A hero in a realm where cowards and nutcases are the norm

That would be the Western university campus.

The hero? Jordan B. Peterson:

Jordan B. Peterson is a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and a clinical psychologist. His lectures—many produced by TEDx—are popular on YouTube and include titles as wide-ranging as “Potential,” “The Necessity of Virtue,” and “Redefining Reality.” Many readers report being deeply influenced by his book, “Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief,” which explores how and why divergent cultures produce similar myths and stories.

Today Peterson is laser-focused on fighting the cultural cancer of political correctness. He is alarmed at how quickly it is metastasizing into laws that seek to punish any and all self-expression. Such legislation—in his case, Canada’s bill C-16, which would amend the Canadian Human Rights Code and Criminal Code to add “gender identity and expression” as a special category for anti-discrimination—is tailor-made to program people into conformity of thought. As with all things politically correct, such legislation always comes disguised in the language of “equality.”

Pointing this out is a herculean task today, and one Peterson seems to have taken on by himself. If he has colleagues who are also distressed, they probably don’t speak up out of fear of being smeared or fired. But there really is no alternative to loudly fighting political correctness. Peterson seems to have valiantly and quite sanely realized tenure is utterly worthless if the future holds nothing more than perpetual gagging by the thought police. Hopefully concerned colleagues will join him if this reality dawns on them before it’s too late.

When interviewed recently by Lauren Southern of Rebel Media at a free speech rally at the University of Toronto, Peterson made clear that even if his job is in jeopardy, the stakes are far too high to remain silent. “Something ugly is brewing,” he stated.

And you can be sure that he comes in for vitriol.

But, being a clinical psychologist, he has to point out what he has seen firsthand in terms of real-life damage:

Peterson reports several of his clinical patients have been driven literally to the brink of insanity by the effects of political correctness in their workplaces. One who worked in a financial institution was warned that using the term “flip chart” was racist. Another was a social worker, forced by law to allow non-surgically-altered men into a women’s shelter despite the further trauma their presence caused the women there.

Check out his YouTube videos. He's as impressive a warrior as we've had in some time.

 

 

 

 

This is what you get when government runs schools - today's edition

Leviathan controls the kiddies' lives, right down to what is going in their mouths:

More than 30 parents in Durham, Ontario shared stories about teachers telling their kids what items they could and could not eat, and even confiscating food, Canada's The Star reported last Thursday. Teachers reportedly told children their parent-given foods were "too unhealthy" to eat.

Tami DeVries said that when her son took his lunch to kindergarten, it was confiscated. A teacher took away his kielbasa, cheese, and Wheat Thins crackers, replacing them with Cheerios. Alicia Nesbitt reported that her stepdaughter, in first grade, had chips removed from her lunch during the first week of school.

“She came home and told me they weren’t a ‘healthy choice,’” Nesbitt said. “That may be true, but the rest of her lunch and snacks were very healthy and it’s up to parents if they want to put a little treat in for their kids. Unless the school wants to provide lunches, I don’t really think it’s their business.”

Janae Brangman recalled several times last where, when her daughter, then in first grade, had her entire lunch sent home because it contained pizza. The school didn't have a problem with pizza per se, after all it has designated pizza days. Her daughter just needed to eat her pizza on the right day.

Local mom Tami DeVries says when her son was in kindergarten his lunch of kielbasa, cheese and Wheat Thins crackers was confiscated and replaced with Cheerios, while Alicia Nesbitt was “furious” that her stepdaughter, currently in Grade 1 with the Durham Catholic District School Board, had chips removed from her lunch the first week of school.
"It's not like he had chips or a chocolate bar," explained Eliana Daoust, a mother of two. The offending piece of food? A snack-size banana bread. Her son was told not to eat a small piece of banana bread for his morning snack, because it contained chocolate chips.

"He came home with a chart (listing healthy snack ideas) and told me he and the teacher talked about it and healthy choices," Daoust said. "She also sent a note to me. I was really, really, really mad for several reasons." 

The Durham District school board doesn't see a problem.

