Health Care Law; A Call For Expediting ObamaCare With Supremes; America's Global Power Diminishing; Gitmo Transfers Defunded?; Boehner's Choices; Airport Scanners; Obama Itching For a Fight

FrontPageMagazine writes: Hidden in the labyrinth of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA)—ObamaCare, for short—is a provision that symbolizes the mandatory theme that characterizes the entire nationalized health scheme. The provision creates an appointed board of “experts” with power to dictate cost policies and timing to Congress and to cap health-care spending.
Eventually, patients, doctors, and hospitals will be under the sway of this board. It’s called the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB). There’s an odor, not only of independence but also of arrogance, about this board’s authority and function. The chief actuary for Medicare will estimate costs in the spring of 2013. The IPAB will then begin its work to make its own decisions by 2015.
By then, many new health-care revisions could be in place. Certainly that’s the hope of most Americans. But the powers presently granted to the nascent IPAB reveal the mentality and intent of the drafters and supporters of ObamaCare. They are not comforting.
The Star Chamber-like operations of the IPAB can be seen in the fact that only if three-fifths of the Senate—a supermajority—vote against implementing a decision of the IPAB can its decisions be blocked. Further, the implementations of the Board’s dictates are exempt by law from administrative and even from judicial review. http://frontpagemag.com/2010/12/08/the-price-of-expert-care/
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Nation Review Online writes: To ensure an expedited process moving forward, I call on President Obama and Attorney General Holder to join Attorney General Cuccinelli in requesting that this case be sent directly to the U.S. Supreme Court. In this challenging environment, we must not burden our states, employers, and families with the costs and uncertainty created by this unconstitutional law, and we must take all steps to resolve this issue immediately. 
Cantor also promised to pass “a clean repeal of ObamaCare” once the Republicans take over the House in January. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/255170/cantor-calls-direct-appeal-supreme-court-daniel-foster
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 Salon.com writes: Significantly, in 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America's global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited "the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East" and "without precedent in modern history," as the primary factor in the decline of the "United States' relative strength -- even in the military realm."
Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar's privileged status as the global reserve currency.
Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, "From the Cold War to the War on Terror." Later this year, "Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State," a forthcoming book of his, will explore the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations on the spread of internal security measures here at home.  http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2010/12/06/america_collapse_2025
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The Washington Times writes:The massive spending bill Democrats released early Wednesday morning would prohibit the Obama administration from spending any money either to transfer detainees to the United States or to buy a replacement prison in the United States, as Mr. Obama had planned.
Prohibiting spending effectively stops the administration from acting over the next year, and with Republicans about to take control of the House in January, his chances are virtually zero that Congress will relent any time before the president stands for re-election in 2012.
The bill, which will be voted on over the next week or so, explicitly prohibits the transfer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/dec/8/congress-deals-death-blow-gitmo-closure/
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The Washington Examiner writes: Now Boehner faces a choice. He can in good conscience declare that the deal he agreed to has been buried under a mountain of pork and that, upon further reflection, he ought not to have gone along with it in the first place because of the explicit, specific provisions in the Pledge to America he captained and is now in a position to advance. Boehner can make a stand as memorable as the one he took on Feb. 13, 2009, when he dropped 1,100 pages of an unread stimulus bill on the floor of the House and denounced the process that produced in near-secrecy such a deficit-driving monster. There are enormous risks to that course. Markets could be unsettled and even sell off for a few days. The president will denounce Boehner as untrustworthy, and the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico will repeat the charge without examination of the White House's capitulation to the spending frenzy demanded by Democrats as an additional bit of blackmail necessary to prevent the biggest tax increase in history. Boehner can choose this week to reaffirm what he and the GOP leadership have said over and over again for the past two years: We cannot stay on this path. The new speaker can, with the country's attention fixed on him, use that moment to warn the country that the fiscal cliff is real and that we are at its edge, perilously close to taking a turn marked Greece and Ireland. If John Boehner does the right thing this week, a speakership not yet begun will already have made a profound mark on American history. Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/2010/12/hugh-hewitt-boehner-faces-historic-decision-2010-tax-cut-christmas-tree#ixzz17zvdx1vX ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The New Republic informs us: Eight years ago, officials at Orlando International Airport first began testing the millimeter-wave body scanners that are currently at the center of a national uproar. The designers of the scanners at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory offered U.S. officials a choice: naked machines or blob machines? The same researchers had developed both technologies, and both were equally effective at identifying contraband. But, as their nicknames suggest, the former displays graphic images of the human body, while the latter scrambles the images into a non-humiliating blob. Since both versions of the scanners promise the same degree of security, any sane attempt to balance privacy and safety would seem to favor the blob machines. And that’s what the handful of European airports that have adopted body scanners chose. http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/79750/nude-breach-privacy-americans ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Please keep LTC Terry Lakin, who is challenging Barack Obama's eligibility to serve as president, in your minds and hearts .  LTC Lakin's courts martial is scheduled to begin on December 14, 2010. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Our suave President yesterday said: "I will be happy to see the Republicans test whether or not I'm itching for a fight on a whole range of issues," Obama said last week. "I suspect they will find I am. And I think the American people will be on my side on a whole bunch of these fights." http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/12/obama-vows-to-fight-republicans----next-year/1