the cost of keeping people in acute-care hospitals continues to escalate.

But even if Medicaid pays for some care, taxpayer dollars are ultimately being consumed by patients who could be cared for in nursing homes or other health facilities, and even at home if supportive services were available. Care for a patient languishing in a hospital can cost more than $100,000 a year, while care in a nursing home can cost $20,000 or less.

Patients fit to be discharged from hospitals but having no place to go typically remain more than five years, Ms. Brown said. She estimated that there were about 300 patients in such a predicament throughout the city, most in public hospitals or higher-priced skilled public nursing homes, though a smattering were in private hospitals.

One patient, a former hospital technician from Queens, has lived at the city’s Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island for 13 years because the hospital has no place to send him, Ms. Brown said. The patient, who is in his mid-60s, has been there since an arterial disease cost him part of one leg below the knee and left him in a wheelchair. The city’s public health system declined to provide the names of any long-term patients or make them available for interviews, citing confidentiality laws.

Five years ago, Yu Kang Fu, 58, who lived in Flushing, Queens, and was a cook at a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, was dropped off by his boss at New York Downtown Hospital, a private institution in Manhattan, complaining of a severe headache. Mr. Yu was admitted to the intensive-care unit with a stroke.

Within days, he was well enough for hospital personnel to begin planning for his release, but as an illegal immigrant (he had overstayed a work visa a decade ago), he was ineligible for health benefits. And no nursing home or rehabilitation center would take him. Neither would his son in China nor the Chinese government, although the hospital volunteered to fly him there at its expense.

Mr. Yu’s protracted hospital stay was first chronicled in an article in The New York Times in 2008 about the treatment of uninsured immigrants.

Mr. Yu remained in the hospital for over four years until he was transferred last spring to the Atlantis Rehabilitation and Residential Health Care Facility, a private center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after the federal government certified him as a “permanent resident under color of law,” essentially acknowledging that he could not be returned to China and qualifying him for medical benefits.

“This gentleman cost us millions of dollars,” said Jeffrey Menkes, the president of New York Downtown. “We try to provide physical, occupational therapy, but this is an acute-care hospital. This patient shouldn’t be here.”

Mr. Yu said that the hospital had treated him well, but that he had made enormous progress in regaining his ability to walk through his rehabilitation regimen at Atlantis. He hopes to return to China when he is well enough to be discharged.

“Here, I am very happy,” he said. “This is very nice — No. 1.”

New York Downtown serves a largely immigrant population, and many patients have no insurance or proof that they are in the United States legally, which is necessary for discharge purposes and eventual reimbursements, said Chui Man Lai, assistant vice president of patient services at the hospital.

These patients often arrive in the emergency room acutely ill and unaccompanied, and we have to treat them until they can be discharged safely,” Ms. Lai said. “The hospital is required, by law and its mission, to care for these patients.”

 

Health professionals refer to them as “permanent patients,” trussed in red tape and essentially living in hospitals already operating on thin margins. In some cases, health care professionals say, grown children leave ailing parents at the hospitals and go on vacation. Officials call that practice a “pop drop.”

Though the problem is particularly severe in the municipal hospital system, longtime patients place a financial burden wherever they end up.

New York Downtown spends about $2 million annually for such patients out of an operating budget of about $200 million. An acute-care patient can cost the hospital more than $1,500 a day.

Hospitals are reluctant to complain publicly about such patients for fear of being perceived as callously seeking to dump nonpaying patients. Elected officials are generally loath to be seen as encouraging illegal immigrants by changing reimbursement formulas. The issue was never addressed during the debate over national health care legislation.

Longtime patients, meanwhile, risk getting sicker because they are exposed to diseases that fester in hospitals.

“At times there is a fine line regarding who meets the criteria to be admitted to a hospital, but if there’s no way to immediately contact a family member and the patient needs nonmedical help or is homeless, you’re obligated to provide shelter,” said Dr. Warren B. Licht, who recently retired as New York Downtown’s chief medical officer after seven years to return to full-time clinical practice in the wellness and prevention center that he founded there. “You can’t kick a patient out of the hospital.”

New York Downtown, Dr. Licht said, has offered to pay for nursing home care for patents who are uninsured and are illegal immigrants, but care facilities are reluctant to risk taking patients for fear that they would be saddled with unexpected and unreimbursed expenses.

“If the patient does not have or cannot obtain health insurance to pay for the next level of care, other non-acute-care health facilities won’t routinely accept a patient,” Dr. Licht said.

New York Downtown has four or five patients out of a total of 180 who have no place to go, he said, adding, “It cost us several million dollars a year in a hospital struggling to keep its head above water.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/nyregion/nowhere-to-go-patients-linger-in-hospitals-at-a-high-cost.html?_r=1

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Can We Call Mitt Romney a Conservative?