Mounting resistance to the campus jackboots

Dartmouth College has not yet managed to turn its entire student body into cattle.

Here's what some who insist on reclaiming their humanity have done:

At least some Dartmouth College students have had enough. In a scathing petition on change.org, five leaders in Dartmouth’s student government, joined by more than 1,200 signatories, have called on the administration to return the college to its mission of educating, rather than policing, students. Although the growth of bureaucracy in academia is no secret, it is always sobering to confront the statistics. According to the well-cited petition, non-faculty staff at Dartmouth grew by more than 1,000 people from 1999 to 2004, and in spite of faculty layoffs, that number had increased to 3,497 by 2015. And most administrative staff do not come cheap, especially at prestigious research universities. As the petition points out, this contributes to the institution’s sky-high tuition; the sticker price for a year at Dartmouth is now just below $70,000.

But the petition points out that the cost of non-faculty staff is only part of the problem; what many of these people do all day damages the college as a place of learning as well. The petition does not mince words:

Instead of making a sincere and concerted attempt to resolve the [cost] issues mentioned above, the Dartmouth administration has spent its time policing student life. Buoyed by the idea that the College should support exclusionary “safe spaces” that act as a barrier against uncomfortable ideas, administrators have assumed the role of paternalistic babysitters. By effectively taking sides in sensitive debates and privileging the perspectives of certain students over others, administrators have crossed the line between maintaining a learning environment that is open to all and forcing their own personal views onto the entire campus. In doing so, they have undermined the value of civility, harmed the free exchange of ideas, and performed a disservice to those students who see their time in college as preparation for success in the real world. [Footnotes omitted.]

Will try to follow up on this.

What she really fears is a majority in Congress and a president who will hew to the Constitution's letter

Chief EPA thug Gina McCarthy tries to sound tough about the possibility of a new Republican era in the federal government:

The level of scrutiny the EPA has come under in recent years is both well deserved and a driving factor for some voters in the upcoming election. We’ve watched as lawlessness and overreach in one executive branch department after another were exposed (the VA, the IRS, etc.) but few have come close to the levels of abuse on display at the EPA. President Obama has been a staunch defender of the agency and his pick to lead it, Gina McCarthy. But sensing a change in the wind, the EPA director is up on her hind legs defending the department and predicting that even if a Republican takes the White House this November, the EPA will march onward. (Government Executive)

So how does Gina McCarthy, administrator of the agency on the receiving end of universal Republican animosity, repond? Not so fast.

McCarthy said her regulations are “grounded in the law.”

“The one thing I know more than any other agency is EPA’s rules get scrutinized like no other,” the administrator said this week, as reported by The Washington Examiner. “They would have to go to that same level of scrutiny by any president should there be a reverse in direction.”

To follow through on their promises to undo virtually every regulation the EPA has issued in the last seven years would require a drawn out legal battle, she said. You would need a clear record to establish that or you will be working through the court system for a very long time,” McCarthy said. The EPA’s Clean Power Plan hangs in the balance at the Supreme Court.

Given McCarthy’s lifelong service in appointed civil service positions after getting her B.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts, she really hasn’t had much direct experience in elected office and the operations of the legislature, so it’s perhaps forgivable if she really doesn’t quite understand how all of this works. First of all, while extra-legislative, executive branch decrees certainly carry the unfortunate weight of “laws” they are most certainly not laws in the conventional sense of the word. They are not voted on by representatives of the people and exist at the whim of the President and his appointees. There are indeed frequent challenges against them in the courts and sometimes they are batted down, but nobody ever goes to court demanding that new ones be put in place.

Further, they have theoretical expiration dates which last precisely as long as their supporters hold the executive branch. They are rules which are regularly changed and will be changed again when the White House is no longer held by someone of a like mind. Putting these rules in place generally involves lengthy periods of hearings and public comment, but as we saw with the Keystone Pipeline, that’s all window dressing for the public and the White House will wind up doing what it wants in the end anyway. There is no need for a court order or a vote in Congress for the new director of the EPA and the next President to table or entirely cancel any existing rules.

