our country's most prominent civil/left-libertarian finally finds a president who scares him...guess who?

From Nat Hentoff in Jewish World Review...

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

The members of that ultimate federal board will themselves not have examined or seen the patient in question....This end-of-life consultation has been stripped from the Senate Finance Committee bill because of democracy-in-action town-hall outcries but remains in three House bills. A specific end-of-life proposal is in draft Section 1233 of H.R. 3200, a House Democratic health care bill that is echoed in two others that also call for versions of "advance care planning consultation" every five years — or sooner if the patient is diagnosed with a progressive or terminal illness.

...the Obama administration claims these fateful consultations are "purely voluntary."

Hentoff then favorably quotes Charles Lane, a Washington Post reporter, who says "purely voluntary" means "not unless the patient requests one".

From there, Hentoff quotes Wesley J. Smith, another reporter, from his recent book on the topic:

"Remember that legislation itself is only half the problem with Obamacare. Whatever bill passes, hundreds of bureaucrats in the federal agencies will have years to promulgate scores of regulations to govern the details of the law....This is where the real mischief could be done because most regulatory actions are effectuated beneath the public radar."