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The Liberty Now Network™ Home of the "Legitimate Power" Talk Radio Program with Dr. Christopher A. Gower.  

The Liberty Now Network discusses all aspects of liberty and freedom. Current events, politics, policy-making & elected representation and their relevance to the preservation of both personal, and social liberty are discussed openly. Due to frank 1st amendment rights being utilized, listener discretion is advised. Nationally syndicated hosts include: ( Author )Duncan Mizel, Dr. Merideth Archer and Christopher Gower,PhD..

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    Date / Time:

    An Open Letter to Mr. Obama.

  • Date / Time:

    Hurumph, Hurumph!!

  • Date / Time:

    Indeed. Mr Payne, Indeed.

  • Date / Time:

    WHAT YOU STAND TO LOSE WITH THE "HEALTH CARE REFORM"CURRENTLY BEFORE CONGRESS.

    If you read the fine print in the Congressional plans, you'll find that a lot of cherished aspects of the current system would disappear.

    In promoting his health-care agenda, President Obama has repeatedly reassured Americans that they can keep their existing health plans -- and that the benefits and access they prize will be enhanced through reform.

    A close reading of the two main bills, one backed by Democrats in the House and the other issued by Sen. Edward Kennedy's Health committee, contradict the President's assurances. To be sure, it isn't easy to comb through their 2,000 pages of tortured legal language. But page by page, the bills reveal a web of restrictions, fines, and mandates that would radically change your health-care coverage.

    If you prize choosing your own cardiologist or urologist under your company's Preferred Provider Organization plan (PPO), if your employer rewards your non-smoking, healthy lifestyle with reduced premiums, if you love the bargain Health Savings Account (HSA) that insures you just for the essentials, or if you simply take comfort in the freedom to spend your own money for a policy that covers the newest drugs and diagnostic tests -- you may be shocked to learn that you could lose all of those good things under the rules proposed in the two bills that herald a health-care revolution.

    In short, the Obama platform would mandate extremely full, expensive, and highly subsidized coverage -- including a lot of benefits people would never pay for with their own money -- but deliver it through a highly restrictive, HMO-style plan that will determine what care and tests you can and can't have. It's a revolution, all right, but in the wrong direction.

    Let's explore the five freedoms that Americans would lose under Obamacare:

    1. Freedom to choose what's in your plan

    The bills in both houses require that Americans purchase insurance through "qualified" plans offered by health-care "exchanges" that would be set up in each state. The rub is that the plans can't really compete based on what they offer. The reason: The federal government will impose a minimum list of benefits that each plan is required to offer.

    Today, many states require these "standard benefits packages" -- and they're a major cause for the rise in health-care costs. Every group, from chiropractors to alcohol-abuse counselors, do lobbying to get included. Connecticut, for example, requires reimbursement for hair transplants, hearing aids, and in vitro fertilization.

    The Senate bill would require coverage for prescription drugs, mental-health benefits, and substance-abuse services. It also requires policies to insure "children" until the age of 26. That's just the starting list. The bills would allow the Department of Health and Human Services to add to the list of required benefits, based on recommendations from a committee of experts. Americans, therefore, wouldn't even know what's in their plans and what they're required to pay for, directly or indirectly, until after the bills become law.

    2. Freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, or pay your real costs

    As with the previous example, the Obama plan enshrines into federal law one of the worst features of state legislation: community rating. Eleven states, ranging from New York to Oregon, have some form of community rating. In its purest form, community rating requires that all patients pay the same rates for their level of coverage regardless of their age or medical condition.

    Americans with pre-existing conditions need subsidies under any plan, but community rating is a dubious way to bring fairness to health care. The reason is twofold: First, it forces young people, who typically have lower incomes than older workers, to pay far more than their actual cost, and gives older workers, who can afford to pay more, a big discount. The state laws gouging the young are a major reason so many of them have joined the ranks of uninsured.

