President Obama has declared the ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya to be “illegal.” Exactly what he means by that is not readily apparent.

The overthrow was ordered by that nation’s Supreme Court, which is usually how liberals define legality. According to the “living Constitution” theory, it’s not the literal meaning of the law that matters, but the judiciary’s interpretation of how the law has “evolved.” To the contrary, the Obama administration is arguing that the actual, written constitution of Honduras has been violated. Now that the rights of Americans are not directly involved, liberal Democrats are free to embrace strict constructionism.

Mind you, this is the same party that argues in favor of the U.S. Supreme Court citing foreign precedent. Perhaps if Zelaya were to sneak into our country as a so-called “undocumented American,” liberals would consider him subject to the rulings of the Honduran Supreme Court. Until then, they’ll continue to portray him as the first victim of judicial activism since the high court put the kibosh on Al Gore’s psychic ballot readings.

Whether Obama even has a valid legal argument is itself doubtful. Zelaya had declared a referendum to rewrite his nation’s constitution, in order to allow himself to remain in power beyond the end of his term. The court ruled that such a ballot must be approved by Congress, and that Zelaya had acted illegally in trying to administer it himself. With logistical help from the government of Venezuela, Zelaya persisted in his effort to organize the referendum, in circumvention of both the legislature and the judiciary.

Obviously, the deposed leader’s Marxist politics are instrumental in winning him the support of the Obama administration. Last October, Zelaya entered his country into the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas, an anti-capitalist multinational organization created by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, for the purpose of combating free-trade agreements between Latin America and the United States. Barack “only government can do it” Obama clearly shares the Bolivarian Alliance’s faith in a centralized command economy, and its hostility toward the free market. It is only because Zelaya’s ouster portends his country’s break from this alliance that our president has decided to involve himself.

Had it instead been, say, the Israeli Supreme Court that removed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from office, it’s inconceivable that Obama would be speaking out against the decision, let alone trying to exert pressure to have Bibi’s power reinstated. Any Americans who objected to the court’s behavior in that case could count on liberals to lecture them about meddling in other countries’ internal affairs. We might have even seen the return of those “These Colors Don’t Run The World” bumper stickers.

Liberals typically consider Supreme Court precedent to supersede the written law, because their elitist proposals stand a better chance of prevailing in the judicial arena than in a legislative body that is accountable to the people. In the end, though, all that matters to them is the outcome. We can see this in the way they champion the legal concept of stare decisis (meaning “to stand by that which is decided”) until it comes to revisiting a decision they don’t like. When given the chance to overturn a precedent in order to declare a constitutional right to sodomy in the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, liberals couldn’t distance themselves from that which was decided fast enough.

Foreign courts, simply by virtue of not being American, are considered to be the wisest of the wise, just as long as their rulings serve as a rationale for advancing a left-wing agenda. Justice Stephen Breyer often brags, for instance, that he once cited precedent from the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe — the same court that approved Robert Mugabe’s murderous “land reform” policy.

The Honduran court has only been deemed unreliable because it has impeded the march of socialism. If it had instead approved Zelaya’s referendum, nobody in the Obama administration would care if the decision adhered to the Honduran constitution or not. That’s because, in the kind of Marxist banana republic that Obama admires, the whole purpose of the law is to sustain the power of the ruling class. Therefore, the removal from office of a Marxist leader must, by definition, be illegal. The question of whether his country’s constitution or its judiciary agrees is beside the point.

What’s most alarming about this story is that President Obama undoubtedly applies this same tyrannical concept of legality within the United States. Don’t believe it? Just ask his “pay czar.”

Thomas D. Segel

Harlingen, Texas, August 28, 2009: When ABC and NBC Television refused to accept the League of American Voters ad critical of the Obama healthcare plan, the two broadcast giants not only provided solid proof they endorse the Administration’s radical agenda, they also brought into the light a question most healthcare providers have been asking themselves. Where do we find all the doctors we will need? Taking it one step further, where do we get all the nurses we will need? These are very serious questions to ask, considering there is already both a doctor and nursing shortage in the United States.

The 33-second ad was voiced by a doctor who posed a simple question, “How can Obama’s plan cover 50 million new patients without any new doctors? It can’t.”

Why would that claim be made? At this time the United States finds itself thirty-second in the world for doctor to patient ratios. At one doctor per every 390 people in the United States we are already behind countries such as Cuba, which has one doctor per 170 people, Russia with one doctor per 230 people and Mongolia with one doctor per 380 people.

