"Transforming America"

President Obama got his Health Care Reform vote in the House.

Liberty dies, with thunderous applause.

Well, perhaps the Star Wars comparison is a bit dramatic. However, as C.S. Lewis said,

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The President is going directly from a reality-bending (she's right: he turns the meaning of words on end from the beginning to the end of the speech) victory speech about "Health Care Reform" (read the whole speech if you have doubts about its Orwellian nature) to "Immigration Reform".

The Democrats have to enroll as many dependent voters as possible before November to continue their plan to "Transform America", I guess, since the Democrat's "Health Care Reform" bills are so unpopular.

Remind anyone of the Stamp Act, 245 years ago today.?

The final big points in the President's speech about giving people "control over their own health care":

The work of promoting private sector job creation goes on. The work of putting American families’ dreams back within reach goes on. And we march on, with renewed confidence, energized by this victory on their behalf.

In the end, what this day represents is another stone firmly laid in the foundation of the American Dream. Tonight, we answered the call of history as so many generations of Americans have before us. When faced with crisis, we did not shrink from our challenge -- we overcame it. We did not avoid our responsibility -- we embraced it. We did not fear our future -- we shaped it.

Compare with the observations here, like "My health insurance just became illegal". Well, I guess that's one way to give people control over their own health care. Force them to buy the kind of insurance YOU want them to buy. Unless they're senior Democratic staffers who helped write the bill or something.  OF COURSE you would want to exempt THEM from the restrictions of this bill.

And here's Canadian-born Mark Steyn, writing when the Democrats were still planning on the "Deem and Pass" evasion of responsibility for their votes:

This will be the biggest expansion of the IRS since World War II – and that's change you can believe in. This is what "health" "care" "reform" boils down to: Fewer doctors, longer wait times, but more bureaucrats. . .

Investor's Business Daily argues that the "health" debate is really a proxy fight on the size and role of government. According to their poll, 64 percent of people think the federal government has "too much power."

Correct. But a big chunk of that 64 percent voted less than 18 months ago for a man and a party explicitly committed to more government with more power, and they're now living with the consequences. Obama is government, and government is Obama. That's all he knows and all he's ever known. You elected to the highest office in the land a man who's never run a business or created wealth or made a payroll, and for his entire adult life has hung out with guys who've demonized (demonized?) such grubby activities. Many of which associates he appointed to high office: Obama's Cabinet has less experience of private business than any in the past century. What it knows is government, and government's default mode is to grow, and grow.

California is bankrupt: The dependent class and the government class that issues the checks to the dependent class have squeezed out the poor boobs in the middle who have to pay for it all. Everybody knows this. But a state that already has a Bureau of Home Furnishings cannot restrain itself from setting up a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation – or, anyway, an impact study to study whether the Bureau of Impact Studies should study the impact of a Bureau of Motion Picture Condom Regulation.

Look around you, and take it all in. From now on, it gets worse. If you have kids, they'll live in smaller homes, drive smaller cars, live smaller lives. If you don't have kids, you better hope your neighbors do, because someone needs to spawn a working population large enough to pay for the unsustainable entitlements the Obama party has suckered you into thinking you're entitled to. The unfunded liabilities of current entitlements are $100 trillion.  . . . To these existing entitlements, Obama and his enforcers in Congress propose to add the grandest of all: health care, on a scale no advanced democracy has ever attempted.

Steyn's observations are set to music by a Dutch Immigrant. With a few additional comments.

. . . he mentioned in passing one of my persistent observations about the strange new world being engineered in Washington; a world in which all, except for the elite, lead smaller, much smaller lives than ourselves or our parents.

Partly because the Bigger the Government, the Smaller the Citizen.

Milton Friedman, April 17, 1996, on the depersonalization of medicine with government control.