    Under the Senate plan, insurers would be barred from charging any more than twice as much for one patient vs. any other patient with the same coverage. So if a 20-year-old who costs just $800 a year to insure is forced to pay $2,500, a 62-year-old who costs $7,500 would pay no more than $5,000.

    Second, the bills would ban insurers from charging differing premiums based on the health of their customers. Again, that's understandable for folks with diabetes or cancer. But the bills would bar rewarding people who pursue a healthy lifestyle of exercise or a cholesterol-conscious diet. That's hardly a formula for lower costs. It's as if car insurers had to charge the same rates to safe drivers as to chronic speeders with a history of accidents.

    3. Freedom to choose high-deductible coverage

    The bills threaten to eliminate the one part of the market truly driven by consumers spending their own money. That's what makes a market, and health care needs more of it, not less.

    Hundreds of companies now offer Health Savings Accounts to about 5 million employees. Those workers deposit tax-free money in the accounts and get a matching contribution from their employer. They can use the funds to buy a high-deductible plan -- say for major medical costs over $12,000. Preventive care is reimbursed, but patients pay all other routine doctor visits and tests with their own money from the HSA account. As a result, HSA users are far more cost-conscious than customers who are reimbursed for the majority of their care.

    The bills seriously endanger the trend toward consumer-driven care in general. By requiring minimum packages, they would prevent patients from choosing stripped-down plans that cover only major medical expenses. "The government could set extremely low deductibles that would eliminate HSAs," says John Goodman of the National Center for Policy Analysis, a free-market research group. "And they could do it after the bills are passed."

    4. Freedom to keep your existing plan

    This is the freedom that the President keeps emphasizing. Yet the bills appear to say otherwise. It's worth diving into the weeds -- the territory where most pundits and politicians don't seem to have ventured.

    The legislation divides the insured into two main groups, and those two groups are treated differently with respect to their current plans. The first are employees covered by the Employee Retirement Security Act of 1974. ERISA regulates companies that are self-insured, meaning they pay claims out of their cash flow, and don't have real insurance. Those are the GEs and Time Warners and most other big companies.

    The House bill states that employees covered by ERISA plans are "grandfathered." Under ERISA, the plans can do pretty much what they want -- they're exempt from standard packages and community rating and can reward employees for healthy lifestyles even in restrictive states.

    But read on.

    The bill gives ERISA employers a five-year grace period when they can keep offering plans free from the restrictions of the "qualified" policies offered on the exchanges. But after five years, they would have to offer only approved plans, with the myriad rules we've already discussed. So for Americans in large corporations, "keeping your own plan" has a strict deadline. In five years, like it or not, you'll get dumped into the exchange. As we'll see, it could happen a lot earlier.

    The outlook is worse for the second group. It encompasses employees who aren't under ERISA but get actual insurance either on their own or through small businesses. After the legislation passes, all insurers that offer a wide range of plans to these employees will be forced to offer only "qualified" plans to new customers, via the exchanges.

    The employees who got their coverage before the law goes into effect can keep their plans, but once again, there's a catch. If the plan changes in any way -- by altering co-pays, deductibles, or even switching coverage for this or that drug -- the employee must drop out and shop through the exchange. Since these plans generally change their policies every year, it's likely that millions of employees will lose their plans in 12 months.

    5. Freedom to choose your doctors

    The Senate bill requires that Americans buying through the exchanges -- and as we've seen, that will soon be most Americans -- must get their care through something called "medical home." Medical home is similar to an HMO. You're assigned a primary care doctor, and the doctor controls your access to specialists. The primary care physicians will decide which services, like MRIs and other diagnostic scans, are best for you, and will decide when you really need to see a cardiologists or orthopedists.

    Under the proposals, the gatekeepers would theoretically guide patients to tests and treatments that have proved most cost-effective. The danger is that doctors will be financially rewarded for denying care, as were HMO physicians more than a decade ago. It was consumer outrage over despotic gatekeepers that made the HMOs so unpopular, and killed what was billed as the solution to America's health-care cost explosion.