You see, Gina, all that power is actually quite ephemeral, akin to the way the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the party that ran it faded away once a critical mass of Russians, Ukrainians, etc, began behaving as it it were a joke, or the way the menacing-looking lady made of brown sugar collapsed in a heap of smoke when Dorothy inadvertently applied a little fire.

Ben's da man!

Yesterday I posted about California State U - LA barring Ben Shapiro coming to speak as part of the campus's chapter of Young America's Foundation series.The school prez cited the need for a more "inclusive event" if Shapiro were going to be welcome.

That's not enough to deter Ben:

Shapiro and YAF have vowed to take their event to campus anyway, without the permission of the school. “The campus fascists have taken over,” Shapiro told Breitbart News. “I pay taxes in the state of California; I’m paying for these whiny children to be indoctrinated by radical leftists. For CSULA to pretend that they’re trying to provide balance isn’t just stupid, it’s insultingly stupid. I am the balance, and they’re too afraid to let me speak. These aren’t diversity warriors. They’re jackbooted thugs. If they want to call the men with guns to shut down free speech, they’ll demonstrate clearly just who they are. I’ll be there on Thursday. See you there, snowflakes.”

YAF announced in a statement, “In recognition of the school’s dire need for ideological diversity, Young America’s Foundation and CSULA YAF, in cooperation with Ben Shapiro, fully intend to hold the event, which is part of YAF’s Fred R. Allen Lecture Series, without the university’s approval. The Foundation is prepared to take legal action if the school fails to recognize these students’ rights.”

Walkin' the talk.

How to stop the Most Equal Comrade's explicit tilt toward Iran?

You'll derive great encouragement from a piece by Robert Sklarof at The Algemeiner on how Congress might block the Iran "deal." Momentum seems to be building among those who see it as a real possibility:

Support is building for the US House of Representatives to muster the courage to block implementation of the flawed “deal” with Iran, and the only way to do so is to enjoin the administration from dropping sanctions.

This was the message delivered in a just-published op-ed by Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey and former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge.

A bipartisan group of 105 congressmen wrote to US President Barack Obama asking that he freeze the Iran nuke deal, since “the Iranians have already violated critical provisions on multiple occasions just months into the agreement.”

Ferment among legislators has delayed emergence of a consensus view that would yield a concrete proposal as to how to follow through on this request.

There is no alternative. To save Western civilization, the House must enjoin Obama from implementing the Iranian nuke pact.

Sklarof thinks the most effective route is a lawsuit that would be filed by the House on the basis that the way the "deal" was "finalized" runs counter to the Corker-Cardin Act.

A prototype suit has in fact been crafted:

 . . . a model filing was formulated in November, based on causes- of-action:

* The pact has not been signed by anyone — including Iran — so it is unenforceable.

* It is a treaty rather than an executive agreement or political commitment.

* It undermines American support for Israel’s right to exist and survival, ignoring the unambiguous “sense” of Congress, as articulated in Corker-Cardin.

* It was improperly implemented through passage of the Corker-Cardin Bill, due to fundamental misrepresentations and withheld data.

* It violates the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

* Neither the pact nor Corker-Cardin contains a “severability” clause and, thus, if any component of either document is flawed, the entire pact cannot be portrayed as having been approved.

Concern that such a filing could yield a protracted battle that would ultimately have to reach the Supreme Court is misguided, for an injunction would stop Obama from releasing the funds in the interim, and the above bullet-points underscore the narrative that this out-of-control president must be restrained.

Because this deal is interwoven with Obama’s Islamophilic foreign policy, undermining his unholy alliance with Iran and Russia could finally unravel what has proven to be a series of failed “friendship” gambits with sworn enemies and disheartening distancing efforts with loyal friends. 

It's those friendship gambits and disheartening distancing efforts that have Tony Badran of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies disturbed, and that the first arena of difficulty therefrom is going to be the patty-cake among "stakeholders" over the Syrian multi-layered civil war:

The claim that the Saudis were damaging the supposed Syrian "peace process" [by executing radical Shiite cleric Nimr] sounds surreal on its face. But it is quite revealing, not just about how the White House defines success, but also about its overall policy in Syria.