I am a Progressive

By: Ben Shapiro

Much of the conservative punditocracy has declared that Mitt
Romney is the consensus conservative candidate. If he is, he’s the least
consensual consensus candidate in modern political history — the man can’t
break 25 percent with a sledgehammer. While his supporters shout from the hills
that Romney essentially tied for the win in Iowa, his glass remains
three-quarters empty, with no-name Rick Santorum winning as much of the vote,
Ron Paul winning nearly as much, and Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry combining for
as much. The last time a Republican candidate captured the nomination for the
presidency by winning Iowa with this low a vote total, his name was Bob Dole. A
couple of years later, he was hawking Viagra.

Nonetheless, the word is out: The fix is in. Unbelievably,
not a single anti-Romney television ad was run in the state of Iowa. And while
a few conservatives — including yours truly — have come out and opposed
nominating the most left-wing Republican in the field, many more conservatives
have endorsed Romney’s candidacy.

Now there are good reasons for supporting Romney in the GOP
nomination race. Some people argue that he has the most appeal to independents,
because he is the least openly conservative. Others state that he doesn’t have
personal baggage and is thus less likely to become fodder for late night talk
shows. Still others contend that his vanilla personality means that the focus
of the election will remain on President Obama and such focus will make Romney
a shoe-in. Finally, there are those who say that Romney has had his convenient
road-to-Damascus conversion to conservatism and we should now trust him.

 

These arguments, at the very least, are understandable. What
is not understandable is the contention by so many conservatives that Romney’s
record is conservative. It isn’t. He’s always been an advocate of a carefully
managed, large government rather than a freedom-ensuring small one; his record
in Massachusetts shows him to be an advocate for liberal policies like the
individual mandate and activist judges. There can be no doubt that among all
the Republicans running, his record is the most left. Even Jon Huntsman looks
like Ronald Reagan next to Romney.

 

Why, then, do so many conservatives say that Romney
represents true conservatism?

 

Because it’s convenient.

 

Whenever there is an open Republican race, many professional
conservatives fear alienating the candidates. Instead of holding their feet to
the fire, they find the person most likely to win and back him. If that person
happens not to be particularly conservative, the pundits rewrite conservatism
to fit the candidate. This preserves their access and their credibility with
their audience. As professional prognosticators, it certainly looks better to
have endorsed George W. Bush in 2000 than Steve Forbes. If pundits can convince
us that not only did they support George W. Bush but also that George W. Bush’s
“compassionate conservatism” was actually conservative rather than
warmed over big government liberalism, they can eat their cake and have it,
too.

 

This is deeply problematic, of course, since the
professional pundit class is supposed to stand for something other than
convenience. Yes, defeating horrible politicians like Barack Obama is the top
goal — but that doesn’t justify redefining conservatism entirely. Support Mitt
Romney if you must — but don’t urinate on our leg and tell us that it’s
raining. Mitt Romney is not a conservative. If you want to support him, go
right ahead. But don’t lie about your rationale. It undermines the conservative
standard.

 

Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., long ago pointed
out that folks who cannot live by certain standards tend to undermine those
standards. When the standards are lowered, the behavior that such standards
were originally intended to stop increases dramatically. In the case of unwed
motherhood, for example, when society ceases to consider such behavior morally
wrong, the behavior increases exponentially.

 

The same holds true in politics. When we deliberately
broaden conservatism to encompass government-forced purchase of health
insurance or raising taxes or appointing liberal judges or enforcing same-sex
marriage or using taxpayer money to bail out business or pushing trade
barriers, we destroy conservatism from within. If we do that, why would our
politicians even bother to pay lip service to the standard?

 

They wouldn’t. And we’d end up with ever more liberal
nominees. Which is precisely what has happened since the halcyon days of
Reagan.

 

Standards matter. If you want to support Mitt Romney, that’s
your prerogative. But don’t sell out conservative principles in the process.

http://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2012/01/04/the_great_conservative_sellout/page/full/

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President Obama appoints three to NLRB, and GOP does nothing

I can not be stopped

By: Lisa Mascaro

Capping a daylong assault on congressional Republicans,
President Obama appointed three members to the National Labor Relations Board
as part of a series of recess appointments the GOP had tried to prevent.

Obama made the move while Congress is away for the holiday
break, but meeting every few days in pro forma sessions to block the White
House from precisely these type of recess appointments. The labor board
appointments were tucked into Obama’s more public announcement of Richard
Cordray as the new consumer protection bureau chief.

“The American people deserve to have qualified public
servants fighting for them every day,” Obama said in a statement. “We can’t
wait.”