    The bills do not specifically rule out fee-for-service plans as options to be offered through the exchanges. But remember, those plans -- if they exist -- would be barred from charging sick or elderly patients more than young and healthy ones. So patients would be inclined to game the system, staying in the HMO while they're healthy and switching to fee-for-service when they become seriously ill. "That would kill fee-for-service in a hurry," says Goodman.

    In reality, the flexible, employer-based plans that now dominate the landscape, and that Americans so cherish, could disappear far faster than the 5 year "grace period" that's barely being discussed.

    Companies would have the option of paying an 8% payroll tax into a fund that pays for coverage for Americans who aren't covered by their employers. It won't happen right away -- large companies must wait a couple of years before they opt out. But it will happen, since it's likely that the tax will rise a lot more slowly than corporate health-care costs, especially since they'll be lobbying Washington to keep the tax under control in the righteous name of job creation.

    The best solution is to move to a let-freedom-ring regime of high deductibles, no community rating, no standard benefits, and cross-state shopping for bargains (another market-based reform that's strictly taboo in the bills). For now, we suffer with a flawed health-care system, but we still have our Five Freedoms. Call them the Five Endangered Freedoms.

    Dr. Merideth Archer, "Living Wisely"
    Nationally Syndicated Talk-Show Host, The Liberty Now Network

  • Date / Time:

    Definitions for the Ignorant & Misinformed.

    Fascism: pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/, comprises a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology and a corporatist economic ideology.

    ref; GM takeover, the Bank Bailouts, and the takeover of the largest Insurance company in the world.

    Socialism: refers to any one of various theories of economic organization advocating state, public or common worker ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

    ref; 3 trillion dollars spent and allocated for in less than 120 days in office, obligating generations not even born yet to a tax load unrivaled in human history.

    Marxism: In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that a liberating communist revolution would only occur under a specific set of conditions, including the precondition of an economically exhausted industrialized nation.

    ref; by exhausting our coffers they can reorganize our very foundation, by claiming the need for the preservation of the whole. A democrat held congress and a democrat president = marxist revolution.

    Leninism: Lenin argued that the proletariat can only achieve a successful revolutionary consciousness through the efforts of a vanguard party composed of full-time professional revolutionaries.

    ref; Listen to the words and the polispeak being used to win the offices, and how they have radically changed after achieving the office.

    OKAY HERE IS THE DEAL, ALL OF THIS SOUNDS MIGHTY FAMILIAR DOESN'T IT. WAKE UP AMERICA, THIS IS WHAT YOUR ELECTED REPRESENATIVES ARE, AND WHAT THEY BELIEVE.

    IF YOU DO NOT RISE UP AGAINST THE TYRANNY OF DECEPTION, AND CLAIM YOUR NATURAL BORN AMERICAN RIGHT OF LIBERTY, AND A FREE AND DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATIVE REPUBLIC YOU DESERVE THE PAIN, ABUSE, AND NEGLECT THAT WILL COME WITH PASSIVITY.

    Duncan Mizel, "Righteous Thinking"
    Author & Nationally Syndicated Talk-Show Host, The Liberty Now Network

  • Date / Time:

    Obama .. a look inside the unfiltered message of the man.

    After a recent blow-up, and corelating friendship removal with a facebook friend due to the fact, that she felt that I was calling her names; because I called hers and her friends comments sections in a posting; "Sheeple", in the fact that they are taking their leaders at their word, and false promises. I was told that I should do some research before I sat in judgement of the Left. So I felt that I should really reaquiant myself with the leaders of the left's own leaders, in their own words.

    I was not only reinvigorated within my own perspective of common sense, but fully alarmed at how socialist, bordering on facist our current leadership really is. In sifting through the intellectual landfill upon which the American left has built its worldview, any truly authentic, and fully articulate researcher can find any number of artifacts to help decrypt the Obama presidency.

    Among the more illuminating is Weather Underground, a watchable 2002 documentary on the soi-disant Weathermen and their times. Although superficially objective, the film allows the final comment of Weatherman Mark Rudd to stand as something of a thesis statement.

