Pelosi: Jail for no health insurance is "fair"; Purging GOP civil servants; Hoffman may have won 23

1) Pelosi: Jail for Those Who Refuse to Buy Health Insurance is "Fair" RUSH: This is last Monday in Seattle at a Swedish Medical Center press conference. Pelosi spoke to the press. A news reporter, Shomari Stone, said, "Do you think it's fair to send people to jail for not buying health insurance?" PELOSI: For a long time now people who haven't had health care or provided it have placed the burden on others. Everybody is paying the price for uncompensated care. I don't need to tell you that in a hospital. And so what this is is to say we all have to do our part and that is the point of the bill. STONE: But, Madam Speaker, I'm just trying to understand. If you don't buy health insurance, you go to jail? You didn't answer my question. PELOSI: There -- there is, uh, uh -- there is -- I think the legislation is very fair in this respect. RUSH: There you have it. I mean it's not a mistake in there. "What are you in for?" "Yeah, I'm here for rape, incest and murder. What are you here for?" "I didn't buy health insurance." …And don't give me this automobile insurance because not everybody has to buy it. People that don't have cars don't have to buy it, people that don't have driver's licenses and don't drive don't have to buy it and automobile insurance you buy to protect against people that hit you, or that you hit. You're not insuring yourself per se. The analogy just doesn't work. So yesterday in Washington, the Speaker of the House continued speaking to the press and described her health care bill as such. See: http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_111209/content/01125110.guest.html 2) Obama Administration Intends to Purge Republicans From the Civil Service Via Instapundit comes word that the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management (OPM) intends to purge the federal government of Republican civil servants all in the name of purify the federal bureaucracy. …It is a typical Washington process that many political appointees are able to take jobs within the civil service once their political appointment expires — usually at the conclusion of one administration. What often happens as well is Congressional staffers, before an election or shortly thereafter, will move over to the Executive Branch placed into the civil service, in effect, by appointment. So, for example, when George Bush became President in 2001, a number of Clinton political appointees became civil service employees. As a result, they became subject to civil service hiring and firing rules, which meant they could no longer be replaced simply for having been a Democratic appointee. Barack Obama is changing that. He intends to purge all Republicans from the federal bureaucracy retroactive to five years ago. Under his new rules, made retroactive for five years, the Office of Personnel Management will examine civil service employees who got their start as political appointees in the Bush administration and terminate those employees. The order is retroactive to 2004, that moment when a number of Republican congressional staffers and others sought to embed into the second Bush administration right after the election. …The memorandum goes on to apply this change to civil servants who were political appointees in the last five years, in effect freezing these employees out of other positions, denying them promotions, and forcing them out of their jobs. No one is allowed to stand in the way of Barack Obama’s agenda, including his own bureaucracy. This is what happens in third world kleptocracies and totalitarian regimes. This is scary stuff. Just for perspective: remember the Democrats threatened to throw Bush administration people in jail for firing United States Attorneys who happened to be Democrats. In that case, it was clear as crystal that U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the President and he can fire them whenever he wants. In this case, these people are now civil service employees who do not serve at the pleasure of the President and cannot be fired just because they are Republicans. in fact, the law is very clear on that point. See: http://www.redstate.com/erick/2009/11/12/obama-administration-intends-to-purge-republicans-from-the-civil-service/ 3) A Curious Subpoena Big Brother: The Justice Department wants an online news site to hand over its visitor list. Why? No one's quite sure yet. But if this is just a fishing expedition by the government, it's a troubling precedent. The unusual request for information, delivered via a grand jury subpoena to Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us, also demanded that the Web site "not ... disclose the existence of this request," unless the Justice Department approves it. For those who don't know, Indymedia is a far-left news aggregation site run by the Independent Media Center, not exactly known for its moderation either in content or tone. That said, we wonder what could be behind such a sweeping government attempt to search a journalistic organization's files? According to new reports, the subpoena from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis sought "all IP traffic to and from" the Web site for the day of June 25, 2008. It went much deeper than that, however. It also sought Internet addresses and "any other identifying information" of those who contacted the Web site — including e-mail addresses, home addresses, online accounts, Social Security numbers, and bank account and credit card numbers (emphasis mine). So much for privacy. The subpoena, we're told, has since been withdrawn. Someone, perhaps Morrison, had second thoughts. Still, the sweeping nature of the requests and the threat to prosecute Indymedia if it so much as revealed even the existence of the subpoena raises questions. See: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=511955 4) Winning margin in NY House 23 race tightens ALBANY, N.Y. – The special election last week for the 23rd Congressional District seat in New York may not be over after all. Though Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman conceded and Democrat Bill Owens was sworn into Congress last week, the routine recanvassing of votes shows Owens' lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes, with about 5,800 absentee ballots received so far that have yet to be counted. The final outcome rests on uncounted absentee ballots, and more than 10,000 were sent out. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091113/ap_on_re_us/us_ny_special_election

4a) Recanvassing shows NY-23 race tightens even as Rep. Bill Owens is sworn into House seat