As our population grows and doctors now in practice retire, replacements are always in demand. Currently we graduate about 25,000 doctors each year and this does not even meet our current needs. It is estimated that just to stay where we are at this time, another 4,000 to 6,000 doctors must be added to the 25,000 entering the healthcare field.

The numbers can be a bit misleading, because each doctor does not attend to 390 patients. Actually, each doctor is attending to the health needs of about 100 people during any fixed period of time. To keep the same level of care under Obama’s plan to cover an additional 50 million people we need to have an additional 50,000 doctors in place…. today. From that point onward, it means we will need to increase our medical school output upward to perhaps 40,000 new doctors every year. That is a huge demand and an even greater challenge for medical educators.

It could be strongly argued that with such a large medical recruitment effort being required, the same thing would happen to the medical field that happens in the military when people are drafted into service. The quality declines markedly.

What will happen to the quality of care when we are faced with increased doctor shortages, combined with the nursing shortages that already exist all across the United States? When it comes to hospitals with low staffing levels, we already know the answer. Those hospitals report higher rates of poor patient outcomes, including shock, pneumonia, cardiac arrest, urinary tract infections, slowed recovery and mortality.

At this time under our current medical and healthcare environment, we are facing a decline in the number of nursing personnel that will continue for at least the next two decades. Healthcare providers now estimate that by the year 2020 there will be 800,000 hospital vacancies or a decline of 29% from today’s nursing workforce.

There have been multiple studies done related to job satisfaction and patient workload. With an ever-increasing number of patients to serve, nursing job satisfaction plummets. A full 40% of nurses claim they are unhappy with their working conditions. Only 35% of nurses surveyed rated the quality of care they provide as excellent. Almost 45% of these nurses indicated the quality of service in their hospital had declined over the past year. An astounding 83% of nurses in the survey indicated they had their patient workload increased during the past year.

If all of these problems exist now, what will it be like a year from now if another 50 million patients are added to an already overextended nursing force?

So, again we will ask the same question the doctor in the League of American Voters ad posed, “How can Obama’s plan cover 50 million new patients without any new doctors?’ To that we will add, “How can Obama’s plan cover 50 million new patients without any new nurses?” It can’t!!!

If this isn’t the perfect example that liberals don’t care who has to die in order to make sure that left wing policies win the day, then nothing does. We can see this prime example in Eric Zorn’s horrid August 28 editorial where he thanks … well, whatever deity leftists believe in, if any… that the country didn’t quickly find out about the homicide of Mary Jo Kopechne that was committed by Teddy Kennedy in July of 1969.

Zorn is happy that the news of Teddy’s crime was quashed for hours as the poor woman slowly drowned while Teddy boy sat around a plush hotel drinking with pals. He’s happy because if the country had seen 24/7 coverage of the incident in 1969 it may have ruined Teddy’s career as a politician afterward. And if that had happened, you see, why the “lion of the Senate” wouldn’t have been able to push his anti-American, left-wing agenda for the ensuing four decades.

So, as far as Zorn is concerned, quashing the news of the homicide that Kennedy committed was a good thing. In Zorn’s opinion, allowing the woman to slowly drown wasn’t so bad after all. In Zorn’s opinion, the attempted cover-up of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death was unimportant. Yeah, the woman’s death was a small price to pay for 40 years of pushing a left-wing agenda.

After padding his editorial for paragraph after paragraph of pointless exposition of how TV might cover such an incident now, Zorn finally got to the meat of his point at the end of his piece.

This thought experiment invites a question to which there is no nonpartisan answer: Was it just as well that we didn’t — couldn’t — have a media feeding frenzy over Chappaquiddick in 1969? Would the nation have been better off if Kennedy had been shamed into private life?

Or, as I believe, is the nation — particularly our disabled and disadvantaged residents — better off for the 40 years of service he was able to render after that terrible night?

The momentary satisfaction of destroying Ted Kennedy for his failings would have had a significant price. Something to keep in mind when the next fallen figure, Democrat or Republican, stumbles into the heat lamp.

So, hiding this poor woman’s death as much as possible from the media and the public was justifiable because it allowed Teddy to go on pushing his agenda without a hitch in his program. Who cares that a woman was killed by Teddy’s negligence and attempted cover-up? As long as left-wing policies were successfully pushed, who cares about murder?

If one might take a step further back here, one can easily understand that Zorn wouldn’t care how many people would have to die as long as liberals win on the political front. If he has no sympathy for Kopechne, he’ll have no sympathy for you, your grandma or your little dog Toto.

