Ray Harvey

Tad the bartender: Did they shoot your horse?

Tom Reagan: If there’s any justice.

— Miller’s Crossing (1989)

Well, thank goodness, there is still some, Tom.

This Monday, January 31st, 2011, U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson became the second judge to officially recognize the painfully obvious: namely, that forcing people to buy health insurance is unconstitutional.

Judge Vinson ruled that the reform law’s so-called “individual mandate” went “too far” in requiring that Americans start buying health insurance in 2014 or pay a penalty, stating furthermore:

“Because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void. This has been a difficult decision to reach, and I am aware that it will have indeterminable implications.”

Difficult decision? Seriously? This is a no-brainer.

Today was a small victory for my favorite lady, and yet Judge Vinson — who was so overwhelming correct in his ruling — makes me nervous with his equivocal language, leading to the real question:

How could any sane person actually believe that government possesses legitimate authority to force me or anyone to buy health insurance?

My salad days, when I was green in judgment, cold in blood …

– William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606)

The following might be a little difficult for you to swallow, but I make no apologies: here at rayharvey.org we aim to pulverize all the myths, one slab of baloney at a time.

My good friend Dave (“The Cock”) Cochrane, from across the pond, was kind enough to send me this article, which recently appeared in the Daily Mail Online:

With great fanfare, it was reported last week that the current health advice about eating five portions of fruit and vegetables a day is outdated, and that scientists now believe that eight portions is more beneficial.

While many people grumbled about how on earth they would manage those extra portions, I ­allowed myself a wry smile.

For more than two years I’ve known that the ‘five-a-day’ mantra we’re all so familiar with is nothing but a fairytale.

Of course, they are tasty, colourful additions to any meal. But in terms of health and nutrition, fruit and veg have little to offer, and telling us to eat eight portions a day is compounding one of the worst health fallacies in recent history.

Surprised? Many people will be, and no doubt some dieticians and nutritionists will reject my arguments. But science backs me up.

The latest findings come from a European study into diet and health looking at 300,000 people in eight countries.

It found that people who ate eight or more portions of fresh food a day had a 22 per cent lower chance of dying from heart disease. Yet just 1,636 participants died during the study from heart disease, which is about half of one per cent.

Out of that very small proportion, fewer people died from the group that ate more fruit and veg.

However, the researchers cautioned that these people may have healthier lifestyles generally. They may be less likely to smoke; they may eat less processed food; they may be more active.

What we should not do is to make the usual bad science leap from association to causation and say ‘eating more fruit and veg lowers the risk of dying from heart disease’.

This survey comes not long after another large study, which examined half a million people over eight years, reported that fruit and veg offer no protection against breast, prostate, bowel, lung or any other kind of tumour. Those eating the most fruit and veg showed no difference in cancer risk compared with those ­eating the least.

So how have we been duped for so long?

You might assume our five-a-day ­fixation is based on firm evidence. But you’d be wrong.

It started as a marketing campaign dreamt up by around 20 fruit and veg ­companies and the U.S. National Cancer Institute at a meeting in California in 1991. And it’s been remarkably successful.

People in 25 countries, across three continents, have been urged to eat more greens, and have done so in their millions, believing it was good for them.

No doubt it was set up with the best intentions — to improve the health of the nation and reduce the incidence of cancer. But there was no evidence that it was doing us any good at all.

Read the full article here.

And remember: It’s an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers.

Government, as everyone knows, holds a monopoly on education in this country, and because of that monopoly, our publicly funded schools operate at a dismal standard — and they do so, moreover, with complete impunity. The following story is for all those who never tire of telling me how great our public institutions are; how we couldn’t live without them; how a fully free society could not possibly provide fire departments, post offices, roads, and schools.

A crime has been committed here, but not by Kelley Williams-Bolar.

On the contrary, she and her daughter are the victims of this absurd malefaction. Watch:

Food-and-drink maven Kristin Mastre just wrote a gorgeous review of the Corzo tequila dinner Ace Gillett’s recently put on, the cocktails for which I crafted especially for the event.

Here’s an excerpt of her review:

When I first discovered that Ace Gillett’s was hosting a tequila pairing dinner, my heart fluttered with excitement. Not only was this a time to enjoy a night of excellence – delectable food from talented Chef Troy Heller and remarkable cocktails from Ray Harvey, the best bartender in Fort Collins – it was also a time to indulge in a bit of luxury, drinking the most lavish tequila from Corzo.

Do yourself a favor and read the full review, complete with photos, at her Feasting Fort Collins website.

No shit.

The only real question here is this: what took you liberals so long to figure it out?

And, make no mistake, Evan Thomas is a liberal — about as liberal as they come, as a matter of fact, once even uplifting his hero Barack to the status of a deity.

