Al Jazeera news coming to a TV near you?

I would watch Al-Jezeera because I am specializing in Middle Eastern studies and plan on continuing for my graduate studies and I need to know what's going on in that part of the world so I can get a job as a researcher.

 

I used to get the Worldlink.org channel...also called Link TV...I really miss the news they would show (a lot of it was al jezzeera)..it was actual reporting instead of these American idiots who showboat and turn the news into programs to express their own opinions.

 

Trying to use the merchant marine tax from 1798 to justify as Constitutional the federal government fining the general public for not buying healthcare is stretching the imagination to the extreme. What happened with the merchant marine was a payroll tax, which is very different than fining the general public for not buying something.

If you look at the way the U.S. Supreme Court justified its ruling that supports the healthcare mandate, it deliberately avoided interpreted it as a fine for not buying something because it knew that such a thing was unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court instead interpreted the mandate as essentially a tax, much like the merchant marine tax, because that is Constitutional. That's the only way the Court could have supported the mandate without being unconstitutional.

With its vague fuzzy interpretation of the Commerce Clause, the U.S. Supreme Court essentially gave the Congress the power to raise taxes on the general public without explicitly raising taxes. The Congress can now fine people for not buying something that is claimed as involving interstate commerce because the Supreme Court has interpreted such use of the Commerce Clause as a tax. The members of Congress can now use this approach to raise taxes without explicitly going on the public record as voting in another tax increase, which is pleasurable for them.

It would have been Constitutional and made more sense for the Supreme Court to hand the healthcare bill back to the Congress and tell it to fund it with a tax increase. There wasn't any compelling reason why it couldn't have been financed that way. It wasn't as if there was no remedy available and there were critical time constraints. Instead, the SC handed the Congress new powers for raising taxes that are not in the Constitution.

 

If anything good can be salvaged from the SC ruling, it's that its interpretation of the mandate as being a tax makes details about the funding subject to the budget reconciliation process of the Congress. That makes the financing open to some debate and constraints regarding how much money the general public can be fined by the federal government for not buying something (what the SC interpreted as a tax).

 

off topic post in a 2 year old thread... lol

 

OP: Last Activity: 03-14-2011 05:04 PM

 

The US watches everything everybody does.

I prefer Al Jazeera and BBC to CNN, MSNBC and Fox.