The administration believes it has achieved a critical diplomatic feat by bringing Iran into the diplomatic talks over Syria and that this constitutes a major breakthrough in itself. "The United States has succeeded in leading the international effort to bring all sides together to try to bring about a political resolution inside of Syria," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a briefing after the Saudi-Iranian spat. The way the administration sees it, for a true discussion to take place, all so-called "stakeholders" in Syria must be gathered around the table in order to reach a settlement.

The administration's self-congratulation aside, it's worth exploring what this means in practice. By declaring Iran a legitimate "stakeholder," the White House is not only saying that Syria is a recognized Iranian sphere of influence, but it also is recognizing Iran's "stake" as legitimate. In fact, President Obama stated explicitly last month that the solution in Syria should be one that allows the Iranians to ensure "that their equities are respected."

This begs the question of what, exactly, is Iran's "stake" or "equities" in Syria? The answer is straightforward: Iran's interest is to maintain a logistical bridge to Hezbollah through which it could supply the group with missiles and arms, thereby enabling it to continue to threaten U.S. allies like Israel and destabilize the region. The White House's legitimization of Iran as a stakeholder in Syria risks licensing Iran to continue arming Hezbollah.

But this was hardly the only cost of President Obama's policy. The key for safeguarding Iranian interests in Syria is ensuring the continuity of the Syrian President Bashar Assad regime. And so, in order to obtain Iranian "buy-in," the administration abandoned what's supposed to be the main objective in Syria, which is the removal of Assad and his regime. Assad, the administration now concedes, gets to stay on for an indefinite period as part of an indeterminate "transitional period." In other words, when it comes to Syria, not only did Obama force Iran down his allies' throat -- he also fully endorsed its position.

Now, to top it off, the administration is attacking the Saudis for supposedly jeopardizing a process designed to safeguard Iran's unchanged objectives in Syria. As the White House sees it, the Saudis' only job is to bring the Syrian opposition to the table essentially to sign a surrender. What's more, as part of this process, Iran, which has underwritten and partaken in Assad's mass slaughter, gets a say in determining which opposition groups are listed as terrorists.

Of course, the SOTU is tonight. It will be interesting to see if the Most Equal Comrade does any explicit tilting toward Iran and away from longtime Mideast allies.

 Memo to Senator Toomey and his bunch: Keep your thinking caps on, and move forward at the first opportunity.

And now, for an antidote to the second-to-most-recent post

Ben Shapiro is one of the coolest people in post-America today:

On Thursday evening, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Ben Shapiro crashed the fascist safe space known as University of Missouri and delivered an incendiary set of remarks titled, "The Truth is a Microaggression."

Calling the concept of white privilege "bullshit" and pointing out to students that "facts don't care about your feelings," Shapiro connected the race hoaxes taking place on campus at Mizzou and around the country to past frauds-used-to-incite-violence from "St. Michael of the Gentle Giantedness" to "St. Trayvon of the Blessed Hoodie." According to Shapiro, the spirit of the KKK is, in fact, alive at Mizzou - alive in the spirit of Concerned Student 1950 and the other "Pantywaist Fascists" on campus who demand an end to any dissent and the creation of racially segregated "safe spaces." Such spaces, quipped Shapiro, "are both separate, and equal!" 

"Facts don't care about your feelings." Would love to see that become a viral meme.

Matt Bevin is going to be a very good governor

Please, post-American society, provide us with more politicians with this kind of spine:

Kentucky Gov.-elect Matt Bevin said in an appearance on The Glenn Beck Radio Program Friday that he will push back against the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate the coal industry, telling the EPA to “pound sand.”

Bevin’s comments came after Glenn Beck asked, “Now that you’re in, President Obama has said that he’s going to destroy the coal industry. Kentucky is a coal state. What are you going to be doing specifically to push back on that?”

In August, President Barack Obama unveiled his coal policy in partnership with the EPA, granting the agency authority over what is traditionally a state responsibility.