From The Daily Caller:

“It ain’t because of Congress,” Thomas said. “The unemployment will go down a little bit but the game in Washington will still be this unreal game. Health care though – I got to say, is one place where I think where Republicans are right.”

Back in November 2009, Thomas admitted the health care reform bill had flaws, but still voiced his support for it. Now he has proclaimed it a failure.

“The health care bill is a disaster,” Thomas continued. “We’re sort of slowly learning – it’s not working. It’s interesting – they’re implementing it and it’s not working out at all as people anticipated. There’s all sorts of wildly wrong projections. As it’s being practiced – it’s failed.”

Read the full article here.

Watch the video here:

Pam Bondi is the attorney general of Florida. In the latest edition of the Wall Street Journal (January 5, 2011), she wrote the following article, which is a rather remarkable article that I think should be read by every American who believes that (a) government has legitimate authority to force each of us to pay for one other’s healthcare; and (b) that congress acted lawfully in the methods used to pass that abortion known as ObamaCare:

This week begins the inauguration and swearing-in ceremonies for newly elected officials all over the country. One thing many of us have in common is that the voters rewarded us for our outspoken opposition to ObamaCare.

The electorate’s decisive rejection of the Obama administration’s policies reveals a pervasive concern over the federal government’s disregard of fundamental aspects of our nation’s Constitution. No legislation in our history alters the balance of power between Washington and the states so much as ObamaCare does.

The tactics used to pass the health-care bill gave all Americans ample warning of the constitutional wrongdoing that was about to occur. Concerns were raised in the summer of 2009 over the constitutionality of the individual mandate and other portions of the bill, yet the president and Congress proceeded full-steam ahead. In the Senate, the much-ridiculed “Cornhusker Kickback” gave Nebraska an all-expenses-paid Medicaid expansion program. Due to public pressure, the provision was eventually removed from the final law.

Following Senate passage, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to “deem-and-pass” the federal health-care bill, a constitutionally suspect procedure of passing a bill without actually voting on it. Instead, the speaker allowed the House to vote on the Senate version of the bill without amendments, and Congress subsequently used a parliamentary maneuver called budget reconciliation to “fix” the flawed bill [emphasis mine]. In the end, not a single Republican voted for the legislation.

Unwilling to acquiesce to such a blatantly unconstitutional act, Florida and 19 other states challenged the new law and its requirement that nearly every American purchase health insurance. The lawsuit is based on the common sense notion that an individual’s decision not to purchase health insurance is not an act of “commerce” that can be regulated under Congress’s constitutionally enumerated powers. Unsurprisingly, the Obama administration has invoked shifting and contradictory arguments in its efforts to defend the indefensible.

The U.S. Department of Justice first argued that the fine triggered by noncompliance with the individual mandate was not a penalty but a tax authorized by the Constitution’s Taxing and Spending Clause—hoping no one noticed President Obama’s claim on national television that the individual mandate is “absolutely not a tax.” The Justice Department continued to press this tax argument despite the fact that Congress referred to the individual mandate as a “penalty,” excluded it from the bill’s revenue-raising section, and claimed the Commerce Clause as the constitutional authority to pass it.

The federal judge presiding over the states’ lawsuit in Pensacola, Fla., got it right when he wrote: “Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing, after which the defenders of that legislation take an ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ tack and argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely.”

The Department of Justice has even argued that the individual mandate regulates the so-called commerce-related activities of “mental processes” and “economic decisions.” It doesn’t matter if a person is currently engaged in an activity affecting commerce, according to the Justice Department, but only that a person inevitably will. Gaining little traction with this thought-equals-action argument, the Justice Department pivoted and claimed that the individual mandate is “essential” for this kind of health-care reform. The Constitution grants Congress only specific powers—it does not empower Congress to pursue its policy objectives by any means necessary.

As new state attorneys general take office in the coming week, I fully expect an increase in the ranks of the states fighting ObamaCare in court. Our lawsuit, together with a similar lawsuit filed by Virginia’s attorney general, has exposed the health-care law’s threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional structure that the Founders designed as a means of protecting that liberty. The stakes are clear and compelling: If the courts deem the federal health-care law to be constitutional, then there are no meaningful constitutional restraints on Congress’s power to regulate virtually every facet of our lives.
(Link)

Here, though, is what I’d really like to know from all defenders of socialized medicine:

Upon whose authority or upon what authority do you justify the wild notion that a group of bureaucrats possesses legitimate power to force me to pay for your healthcare? Says who? And why?

The following site is called the Warmlist, and it has rather painstakingly tracked all the effects actually attributed to global warming climate change “climate chaos.” It will either make you laugh or cry, one or the other:

Click-Click

For all you folks still on the climate chaos bandwagon, please tell us what you’re thinking, and why you’re thinking it.