Open thread.  The road to tyranny starts in Washington DC.

DrewM. at AOSHQ has a perspective on today.

There are two procedural votes, one on ordering the previous question and the other on adopting the rule. This is not the vote on the bill itself but the rules under which the debate will take place. They are procedural votes that the Democrats will win easily*, simply because they are leader votes and all Democrats will vote for them.

*Which they just have.

Then the debate starts.

My guess is it will pass today, very narrowly. Then the battle moves to the more minority friendly Senate.

Have a Dem rep?  Find here if yours is leaning.  Then call.

Malkin:  Democrats and the death of deliberative democracy.

PJM:  ObamaCare’s Redistribution of Health.

WSJ: What the Pelosi Health-Care Bill Really Says. What government first regulates, eventually it mandates.

First Things: Obamacare: Forcing Doctors to Violate the Hippocratic Oath.

Investor’s:  Health Reform Would Bury Small Business.

NYP: Shutting off the miracle-drug spigot.

Lyrics

h/t Simon @ Classical Values

Please go to Project Valor

Interesting, too, some milquetoasts don’t get it.

I remember how we used to call them Socialist-Democrats.  One chuckles to recall those days:

Today, Ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee Dave Camp (R-MI) released a letter from the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) confirming that the failure to comply with the individual mandate to buy health insurance contained in the Pelosi health care bill (H.R. 3962, as amended) could land people in jail.  The JCT letter [PDF] makes clear that Americans who do not maintain “acceptable health insurance coverage” and who choose not to pay the bill’s new individual mandate tax (generally 2.5% of income), are subject to numerous civil and criminal penalties, including criminal fines of up to $250,000 and imprisonment of up to five years.

The Civil penalties are a peach in their own right, so don’t miss those.

In response to the JCT letter, Camp said:  “This is the ultimate example of the Democrats’ command-and-control style of governing – buy what we tell you or go to jail.  It is outrageous and it should be stopped immediately.”

“Criminal penalties

Prosecution is authorized under the Code for a variety of offenses.  Depending on the level of the noncompliance, the following penalties could apply to an individual:

• Section 7203 – misdemeanor willful failure to pay is punishable by a fine of up to $25,000 and/or imprisonment of up to one year.

• Section 7201 – felony willful evasion is punishable by a fine of up to $250,000 and/or imprisonment of up to five years.” [page 3]

When confronted with this same issue during its consideration of a similar individual mandate tax, the Senate Finance Committee worked on a bipartisan basis to include language in its bill that shielded Americans from civil and criminal penalties.  The Pelosi bill, however, contains no similar language protecting American citizens from civil and criminal tax penalties that could include a $250,000 fine and five years in jail.

By what constitutional authority?  Not by constitutional authority at all; by Democrat authority.

Compare:

Contrast:

However, there are just some things that cannot be taught.

• Your interactive coolness for today: a most ingenious marine traffic map, tracking cargo ships in real time. You may have to zoom out and move around to find something.  Click on the icons to see a photo & description of the ship.  Via Coming Anarchy, one of whose commenters makes a depressing observation.
• Presidents aren’t supposed to skip nice round anniversary year events like the 20th of the fall of the Berlin Wall.  But he will, and he’s taking heat for it.  We honor the courage and sacrifice of our troops who served in shooting wars against totalitarian evil.  Why not The Cold War?  Does he think we’re all simply past all that?  Or did someone try to tell him, and he was suffering a James T. Kirk moment?
• Japanese puppeteers? No, female Saudi TV news program hosts.
• A dubious veterans special interest group makes hay from the Ft. Hood slayings:
  

  “I’m very upset. I’m at the point of tears,” said Paul Sullivan, executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, who lives in Austin.

  “We warned the military about this. We warned the military about the need to increase the number of mental health care providers. We warned the military about lowering recruiting standards, about the medical exams for soldiers coming back from the war and needing mental health care and brain injury exams.”

  “We have been working tirelessly to try to prevent this from happening,” he said. “This is so horrible. This is a tragedy.”

  The proprietor of milblog ROK Drop calls BS:

  I guess we are supposed to go duck under tables every time we hear a loud bang. We are supposed to stare off into space all the time and cannot sleep at night because of the nightmares of our war crimes. When someone makes us mad were supposed to go into a fit of rage and attack them and God forbid if we have a weapon handy we would then kill them.  For those that haven’t already, I highly recommend reading B.G. Burkett’s book Stolen Valor to see exactly how the current perceptions of Vietnam veterans was created. It is really shocking and the same perceptions created about Vietnam veterans are now trying to be attributed to current war veterans as well.

  What was the motivation of the Orlando shooting suspect? According to his reply to a shouted question from a reporter, he was angry.

Creep.

Wow, just think of where we’d be without that $789 billion stimulation!