According to Sam Batkins, director of regulatory policy at American Action Forum, the policy will cost $2.5 trillion and 125,800 jobs, along with shuttering 66 power plants.

Bevin, a Tea Party favorite who became only the second Republican in four decades to win Kentucky’s governorship Tuesday, vowed to stand against the EPA when it comes to protecting his state’s large coal industry.

“Why it is that we in Kentucky — that sit on two extraordinary basins, the Illinois basin and the Central basin, an abundance of this — how are we not participating in something that the world wants more of than they ever have?” Bevin asked. “And so, from my way of thinking, we will tell the EPA and other unelected officials who have no legal authority over us as a state, to pound sand.”

Magnificent.

The first step is to recognize that there is a war on for America's soul

Mark Tapson of Truth Revolt interviewed Monica Crowley and she spoke plainly. She spelled out the crux of post-America's dilemma with unsparing candor:

We are in a war. It is a war for America – for the very nature of what America is and what it should be. It is not a war that we have sought, but like it or not, it is a war that has been brought to us by the Left. For decades, the Left has been waging a war for the future of the country. Their war is waged against the Constitution, free market economics, our social fabric and values – and they fight 24/7. They never rest. They never falter. And they rarely fail – and when they do fail, they pick up where they left off and begin the fight anew. 

Their objective is – as then-candidate Barack Obama called it in 2008 – the "fundamental transformation of the nation." We now have seven years of evidence as to what he meant: moving America away from a nation built on individual liberty, fiscal responsibility, strong national defense and economic freedom, and toward a European-style socialist state sapped of superpower strength and influence. Mr. Obama and the Left have largely succeeded in accomplishing that transition. They are winning the war – and the Republicans aren't even in the battle. Most of them simply don't get it.

With a few exceptions, such as Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and House members like Louis Gohmert, most Republicans simply don't understand what they’re up against. They don't understand – or they don't want to understand – that the Democrats of today are not the Democrats of the past. Mr. Obama is not John Kennedy or Bill Clinton or even Jimmy Carter. They were liberals in the classic sense – and mainstream Democrats. Mr. Obama is not a Democrat in that traditional sense. He is a leftist revolutionary. A completely different ball of wax – with a completely different set of objectives for the country. Objectives that involve uprooting our foundational principles and replacing them with socialist policies that will be exceedingly difficult if not impossible to reverse. This is their war. And most Republicans, certainly the Republican leadership, don't see it. And if they don't see it, they cannot wage an effective counteroffensive. That's why the Left continues to win elections and policy battles: because most conservatives and Republicans are playing the game by the traditional rules, and the Democrats are playing by a radically different set of rules – and they have their fellow leftists in the mainstream media serving as their wingmen. The two sides are aren't even on the same playing field.

Longtime LITD readers know that this understanding that the Democrat party hates freedom and America and is the enemy is a core tenet of the worldview through which this site analyzes the affairs of the day. LITD is often taken to task for it, accused of hyperbole of the most vitriolic kind.

Well, let us offer a couple of fresh bits of substantiation for our position: two articles from today's edition of The Hill. The common theme of both is the Most Equal Comrade's contempt for the Constitution:

Ian Smith reports on the post-American regime's assault on the immigration front:

A newly leaked internal DHS memorandum produced for an off-the-record agency conclave reveals that the Obama administration is actively planning to circumvent a federal court injunction that suspended part of last November’s deferral-based amnesty initiative. The document, apparently prepared as follow-up from a DHS “Regulations Retreat” last summer, appears sure to re-ignite concerns in Congress as well as federal judges in the Fifth Circuit. The Administration has already been criticized from the bench for handing out work permits to hundreds of thousands of deferred action beneficiaries, in direct violation of a district court’s order. With the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals deciding any day now whether to deny the Administration’s request to reverse that injunction, this public leak has come at a critical juncture for U.S. enforcement policy. 