And can we also take a second here to realize that this “journalist” is advocating for the Media to be muzzled, as well? We are seeing this extremist, left-wing journo telling us that he doesn’t care if the media is squelched as long as left-wing policies are successful. Oppressing the press is A-OK, as far as Zorn is concerned, as long as we can find liberal politics succeeding.

There is no doubt whatever that Teddy Kennedy is guilty of homicide. There is little doubt that after that he was guilty of all sorts of moral outrages and violations of the law not to mention sins against his country. He was a terror supporter by helping the IRA during “the troubles,” he was a drunk and a sexual harasser, he tried to make side deals against his country with our enemies, and he supported some of the most un-American policies ever to disgrace Washington. That on top of his culpability in Kopechne’s death.

But because Zorn liked his politics, Kennedy’s every manner of immorality, outrage and violations of the law is just fine. And the media better shut up about it, too.

Teddy Kennedy was an odious, horrible American from a long line of criminals, abusers, drug addicts and murderers And Eric Zorn loves him.

(H/T HotAir.com)

Here’s a question that has been nagging me for months. Are Obama’s ever-growing number of “czars” constitutional? I am not a constitutional scholar, but I have read the document.

“Article II. Section 2. “He (the President) shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consults, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein provided for, and which shall be established by law; but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.”

As I read it, the Constitution is very specific about whom the President may appoint and he can do so only within parameters “established by law” and this applies specifically to the “heads of departments.” I interpret this to mean Cabinet Secretaries, all of whom must be vetted and approved for their positions by the Senate.

The Republican National Committee’s conservative caucus recently passed a resolution expressing their concern noting that “The U.S. Constitution explicitly states government officers with significant authority (called ‘principal officers’) must be nominated by the President and are subject to a vote of the U.S. Senate.”

Obama’s appointments are clearly “principal officers” though it will be argued that they are only advisors to the office of the President. Clearly, Obama’s appointments are not heads of departments, but they appear to have been granted an unknown degree of influence and control as regards their responsibilities. They function “in the dark.”

For example, since we have a Department of Labor why do we need an “Auto Recovery” czar, Ed Montgomery, who reports to Larry Summers, the President’s top economic advisor? What can he do to effect recovery? And, constitutionally speaking is it lawful for the United States to have “ownership” of General Motors? Or any other private enterprise? I think not.

Why does President Obama need a “Special Envoy for Climate Change”? Todd Stern reports to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but we have the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that includes the National Weather Service. What exactly does Stern do and why? Stern is best known for having helped negotiate the Kyoto climate pact which was based on the discredited claims of a global warming that is not happening. It was instantly rendered void by the exemption of nations such as China and India.

Meanwhile, the so-called energy and environment czar, Carol Browner, is reportedly coordinating policy in the same area as the “climate change” czar despite the fact that we have both a Department of Energy and an Environmental Protection Agency. Obama’s choice for “Green Jobs” czar, Van Jones, is a Marxist radical.

I could go on, but the point, obviously, is that there is an enormous amount of overlap going on and it involves appointees who give the appearance of being doppelgangers to the existing Secretaries and the huge bureaucracies they oversee. They answer directly to the President, but presumably so do the Secretaries whom we occasionally see gathered around a huge table in cabinet meetings.

If these people who have not been approved by the Senate or occupy positions that have not been “established by law” and are not “heads of departments” exist solely at the pleasure of the President, are we not hip deep in some very muddy waters concerning who is answerable to the Senate or House committees?

I am of the belief that Obama has methodically gone about creating a shadow government of men and women with undefined powers, but who likely have even more influence with the Oval Office than those who hold office under the mandates of the Constitution.

To borrow a term from the White House, it all smells “fishy” to me in ways that go beyond just the provision of advice and which likely intrude deeply into the process by which laws and regulations are drafted and enacted.

There are now some thirty or more of these “czars” and they represent a threat to the authority of the Congress and could be utilized in some manufactured “crisis” to take control of the federal government, dispensing with the rule of law.

Alan Caruba writes a daily post at http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com. A business and science writer, he is the founder of The National Anxiety Center.

An economist is saying that President Hoover set the stage to worsen The Great Depression because of his pro-labor union stance.

Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation’s gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, a UCLA economist concludes in a new study.

Lee E. Ohanian, a UCLA professor of economics, lays the worst of the Depression at the feet of Hoover who, in his opinion, made the recession “three times worse” by keeping industrial wages too high which “sharply depressed employment.”