The economic for October predictions were 175,000 non-farm jobs lost, and an unemployment rate at or just below 10%. Just based on initial unemployment filings, I think you’d have had to count on people continuing to drop out of the system to get numbers that low.

So what actually happened? As of this morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that we lost 190,000 non-farm jobs, and that the unemployment rate has risen to 10.2%. [...]

The President and his economic team have claimed that the plan is working as intended, that they’re on track to save the original goal of 3.6 million jobs, but somehow, despite practically drowning in success, we’re going to have to live with high unemployment for years to come. Oh, and that everything is still Bush’s fault

Oh my, with such success just think of what ObamaCare and Cap-and-Tax will do to the economy!

What can be said about Nancy Pelosi, in the face of the evil that happened at Ft. Hood, who merely issues a boiler plate paragraph and won’t even pause one moment, or even keep a pledge in her grab for power?

What can be said about so-called feminists who don’t even acknowledge the atrocity?

What can be said about an American “mainstream media” that rushes to cover the massacre, but does everything it can to shape the story about a “harassed, disturbed psychiatrist” …

Here in Norway CNN International was my only real TV option. Our cable system doesn’t offer Fox News, though it does offer Al-Jazeera, BBC News, and Sky News, all of which offered only spotty, repetitious coverage of the massacre. It was a deeply frustrating experience. In the hours after Michael Jackson’s death CNN International had stayed with the U.S. feed continuously, focusing on nothing other than Jacko’s life and death. This time around, however, the network kept cutting away from the U.S. feed and from the massacre in order to give us international news, including endlessly repeated sports reports and other trivial material. They seemed determined not to treat this as a truly major story.

CNN (ditto the New York Times website) was considerably less useful than the tidbits I picked up online by following links on various blogs and in Facebook postings. They led me to (among other things) an AP story, a Daily Mail article, and a Fox News interview that provided telling details: Hasan had apparently been a devout Muslim; Arabic words, reportedly a Muslim prayer, had been posted on his apartment door in Maryland; in conversations with colleagues he had repeatedly expressed sympathy for suicide bombers; on Thursday morning, hours before the massacre, he had supposedly handed out copies of the Koran to neighbors. A couple of these facts eventually surfaced on CNN, but only briefly; they were rushed past, left untouched, unexamined; the network seemed to be making a masterly effort to avoid giving this data a cold, hard look. Meanwhile it spent time doing heavy-handed spin — devoting several minutes, for example, to an inane interview with a forensic psychiatrist who talked about the stress of treating soldiers bearing the emotional scars of war. The obvious purpose was to turn our eyes away from Islamism and toward psychiatric instability as a motive.

… even as further reports have eyewitnesses stating Hasan shouted Allahu Akbar! as he went about his evil murderous deed in a “very calm and measured approach”?

“Morally flacid” doesn’t even begin to cover it.

But it is all of a piece isn’t it?

More:

Michelle Malkin
Hot Air
Eric Escheie

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Please visit Soldiers’ Angels

Two things to do after listening to the music:

Go here. And do not call this a “tragedy”.

My daughters are grown and I haven’t watched Sesame Street in years, but oh, lordy..

IT is almost too perfect that the first African-American president of the United States was elected in time for the 40th anniversary of “Sesame Street.” The world is finally beginning to look the way that PBS show always made it out to be.

Would someone dial down the preening worship from eleven?

It’s still a messianic show, but the mission has shifted to the more immediate concerns of pediatricians and progressive parents, especially when it comes to childhood obesity. “Sesame Street” takes the Muppets, rhymes and visual verve that were developed to instill tolerance, racial pride and equality, to preach exercise and healthy eating.

Put it this way, Mrs. Obama’s message on the anniversary episode isn’t an exhortation to future soldiers, scientists and presidents to be all that they can be, but to tiny consumers to eat the freshest food they can find. “Veggies taste so good when they come fresh from the garden, don’t they?” Mrs. Obama tells a rainbow coalition of children gathered around a soil tray, an echo of her White House kitchen garden. “If you eat all these healthy foods, you are going to grow up to be big and strong,” Mrs. Obama says, flexing her fists. “Just like me.”

Actually, the absolute best advice to give any parent about children’s television shows is this:

NONE.

Turn.off.the.tv.

WALNUT CREEK, Calif.

Had state parole agents leafed through Phillip Garrido’s federal parole file when they took over his supervision in 1999, they would have known his property near Antioch, Calif., didn’t end at the backyard fence.

They might have found Jaycee Dugard and her two girls back behind that fence, perhaps in the soundproofed shed that federal agents knew about, the one Garrido called his recording studio.

But state agents never saw the file. They never even asked for it.

Had Garrido’s most recent parole agent asked questions about a 12-year-old girl he came across last year during a visit to Garrido’s house, he too might have unlocked a sordid, nearly two-decade-long mystery.

Bureaucracy, sweet bureaucracy.

And some say only government is qualified to make all the medical decisions of 300,000,000 Americans.