Last June, four months after Texas federal judge Andrew Hanen’s order to freeze President’s DAPA and Expanded DACA programs—disclosure: the Immigration Reform Law Institute has filed briefs in these cases—DHS’s immigration policy makers apparently held a “Regulations Retreat” to discuss “different options” for “open market Employment Authorization Document (EAD) regulatory changes.” EAD is the statutory term for work permits. From a memo recording these discussions, we now know that the Obama DHS has, rather than pausing to allow the courts to assess the constitutionality of its enforcement nullification initiatives, been gearing up to roll out one or more of four plans drawn up at the meeting, each one designed to provide EADs to millions of nonimmigrants, including those lawfully present and visa overstayers, crippling the actual employment-based visa system on the federal statute-book.

[snip]

Bottom line: The memo foreshadows more tactical offensives in a giant administrative amnesty for all 12 million illegal aliens who’ve broken our immigration laws (and many other laws) that will emerge before the next inaugural in January 2016. According to the authors, one negative factor for granting EADs to illegal aliens, visa-overstayers, etc., is that they’ll still “face difficulties in pursuing permanent residence due to ineligibility or being subject to unlawful presence inadmissibility for which a waiver is required.” This is in reference to the reality that an EAD isn’t a green card and that eventually the EAD-beneficiaries are supposed to apply to ‘adjust their status,’ which cannot be done without showing evidence of lawful status. But this might change, they write. The DHS “macro-level policy goal”, we’re told, is to assist individuals to stay “until they are ready and able to become immigrants.” This would seem to say that DHS, the largest federal law enforcement agency in the nation, is banking on awarding those who’ve broken our laws and violated our national sovereignty.

Timothy Cama on the regime's intention to circumvent Congress with regard to the complete fiction that the global climate is in some kind of trouble and post-America needs to change its basic nature to address it:

Republican senators accused President Obama Tuesday of deliberately circumventing Congress in his attempt to reach a broad U.N. deal on climate change.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), chairman of a Foreign Relations Committee subpanel, said at a Tuesday hearing that any deal negotiators reach at the talks in Paris in December needs to go through Senate ratification.

“Just like the Kyoto Protocol and the United Nations framework convention on climate change, any agreement that commits our nation to targets or timetables must go through the process established by the founders in our Constitution. It must be submitted to the United States Senate for its advice and consent,” Barrasso told Todd Stern, the State Department’s top negotiator for the deal.

“The president has made clear that he doesn’t see it that way, as was the case with the Iranian nuclear deal,” he said.

Barrasso was the only Republican at the hearing, which was dominated by Democrats who thanked Stern for his work.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), who wanted to have a joint hearing on the talks with the Environment and Public Works Committee, which he chairs, said in a statement that the deal should go through the Senate.

“While we can certainly disagree on the underlying policies, I believe we, as the Senate, should support basic oversight responsibilities, especially when they are consistent with past practice."

“President Obama and his administrative officials are going out of their way to circumvent the role of the U.S. Senate in this negotiating process and I am disappointed that the minority would enable such behavior,” he said.

This is where we are. There is not a front - Constitutional, economic, cultural, or pertaining to national security - in which the Freedom-Haters do not march forward without relent or even pause.

The question is whether the damage inflicted thus far is reversible.

 

Freedom-Haters eat their own at the first sign of mutiny

One of Mrs. MEC's biggest supporters in her attempt to bring totalitarianism to the nation's government-school cafeterias is turning on her:

the School Nutrition Association – which initially championed the new federal lunch standards on fruits, vegetables, salt, fat, sugar and virtually every other aspect of school lunches when they were implemented in 2012 – is now lobbying Congress to dial back the “overly prescriptive” and expensive changes, the New York Times News Service reports.

“Congress is listening, and it is considering legislation to delay the nutrition regulations for a year, some of which have already gone into effect. But some of the association’s onetime allies in the school-meal campaign are mystified, if not suspicious, concerning the group’s motivations,” the news service reports.

Unsurprisingly, the move has raised the ire of the unwavering food jackboots:

Regardless, proponents of the new lunch standards are lobbing wild accusations at SNA leaders for the group’s decision to side with its members, claiming the association is simply pandering to food companies that help sponsor its work.

“They sold their souls to the devil,” said Stanley Garnett, who resigned from the SNA in protest of the group’s change of heart.