Ohanian’s study is being published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Theory in December and was also posted at www.nber.org, the site of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Hoover’s approach is unlikely to be considered today as a means of responding to economic crisis, but it does illustrate the perils of ill-conceived government policies in times of economic upheaval and confusion, says Ohanian, a macroeconomist who specializes in economic crises.

“Hoover’s response illustrates the danger of knee-jerk policy reactions in a time of crisis,” he said. “Almost always when bad policies are adopted, it’s during a period of crisis. The real risk is picking a cure that turns out to be worse than the disease.”

Of course, President Roosevelt made matters worse by continuing and even expanding many of Hoover’s worst mistakes, many economists are concluding.

As we’ve said many times here on the blog, unions are antithetical to good government as well as economic success.

And now, to today, we can tremble in fear for our economic health as we see a president about to repeat every mistake that Hoover and FDR made by nationalizing industries, forcing a top-down economy, and being a slavish devote of Big Labor.

Democrats do not learn from history.

Recently I did something I don’t do very often, I bought a new car. No, this is not a “cash for clunkers” story, but a brief look at the serious challenges that are faced by the free market in America from the Barack Obama administration.

Now, buying a new car, whether it’s a brand spanking new car, or just a new to you car, involves a familiar procedure that we often refer to as the “dance,” or the “game,” or whatever signifier people use to explain how free-markets work in the buying and selling of things. It usually starts with the covert car lot trolling, which escalates to the commando-style deployments to check sticker prices, with the option to retreat to ‘escape vehicles’ to avoid the salespeople that seem to appear like wraiths from nowhere to begin their overly-happy greetings and the beginning of the all too familiar sales pitch process. If you have been there and done that, then you have probably made it to the advanced stages of the car buying process, which includes the test drives and the gritty back room negotiations, which usually involve the tag-team process of the salesman (always trying to get you the best deal – wink, wink) and his hard nose, but fair, supervisor, who must be privately consulted with repeatedly by the salesman, as you haggle your way to an amicable conclusion.

Now you might think I’m complaining about the process, which would be quite to the contrary. In fact, not only do I think the free market process of buying cars is the best game in town, I submit that the same supply and demand, give and take, process we see in the free market is what makes America uniquely great in all facets of life. Think about it. As with the investment of dollars for a car, Americans invest their time, labor, and even their vote, into the people and products they want to fulfill their services and needs. It’s at times hard work and we all have experienced a few ibuprofen moments, but it’s a fair system that works better than anything else on the planet.

The reason the free market works, and why it’s worth fighting for, can be easily seen by simply looking at the car buying (free market) process. In America, the buyer has the freedom to ‘talk’ and the freedom to ‘walk.’ That is, you can always – and I repeat, always – ask questions and kick the tires. If, heaven forbid, the buyer smells the “scent of lemons” on the ‘gem’ of a product being offered, he or she can take his or her money on down the road. That’s called freedom, and it has been the catalyst of improvements and innovations within the free market for the life history of this country.

The Barack Obama administration is attempting to turn this successful, time-tested, process on its head. Yes, they have products too. The latest products coming from the White House are Obama care and Cap and Trade – and many new models still to be brought out on the show room floor. However, with the Obama administration, they appear to be most fond of the ‘no questions asked’ purchase policy, and when the American people start to drive through the details of the president’s new policies and complain about the ‘scent of lemons,’ things start to get downright nasty. Not only has the administration demonized those who would bring about questions on why we should or should not buy into what the president is selling, it now appears that the American people may not be given the choice of taking their money and moving on down the road for something better. This little maneuver on a good day is called socialism, but after you drive it for a while, you see it really handles much more like communism.

For most Americans, the last several months have reinforced the true meaning of the slogan “buyer beware.” However, for those still in doubt, I would submit that if we wish to maintain the free market in this country, we must collectively stand up and stamp “No Sale!” on the anti-free market initiatives of Barack Obama.

Paul A. Ibbetson is a former Chief of Police of Cherryvale, Kansas, and member of the Montgomery County Drug Task Force. Paul received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Criminal Justice at Wichita State University, and is currently completing his PhD. in sociology at Kansas State University. Paul is the author of the books Living Under The Patriot Act: Educating A Society and Feeding Lions: Sharing The Conservative Philosophy In A Politically Hostile World. Paul is also the radio host of the Kansas Broadcasting Association’s 2008 and 2009 Entertainment Program of the Year, Conscience of Kansas airing on KSDB Manhattan 91.9 f.m. www.ibbetsonusa.com. For interviews or questions, please contact ibbetson91.9@gmail.com