    "It was this knowledge that we couldn't handle," says Rudd, explaining the group's turn to violence. "It was too big. We didn't know what to do. In a way I still don't know what to do with the knowledge."

    The Russian equivalent for Rudd's "big" knowledge is pravda, as in "larger truth" or "truth and justice." In the Soviet era, Communists hammered the facts until they fit the "truth." Small "c" communists like Rudd and his former colleague, Bill Ayers, still do. Their indifference to history stuns the knowing observer, especially in regard to the defining event of their era, the war in Vietnam.

    By contorting every fact that did not naturally fit their template, the Weathermen and their allies concluded, in Ayers' words, that America's "intentions were evil and her justifications dissembling, her explanations dishonest, her every move false." This was the "knowledge," uniquely intuited by the hard left, that Rudd and his colleagues found "too big" to handle.

    In Weather Underground not one of the seven or eight Weathermen interviewed in 2002 questions this assumption about America and the Vietnam War. Neither do their liberal critics in the film, nor do the filmmakers for that matter. All that anyone questions are the futile ends to which the Weathermen applied their superior insights.

    The film offers no hint that the 1968 Tet offensive proved disastrous to the Viet Cong. No hint that by August 1972, U.S. ground forces had so whipped the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) that they were able to withdraw fully from Vietnam. No hint that the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (ARVN) held their own for nearly three years and collapsed only after a Democratic Congress cut off all military funding. No hint that Cambodia sunk into horrific genocide and Vietnam into a repressive Stalinist state after the Weathermen's communist heroes took over. No hint that the anti-war left ignored, or cheered, the horrific consequences of America's withdrawal. In sum, no hint that the Weathermen's larger truth was largely false.

    More troubling, in neither of their memoirs -- Ayers' 2001 Fugitive Days quoted above and Rudd's 2009 Underground -- does either author give any sense that his "big" knowledge is any less true or relevant today than it was forty years ago. America was and remains, in Rudd's words, "racist" and "imperialist." It must be thus, as Ayers declaimed in a 2006 speech in Venezuela, because "capitalism promotes racism and militarism -- turning people into consumers, not citizens."

    Since hitting the mainland Obama has surrounded himself with leftists well versed in the knowledge too big to handle. "I chose my friends carefully," he writes in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." With his new friends, Obama discussed "neocolonialism, Franz (sic) Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy" and flaunted his alienation.

    The literary influences Obama cites include radical anti-imperialists like Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and tyrant-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois. "Joseph Stalin was a great man," DuBois wrote upon Stalin's death in 1953. "Few other men of the 20th century approach his stature."

    In Dreams, Obama gives no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moves on to no new school, embraces no new worldview. At least five of the authors he cites -- Wright, Fanon, Hughes, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin -- Bill Ayers cites in his writings as well. (As an aside, both Obama and Ayers misspell Fanon's name in the same way as "Franz.")

    For mentors, Obama chose men like Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the fraudulent Palestinian wannabe Edward Said, and the radical PLO groupie Rashid Khalidi. These are the men he turned to for wisdom. In 2003, for instance, Obama publicly thanked Khalidi for providing "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

    Khalidi, in turn, publicly thanked Ayers in the "acknowledgments" section of his 2004 book, Resurrecting Empire. "Bill was particularly generous in letting me use his family's dining room table to do some writing for the project," he says of Ayers, a gifted writer and editor. In Rudd's "acknowledgments" section, he thanks his agent, Jane Dystel, who was Obama's agent as well. To complete this left wing cluster back scratch, Obama thanks Dystel, but, understandably, not Ayers.

    Not surprisingly, given his inputs, Barack Obama has embraced a vaguely Marxist, post-colonial view of the capitalist enterprise. In the 2004 preface to Dreams, written after his keynote speech at the Democratic convention, he describes an ongoing "struggle -- between worlds of plenty and worlds of want." America, he implies, prospers only at the expense of the rest of the world, a zero-sum fallacy common among those who refuse to understand the way free enterprise works.