The labor board appointments will ensure that the panel,
which adjudicates workers’ right to form unions, will keep functioning. The
five-person panel was down to just two members in the new year – not enough to
fully function.

The appointments are sure to draw fire from Republicans who
have sought to block what they characterize as the pro-union slant of the labor
board in the Obama administration. Labor unions have been fighting for ways to
make it easier for workers to organize.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who had vowed to block Obama’s
nominees, called the labor board an “out-of-control rogue bureaucracy.”

“Hasn’t the NLRB already done enough damage?” Graham said.
“Today’s action may impress the union bosses but will deliver yet another blow
to job creation.”

The appointees include Sharon Block, a deputy assistant
Labor secretary who once worked for former Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.);
Richard Griffin, a board member of the AFL-CIO; and Terence Flynn, a counsel to
the Republican member of the board.

“We commend the president for exercising his constitutional
authority to ensure that crucially important agencies protecting workers’
rights and consumers are not shut down by Republican obstructionism,” said
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-nlrb-recess-appointments-20120104,0,2653686.story

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Is Comrade Obama stepping over the line with Appointment?

 

The World Is Mine

 

By: Trish Turner

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce may sue the Obama
administration over President Obama’s controversial appointment of Richard
Cordray to head a controversial consumer financial board, officials from the
business group told Fox News on Wednesday after an unprecedented display of
executive power that is sure to poison already-strained relations with the GOP.

Chamber spokeswoman Blair Latoff and colleague Bryan Goettel
both told Fox News that their understanding is that “we are not ruling it
out.” However, they said they still “need to understand the specifics
of the appointment to determine if a legal challenge is even possible.”

Obama to Make Controversial Recess Appointment

President to appoint Richard Cordray as head of Consumer
Financial Protection Bureau

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Dem Leader Hints at Another Walkout

The chamber was early in its criticism of the president’s
move Wednesday to appoint Cordray to chair the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau in a move that invites legal challenge but which administration
officials say is perfectly within the president’s authority to do.

“To say we are disappointed in the move by the
president today would be a gross understatement,” Chamber President Tom
Donohue said in statement. “This controversial appointment is
unprecedented, constitutionally questionable, and puts the authority of the
director and the validity of the bureau’s work in legal jeopardy. What’s more,
it ignores repeated calls to reform the bureau by restoring basic checks and
balances.”

Others are also questioning the validity of the president’s
move. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who could become the
majority leader in 2012, released an ominous statement Wednesday, saying the
appointment “lands this nominee in uncertain legal territory, threatens
the confirmation process and fundamentally endangers the Congress’ role in
providing a check on the excesses of the executive branch.”

One senior GOP aide told Fox News to expect a lawsuit from
an outside group that would fall under CFPB’s regulatory jurisdiction since
Congress itself would lack the authority to sue.

“It’s our understanding that someone affected by the
CFPB would have standing here, not the House,” another aide told Fox
Business Network. “So some business that gets clobbered by the agency
could sue.”

The GOP aide added that aside from an almost immediate
challenge, even if Cordray moves into the post, he will face a wall of
opposition at every turn.

Cordray “will get absolutely nothing done. Also,
funding (for the CFPB) will be in some peril,” the aide said.

The White House might not mind a fight during a presidential
campaign year, as Obama looks to frame the battle as one against obstructionist
congressional Republicans who are against middle-class Americans.

“I nominated Richard for this job last summer, so you
may be wondering why am I appointing him today,” Obama told supporters in
Ohio, where Cordray appeared with him in Shaker Heights. “It would be a
good question. … The only reason Republicans in the Senate have blocked
Richard is because they don’t agree with the law that set up a consumer
watchdog in the first place. They want to weaken the law. They want to water it
down.”

Republicans made clear both during Cordray’s nomination and
on Wednesday that they have no problem with Cordray personally, but want
changes in the massive new watchdog agency, including a budget and nominee
subject to congressional oversight and other reforms in its wide-ranging
rule-making authority.

“The president should stop allowing his Chicago
political campaign to make his Washington policy decisions,” Rep. Patrick
McHenry, R-N.C., chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee on TARP, Financial
Services and Bailouts of Public and Private Programs, said Wednesday in a
statement in which he criticized Obama’s claims of transparency in his
administration. McHenry also invited Cordray to appear on Jan. 24 before his
committee to answer questions about how he would implement policies as head of
CFPB.

“There are legitimate policy concerns about the
structure of the CFPB. They can be reconciled, but the president refuses to
even have the conversation,” he said.

Cordray, who was successfully filibustered by Republicans
last year, will remain in the job until Jan. 3, 2014, unless confirmed by the
Senate sooner, an unlikely event given the current partisan move by the White
House.