Evil corporations are stirring this up, doncha know.

Eric Holder's rough day on Capitol Hill

Two of my current House heroes, Trey Gowdy and Louis Gohmert, turn up the heat on the post-American "Justice" comandante.  

Determined to turn us into totally dependent cattle - today's edition

Deroy Murdock has a piece at NRO today that tells you all you need to know about FHer-care: its labyrinthine bureaucracy, the slimy wiliness of the smiley-face representatives one deals with when embarking on the enrollment process, the utter disregard for individual sovereignty and privacy, and the overt attempt to maximize each comrade's dependency on Leviathan.

He tells the story of Helen, a 60-year-old widow who earns $15,000 a year as a self-employed house cleaner.  For her health care, she'd relied on a volunteer clinic at which doctors examined her and provided her with medicine free of charge.

Nonetheless, this lifelong Democrat considered it her duty to sign up for Obamacare. After all, it is the law. And Helen did not want to pay the penalty for violating the individual mandate.

So, last October, Helen visited HealthCare.gov and smacked into the same delays and diversions that have flummoxed so many Americans. She rang the HealthCare.gov help line and spoke with someone whom she described as sweet and friendly. The woman on the phone, who never gave her name, listened to Helen and then recommended that she seek public assistance.

“Public assistance?” Helen erupted. “That sounds like welfare. I raised my family my whole life and never took one penny of welfare — ever. Why would I want to take government aid now? This is why the system is the way it is today. I am an honest person, and this is why I am refusing welfare.” The woman kept firing questions at her. Helen felt as if the navigator wanted to derail her train of thought, break her down, and make her surrender and accept government aid.

Helen says the Obamacare navigator told her that she did not meet the criteria to qualify for Obamacare. Still, since Helen already had started the application, the navigator told her to complete it. This devoured another hour and 45 minutes. The application was filled with some three dozen deeply personal questions about her bank account, health condition, and even HIV status.

“I felt violated,” Helen said. “It was as if they thought I was a criminal.”

After two weeks, Helen received a letter. The federal government deemed her ineligible and denied her Obamacare.

It gets worse.  She called back to find out the regime had lost her paperwork.  After going though the process again, she discovered that her second navigator had, with stunning dishonesty, signed her up for Medicaid.

The story continues to  unfold from there, and it has at least a somewhat happy private-sector ending, but the overall point is that it examines what happens when an American citizen who insists on paying her own way in the world stands her ground against the socialist machine that just wants to put her on its thrift-shop health-care plan and be done with her.

The anti-Julia.

Why we call them Freedom-Haters - today's edition

Chuck Schumer's media "shield law" would empower government to define the term "journalist" and decide who fits it and who doesn't.

As a freelance magazine writer and a blogger, I have skin in this game.  I'm good, I'm a professional, and I won't have some agent of the regime determining whether or not I pass muster.

The Thunderous truth about Freedom-Hater-care, spoken directly to the overlords trying to force it down our throats

LITD cedes the floor to ophthalmologist Kristin Held:

When she wrote to the Aetna insurance company canceling her participation in its offerings, Dr.Kristin Held of San Antonio was informed she is contractually bound to care for the company’s patients for another year — as though Obamacare not only re-configured the American health care system, it repealed the 13th Amendment at the same time.

In her letter dated Jan. 30, the long-time and vocal opponent of Obamacare wrote that the “law of the land” Obamacare is made up of “politically-expedient mandates, rewards, penalties, rules and regulations with which I cannot rationally or morally treat my patients and run a practice, much less interpret, implement or comply.”

In the letter, Held describes a strange form of care in which a doctor’s services are sold without the doctor’s knowledge or consent.

“So here we are,” Held wrote, “you are getting new business offering health insurance plans featuring my services without my consent under terms which are unacceptable to me …

“It saddens me to think of the decreased access to care from actual physicians and the shockingly increased costs Aetna patients will now experience because of your choice to collude with big government rather than collaborate with patients and physicians.”

Let's take this viral, patriots.  