    "I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago's South Side," Obama continues. When the powerless strike back, the powerful respond with "a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware."

    By equating Chicago with the third world Obama endorses the link between racism and imperialism, the presumed motive for America's involvement in Vietnam. Later in the book, he makes this point more explicitly when he talks about righteous insurrections in "Soweto or Detroit or the Mekong Delta." For the left, racism at home parallels imperialism abroad, one or both of which must inevitably underwrite the capitalist adventure.

    To be fair, the "Detroit" and "Mekong Delta" references -- the whole preface for that matter -- are more likely to have come from Bill Ayers' pen than Obama's, but if so, Obama surely felt comfortable with Ayers' conclusions. And from all evidence, even after eight months as president, he still seems to accept the left's relentless, anti-capitalist, anti-American agitprop as "knowledge."

    Whether it is "too big" for Obama to handle only time will tell.


    Christopher A Gower, PhD., "Legitimate Power"
    Nationally Syndicated Talk-Show Host, The Liberty Now Network

  • Date / Time:

    Beware the Counter-revolution, Beware!

    The left is already telegraphing its strategy to discredit the town hall movement. Conservatives must wise up and use a little jiujitsu of our own. After all the purpose of the congressional break is to hear the concerns and dissent of the constituency. Our very foundation was consumated in revolutionary and spirited dissent.

    It is important to note from the start that the struggle between liberty and socialism will never end, at least not in our lifetimes. If by chance it does, it will be because evil has triumphed. As long as people are free to make their own choices, some of those choices will always be for self-destruction or slavery (moral masochism). That is just the nature of human beings. However, once the slavery of socialism is self-imposed through trickery or stealth, there are no more choices. That is the weakness of a free people. The weakness of socialism is that it cannot be revealed for what it truly is until it is too late to stop it. Like all things evil, it cannot stand the light of day.

    The reason I say that the struggle will never end is that no matter how many times it is beaten back, the socialist left keeps returning. It is relentless. When their evil intent is revealed, the leftists retreat and then re-package it in different wrapping paper. Socialized medicine becomes Hillarycare becomes ObamaCare. Healthcare is a right for everyone, they say. Who would dare oppose that? Environmentalism( which by the way has nothing to truly do with either of the following ) becomes global warming becomes climate change. Who could be against saving the planet? The weakness of a free people is exploited.

    The problem for these strategies is that once people have had a chance to examine the packages, they are discovering that they are Trojan horses. They do not save the planet nor provide quality healthcare for all Americans. Their sole purpose is to dramatically expand the power of the government over its citizens, providing the potential for complete enslavement.

    Americans are finally waking up to this fact, albeit almost too late. They are angry. They have been misled. Surprising the socialist left with their ferocity, they are storming into town hall meetings and confronting their dishonest legislative representatives. Hypocrisy is being exposed. We have taken the high ground and are on the offensive. Is it time to high-five each other and celebrate our victory?

    Au contraire, mon frère (as George Carlin would say). We are facing the most ruthless and power-hungry government in American history. They have the most effective and dedicated propaganda arm the world has ever known, i.e. the misnomered "mainstream" media. They are changing the face of America surreptitiously through an unelected and completely uncontrolled group of leftist radicals (including an avowed Communist) known as "Czars". Congress has been relegated to the status of "useful idiots". The government commands the powerful thuggish shadow armies of ACORN and SEIU, with the intent of forcibly drafting millions of our kids, brainwashing them, and inducting them into a third shadow army, AmeriCorps.

    Do you really believe that the next elections in 2010 and particularly 2012 will be the solution to the current socialist infestation? Do you think that people who are as addicted to power as Obama, Emmanuel, and Axelrod will passively accept their ouster in a fair general election? After fighting the good fight, will they gracefully withdraw from power?