While controversial, nowhere in the Constitution is a recess
expressly defined, though the document does give the chief executive the
“power to fill up vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate.”

As a result, a loose understanding has arisen over the years
as to what constitutes a recess.

Most, including Obama’s own acting solicitor general, appear
to hold to a three-day minimum for a recess, arising from the congressional
adjournment clause in the Constitution which states that no chamber may break
for longer than three days without the approval of the other chamber.

In a 2010 Supreme Court case, “New Process Steel vs.
National Labor Relations Board,” acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal
referenced the three-day minimum, during which no recess appointment could be
made and cited a Department of Justice brief issued in 1993 by Attorney General
Janet Reno.

But the document is vague.

In the brief, which was used to argue against a controversial
recess appointment by former President George H.W. Bush, Reno called the
three-day recess a “requirement.” But it went on to say “the
Constitution provides no basis for limiting the recess to a specific number of
days.”

That does not negate the understanding that appears to have
arisen in modern times among members of Congress, Democrat and Republican
alike. Democrats in 2008 held the Senate in “pro forma” session to
block recess appointments by President George W. Bush. At the time, Obama and Vice
President Joe Biden, while serving in the Senate, strenuously argued against
such an exercise of presidential power.

When Bush appointed John Bolton as ambassador to the United
Nations, then-Sen. Obama said the nominee was, as a result of the temporary
position, “damaged goods.” Noting the Senate had rejected the nominee
— though unlike Cordray, Bolton faced bipartisan opposition — the senator
said the U.S. would have “less credibility” at the world body.

At a Foreign Relations Committee hearing, Biden said,
“No president is entitled to the appointment of anyone he nominates,”
adding, “That’s why they wrote the Constitution the way they did. It says
‘advice and consent.'”

According to a Congressional Research Service report, since
the administration of President Ronald Reagan, no recess appointment has been
bestowed upon a nominee during a recess that was shorter than 10 days.

Nonetheless, a senior administration official told Fox News
that the White House is on solid ground with the maneuver.

“They’re not in session,” the official said of the
Senate, noting that the Senate has stated that “that no business shall be
conducted during pro forma sessions” and the Senate “is unable to
receive appointments” during that time because it is not prepared,
regardless of the length of time in between, to conduct business during those
meetings.

Thus, it is the interpretation of the White House that the
Senate is in fact “in recess” and the administration can make appointments.

Despite the predicted fight over the CFPB nominee, one
congressional GOP source predicted the fight will have no effect. The aide
sited polls that, according to the source, show Americans disinterested in the
watchdog agency, with few knowing about Cordray.

“It’s just not a ‘top of mind’ issue. It’s nowhere on
the radar of anyone,” the aide said.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/01/04/obama-administration-tests-constitutional-power-after-controversial-appointment/

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Welcome to the USSR, (Obama signs NDAA Law)

 

President Barack Obama rang in the New Year by signing the NDAA law with its provision allowing him to indefinitely detain citizens. It was a symbolic moment, to say the least. With Americans distracted with drinking and celebrating, Obama signed one of the greatest rollbacks of civil liberties in the history of our country … and citizens partied in unwitting bliss into the New Year.

Ironically, in addition to breaking his promise not to sign the law, Obama broke his promise on signing statements and attached a statement that he really does not want to detain citizens indefinitely (see the text of the statement here).

 Obama insisted that he signed the bill simply to keep funding for the troops. It was a continuation of the dishonest treatment of the issue by the White House since the law first came to light. As discussed earlier, the White House told citizens that the president would not sign the NDAA because of the provision. That spin ended after sponsor Senator Carl Levin (Democrat, Michigan) went to the floor and disclosed that it was the White House and insisted that there be no exception for citizens in the indefinite detention provision.

 The latest claim is even more insulting. You do not “support our troops” by denying the principles for which they are fighting. They are not fighting to consolidate authoritarian powers in the president. The “American way of life” is defined by our constitution and specifically the bill of rights. Moreover, the insistence that you do not intend to use authoritarian powers does not alter the fact that you just signed an authoritarian measure. It is not the use but the right to use such powers that defines authoritarian systems.

 The almost complete failure of the mainstream media to cover this issue is shocking. Many reporters have bought into the spin of the Obama administration as they did the spin over torture by the Bush administration. Even today, reporters refuse to call waterboarding torture despite the long line of cases and experts defining waterboarding as torture for decades.

 On the NDAA, reporters continue to mouth the claim that this law only codifies what is already the law. That is not true. The administration has fought any challenges to indefinite detention to prevent a true court review. Moreover, most experts agree that such indefinite detention of citizens violates the constitution.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/02/ndaa-historic-assault-american-liberty