His factory was raided because of where he made his political donations - but he had the last word

Interesting American Thinker article about what Gibson Guitar Company did with the wood the government siezed in that 2011 raid and subsequently returned.  

The issue at hand was not that the wood was endangered or illegally harvested, but that it was not of the proper thickness that would have meant that some labor had been performed on it by workers in India and Madagascar.  This was the law in Madagascar and India as a nod to the unions in those countries.  Gibson, who hand-makes its guitars, cannot guarantee the craftsmanship of its products if a portion of the work is done outside their facilities.

What raised many eyebrows about this governmental action was that the countries involved, India and Madagascar, indicated that they were not interested in pursuing the matter when contacted by the Department of Justice.  Also, even if Gibson had been guilty, this would have been a civil, not a criminal matter.  Finally, this same kind of tonewood is used by other guitar makers such as CF Martin and Company and Fender.  Those other companies were not raided.  The principle difference seems to be that those companies contributed to Democratic candidates, while Henry Juszkiewicz, the CEO of Gibson, gives openly to Republicans, and Gibson has plants in a right-to-work state.

After spending nearly two and half million dollars in legal fees and paying a $300,000 fine, the government has settled with Gibson and has finally returned the confiscated tonewood.  Normally that would be the end of the story, with a victory scored for partisan government bullying of political opponents, however, that is not the end.

Gibson took that wood and made it into the Government Series II Les Paul.  These special edition guitars are hot stamped in gold with the Government Series graphic, which is an American bald eagle holding a Gibson guitar neck.  It is an admirable statement of defiance of an abusive government and a refusal of a historic American company to be intimidated.

It's important to resist this regime's tyranny, and the most effective way to do that is to continue to do what you were doing when the regime started harassing you.  That's also why I found it immensely gratifying to see Dinesh D'Souza get right back to making television appearances and even debate Bill Ayers at Darmouth College.

If you woke up in your own bed this morning, you still have enough freedom to keep striking blows against this evil.  The antidote for resignation is fierceness of spirit.

You're not alone, dear Freedom-Cherisher

Our people and our groups are wasting no time in letting Congress know it acted way too hastily in passing this omnibus spending bill.

Stay loud and fierce.

A very nice victory for freedom

The regime's attempt to destroy the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of our civilization took a blow to the gut today:

Yesterday, Judge Brian Cogan of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, not onlystruck down Obamacare's contraception mandate as applied to religious non-profit organizations, but also sent a strong signal that federal courts were losing patience with President Obama's many stitches of executive power.

Previous courts had ruled against President Obama's contraception mandate as applied to for-profit entities (see Sebelius v Hobby Lobby), but this was the first court to hold that participating in Obama's scheme to provide free birth control is a substantial burden on the free practice of religion (specifically the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and its affiliate organizations).

The contraception mandate "directly compels plaintiffs, through the threat of onerous penalties, to undertake actions that their religion forbids," Cogan wrote. "There is no way that a court can, or should, determine that a coerced violation of conscience is of insufficient quantum to merit constitutional protection."

Normal-people type Americans still know how to assert what is right and true in the face of Freedom-Hater vitriol and thuggery.

7 out of 10

That's how many California doctors are boycotting the state's FHer-care exchange.

It wasn't even supposed to look like a coincidence; it was a message

How else do you explain this?

A couple of weeks back, cancer patient Bill Elliot, in a defiant appearance on Fox News, discussed the cancelation of his insurance and what he intended to do about it. He’s now being audited.

Insurance agent C Steven Tucker, who quaintly insists that the whimsies of the hyper-regulatory bureaucracy do not trump your legal rights, saw the interview and reached out to Mr Elliot to help him. And he’s now being audited.

As the Instapundit likes to remind us, Barack Obama has “joked” publicly about siccing the IRS on his enemies. With all this coincidence about, we should be grateful the President is not (yet) doing prison-rape gags.

What does it say about us, the American population, that this regime isn't even trying to do any cosmetics on its heavy-handed means of ruling anymore?

Resistance to tyranny

Nice to see Eric Holder's fiefdom getting some pushback on the school-choice issue.