    This administration currently controls the census, which can initiate creation of additional congressional districts in liberal areas of the country based on their populations as counted by leftist community organizers. The left dominates election committees and polling volunteers. If they decide to sabotage voting machines or vote tabulation software or servers, who will provide the oversight to prevent them from doing so? They run the largest organized voter fraud organization in the world (except for perhaps Iran) a.k.a. ACORN. Who knows what "October surprises" they have planned? Will we see the New Black Panther Party more actively menacing voters at the polls, since the Obama administration refuses to prosecute this voter intimidation?

    Leftists do not see election fraud or other dirty tactics as illegal, immoral, or unethical. This is because the socialist agenda is for the good of the nation, a noble cause to promote and protect at any cost. In other words, the ends justify the means. In the final analysis, it is difficult to predict what they are capable of. The rules don't apply to them. We can only study the actions of other socialist leaders such as Lenin, Stalin, Castro, and Chavez, and make assumptions.

    Not so confident now, are you? In reading the comments sections of National Review and other conservative websites, you can observe that the anger of the commenters is palpable and rising. People feel trapped and threatened. The natural temptation to turn to violence must be resisted.

    Violence is the very tactic that the left is prepared for. The Southern Poverty Law Center released a report several days ago indicating that right-wing militias and hate groups are on the rise and threatening insurrection. This is essentially a recycled article that is trotted out by the SPLC with each new presidential administration, citing many of the same tired anecdotal examples such as Ruby Ridge and Waco's Branch Davidians as evidence of growing violence.

    The only thing new in the piece is blaming the supposed increase in extremist activity on alleged racism toward a black president. No evidence to support this contention was presented, however. Nonetheless, many news outlets, including Associated Press and CBS News, picked up the story and sensationalized it. A quote from the article states, "All it's lacking is a spark". All that is missing in this leftist wishful fantasy is another Timothy McVeigh. If he doesn't show up on his own, someone may create him. They would love nothing better than capturing a group of violent "right-wing crazies" on video committing some atrocity.

    However it's done, the entire right side of the political spectrum will be implicated, tarred with the same brush. The goal will be to shut down all dissent through intimidation, justified by righteously proclaiming a war on domestic terrorism. Conservative conversation will be squelched as "hate speech". Talk radio, internet blogs, Fox News commentators, Tea Parties, and any other conservative outlets of communication or assembly will be forcibly eliminated under the guise of protecting public safety. The "mainstream" media will joyfully cooperate in this endeavor, and anyone identified as a conservative politician will be vilified and transformed into an instant pariah. Game over, they win.

    What is the answer? I like to use the karate analogy. There are two styles of karate, hard and soft. Hard karate is employed by the more powerful fighter, using his size and strength like a bull to overwhelm his opponent. In soft karate, the fighter uses the opponent's size and strength against him. It is more stealthy and graceful. It is the matador. The opponent is defeated by finesse rather than brute force.

    We need to study the weaknesses of our opponents, and capitalize on their mistakes (and there are currently many). The Obama administration is tripped up when they accidently reveal their true agenda. These mistakes need to be "picked, frozen, and personalized" (Alinsky's rule #12).

    Another example is the "Obama Joker" poster that mysteriously appeared around LA and elsewhere. It was a very clever and creative means of passive resistance that delivered a powerful message. Although, as Sonia Sotomayor says, I don't endorse this tactic.

    That's great, you may say, but there's really no way I can personally apply the soft karate method to the fight against American socialism. Again, au contraire, mon frère. There is a golden opportunity rapidly approaching for us to peacefully assemble in massive numbers and demonstrate our resolve to oppose the pure evil of socialist enslavement. It is the 09.12.09 March on Washington.

    This is perfect timing, as the Senate will potentially be voting on Obamacare later in September. In a truly Orwellian move, Obama is scheduled to make a major announcement concerning expansion of AmeriCorps on September 11.

    I will be there, and I hope to see tens of thousands of other Americans there, as well. Please repost this everywhere you possibly can. It is probably one of the most important things you will ever do.

    Christopher A Gower, PhD., "Legitimate Power"
    Nationally Syndicated Talk-Show Host, The Liberty Now Network 

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