Can you name which of the delegated powers in the USSA Constitution allow the president to invade his own country, mass murder his own American citizens, and bomb, burn and plunder their cities? Can you explain how such acts would be consistent with protecting the constitutional liberties of those unfortunate citizens? If you think you can, then congratulations, you are a “Lincoln Scholar.” If not, do not despair. You are in decent company, including the five living past presidents as of 1861, namely, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan.

Americans can thank the former Republican presidents listed above for the unconstitutional healthcare contraption that passed the House and that will complete the transformation of the United States into a European-style social-welfare state, but without any of the market efficiencies that several European nations have designed into their national healthcare systems.

All of these presidents ignored the fatal flaws with the existing healthcare system and handed the issue to the Democrats. The irony is that Democrats had created the fatal flaws and would have been easy targets in a Republican-led reform effort.

The first fatal flaw was wage controls in 1942, which led companies to compete for labor by substituting medical benefits for wages. Next, employer-provided medical benefits were excluded from taxable income. Then, medical benefits were deemed as negotiable wages under labor laws. All of these flaws happened under Democrat presidents.

The flaws resulted in the biggest flaw of all: the death of a consumer market in medical care/insurance. In its place grew the economically unsustainable system of third-party payments, in which employers and their insurance companies paid doctors and hospitals for care given to their employees. Employees sat on the sidelines like brainless coconuts instead of informed consumers as others set prices and service levels for medical care. Eventually, the coconuts lost all knowledge of the cost of the care they were receiving, thus creating a mindset that medical care shouldn’t cost them anything. They also became dependent on their employer for medical care/insurance, a dependency that would lead to widespread insecurity as the old employment model of lifetime employment with one employer fell apart.

Kiss Your Freedoms Goodbye If Health Care Passes
Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights. If this health care bill becomes law, America, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it and privacy as you have enjoyed it will cease to be.

We do not have two political parties in this country, America. We have one party; called the Big Government Party. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. The Democratic wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. Both parties like power; and neither is interested in your freedoms. Think about it. Government is the negation of freedom. Freedom is your power and ability to follow your own free will and your own conscience. The government wants you to follow the will of some faceless bureaucrat.

When I recently asked Congressman James Clyburn, the third ranking Democrat in the House, to tell me "Where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to regulate everyone's healthcare--, he replied that most of what Congress does is not authorized by the Constitution, but they do it anyway. There you have it. Congress recognizes no limits on its power. It doesn't care about the Constitution, it doesn't care about your inalienable rights, it doesn't care about the liberties protected by the Bill of Rights, it doesn't even read the laws it writes.

America, this is not an academic issue. If this health care bill becomes law, life as you have known it, freedom as you have exercised it, privacy as you have enjoyed it, will cease to be.

Yes, I know there are probably other African-Americans much better qualified and prepared for the presidency. Much, much better qualified. Hundreds, easily, if not thousands, and without any troubling ties to radical lunatics and Chicago mobsters. Gary Coleman comes to mind. But let it not distract us from the fact that Mr. Obama’s election represents a profound, positive milestone in our country’s struggle to overcome its long legacy of racial divisions and bigotry. It reminds us of how far we’ve come, and it’s something everyone in our nation should celebrate in whatever little time we now have left."

According to figures released by the Department of Labor, the real marker of American unemployment stands at 17.5 percent -- a figure which takes into account under-employed workers and those who have not sought work in the last four weeks, according to a published report."If statistics went back so far, the measure would almost certainly be at its highest level since the Great Depression," reporter David Leonhardt wrote in Friday's edition of The New York Times."

Gold prices continued to rise on Wednesday extending the all-time highs which followed India’s central bank bought 200 tonnes of the precious metal, swapping dollars for bullion as the country’s finance minister warned the economies of the US and Europe had “collapsed”.

India’s decision to exchange $6.7bn for gold equivalent to 8 per cent of world annual mine production sent the strongest signal yet that Asian countries were moving away from the US currency.

The purchase by New Delhi’s Reserve Bank from the International Monetary Fund pushed gold prices to a record $1,090.90 per troy ounce, up 2.6 per cent on the day, as traders bet that other central banks would also become buyers.

Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, said the acquisition reflected the power of an economy that laid claim to the fifth-largest global foreign reserves: “We have money to buy gold. We have enough foreign exchange reserves.”