Washington -- Conservative Doug Hoffman conceded the race in the 23rd Congressional District last week after receiving two pieces of grim news for his campaign: He was down 5,335 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted on election night, and he had barely won his stronghold in Oswego County. As it turns out, neither was true. But Hoffman’s concession -- based on snafus in Oswego County and elsewhere that left his vote undercounted -- set off a chain of events that echoed all the way to Washington, D.C., and helped secure passage of a historic health care reform bill. Democratic Rep. Bill Owens was quickly sworn into office on Friday, a day before the rare weekend vote in the House of Representatives. His support sealed his party’s narrow victory on the health care legislation. Now a recanvassing in the 11-county district shows that Owens’ lead has narrowed to 3,026 votes over Hoffman, 66,698 to 63,672, according to the latest unofficial results from the state Board of Elections. In Oswego County, where Hoffman was reported to lead by only 500 votes with 93 percent of the vote counted election night, inspectors found Hoffman actually won by 1,748 votes -- 12,748 to 11,000. …Before Owens was sworn in Friday, Rep. John Garamendi, a Democrat who won a special election in California, was sworn in Thursday. The two gave Pelosi the votes she needed to reach a majority of 218 and pass the historic health care reform legislation in the House. The bill passed 220-215 late Saturday with the support of only one Republican. The Republican, Rep. Anh "Joseph" Cao of Louisiana, said he voted for the legislation only after seeing that Democrats had the 218 votes needed for passage. …Jerry Eaton, the Republican elections commissioner for Jefferson County, said inspectors found a problem in four districts where Hoffman’s vote total was mistakenly entered as zero. See: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/its_not_over_recanvassing_shows_ny23_race.html 5) Report: 10 states face looming budget disasters SACRAMENTO, Calif. – In Arizona, the budget has grown so gloomy that lawmakers are considering mortgaging Capitol buildings. In Michigan, state officials dealing with the nation's highest unemployment rate are slashing spending on schools and health care. Drastic financial remedies are no longer limited to California, where a historic budget crisis earlier this year grew so bad that state agencies issued IOUs to pay bills. A study released Wednesday warned that at least nine other big states are also barreling toward economic disaster, raising the likelihood of higher taxes, more government layoffs and deep cuts in services. The report by the Pew Center on the States found that Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island and Wisconsin are also at grave risk. Double-digit budget gaps, rising unemployment, high foreclosure rates and built-in budget constraints are the key reasons. …• Illinois, which has run deficits every year since 2001, is facing an $11.7 billion budget gap for its next fiscal year, beginning in July, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Pew's Government Performance Project ranked Illinois behind only California and Rhode Island for its lack of fiscal management on paying medical bills and pension liabilities. Congratulations, Illinois! See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091111/ap_on_re_us/us_state_budgets 6) Dare to Call It Terrorism (or, here’s my suggested headline: It’s NOT A RELIGION OF PEACE) …Sure, Osama bin Laden & Co. accurately quote Islamic scriptural injunctions to wage jihad against non-Muslims. But never mind that: Islam is an irenic, unmitigated good; in fact, it is one of our best weapons against terrorism. Come again? If all the terrorists are Muslims and all the terrorists say scriptures that plainly command killing are inspiring them to kill, how could Islam be an asset? Don’t go spoiling a feel-good theory by asking a lot of questions — that would be almost like an investigation, and when it comes to Islam, the FBI doesn’t do investigation. If it did, it might stumble onto all sorts of things we’d just as soon not know. We’d have to start acknowledging that Salafist ideology (the strain of Islam endorsed by the Muslim Brotherhood and Sunni terrorist organizations) is prevalent in American mosques. We’d have to concede that beliefs we optimistically call “radical” are actually quite mainstream among American Muslims and predominant among Muslims overseas — including the beliefs that sharia (the law of Islam) should govern the United States, that Muslims must resist American military and law-enforcement operations against other Muslims, that the U.S. military presence in Islamic countries renders American soldiers and those who support them legitimate targets of jihadist terror, and that Israel, America’s democratic ally in the Middle East, should not exist. Obviously, this reality of Islam defies the government’s wishful fiction. So the FBI doesn’t do Islam. It does politics. And if you’re going to do politics, you can’t do preventive counterterrorism of the kind the FBI, the Justice Department, the Homeland Security Department, the intelligence community, and the rest of Leviathan promised to do right after 9/11. See: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YTI1Yjc2MjBmMWUzY2I1Y2ZlZWQ5NGZiNmNlNTk4ZDE 7) Feds move to seize 4 mosques, tower linked to Iran NEW YORK – Federal prosecutors took steps Thursday to seize four U.S. mosques and a Fifth Avenue skyscraper owned by a nonprofit Muslim organization long suspected of being secretly controlled by the Iranian government. In what could prove to be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in U.S. history, prosecutors filed a civil complaint in federal court against the Alavi Foundation, seeking the forfeiture of more than $500 million in assets. The assets include bank accounts; Islamic centers consisting of schools and mosques in New York City, Maryland, California and Houston; more than 100 acres in Virginia; and a 36-story glass office tower in New York. Confiscating the properties would be a sharp blow against Iran, which has been accused by the U.S. government of bankrolling terrorism and trying to build a nuclear bomb. See: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091113/ap_on_re_us/us_mosque_forfeiture 8) Obama to attack guns as public-health threat? 2nd Amendment advocates worry over opinions of OSHA nominee Second Amendment advocates are expressing alarm that the most significant attack on gun rights across the United States in years soon could come in the form of a workplace "safety" regulation under President Obama's nominee to run the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Obama has nominated David Michaels, a George Washington University professor and the chief of the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, which reportedly partially is funded by George Soros. "The controversial OSHA nominee and left-leaning public health advocate also seems to have strong views on firearms," wrote Walter Olson at Overlawyered.com. "That's by no means irrelevant to the agenda of an agency like OSHA, because once you start viewing private gun ownership as a public health menace, it begins to seem logical to use the powers of government to urge or even require employers to forbid workers from possessing guns on company premises, up to and including parking lots, ostensibly for the protection of co-workers." See: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=115720