While subsidies in the law will shield some people, other consumers who make too much for assistance are in for “premium rate shock,” Mark Bertolini, who runs the third-biggest U.S. health-insurance company, told analysts yesterday at a conference in New York. The prospect has spurred discussion of having Congress delay or phase in parts of the law, he said.
“We’ve shared it all with the people in Washington and I think it’s a big concern,” the CEO said. “We’re going to see some markets go up as much as as 100 percent.”
The poll asked respondents, “President Obama has said he will not negotiate with Republicans on cuts to entitlement programs, including Medicare, until they agree to raise tax rates on the wealthy. Do you think he is right or wrong to insist on that as a precondition to broader negotiations?”
As Bloomberg reported in its story, 58 percent percent of respondents indicated that the president was “right” to insist on the precondition, while 37 percent said he was “wrong.”
But in the same poll, American adults were asked “whether it is better to raise the top tax rate the wealthy pay, or to limit the amount people can claim in tax breaks, such as mortgage interest and charitable contributions, so they end up paying tax on a bigger share of their income.”
Fifty-two percent responded that they preferred limited tax breaks to a tax-rate hike.
[Political Arena Editor’s Note – The tax reform to eliminate some deductions and loop holes that tend to favor the richest players with the most political influence is the Boehner (Republican) plan. Bloomberg News did not report that according to their own poll, more people favored the Republican tax plan.]
Only 39 percent said they would rather see tax rates on the wealthy increase. Nine percent indicated they weren’t sure.
The Bloomberg News story quoted the president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the survey, saying the results indicated that Republicans and Speaker of the House John Boehner should yield to the president.
Judicial Watch achieved a significant legal victory last week – and it may lead to cleaner elections. On December 10, 2012, the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Indianapolis Division, denied Indiana’s motion to dismiss our historic election integrity lawsuit (Judicial Watch, et al. v. King, et al. (No. 1:12-cv-00800)). We allege that the state of Indiana failed to maintain clean voter registration lists as required by the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), and now we will have our day in court. Make no mistake, this is a HUGE victory for election integrity. True the Vote, the grassroots clean elections watchdog, is both our client and co-plaintiff in this important lawsuit.
The State of Indiana had feebly offered the argument that Judicial Watch did not have standing to bring the lawsuit and, therefore, could not sue Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson and Indiana Election Division Directors J. Bradley Kind and Trent Deckard in their official capacity. But Judge Lawrence was having none of it, and ruled that the lawsuit can proceed in its entirety.
By way of review, this case began on February 6, 2012, when Judicial Watch notified Indiana election officials by letter that the state was in violation of the NVRA, having failed to clean its voter records to the extent that “the number of persons registered to vote exceeded the total voting population in twelve Indiana counties.”
The Judicial Watch letter also requested that the State of Indiana make available for public inspection all records concerning “the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency” of official lists of eligible voters, per Section 8 of the NVRA.
And what was the state’s reply? Indiana election officials summarily dismissed these concerns about the rolls and flatly refused to produce documents about this issue. And so, on June 11, 2012, Judicial Watch filed suit, leading to our recent court victory.
In its denial of the motion to dismiss, the District Court first ruled that the Judicial Watch and True the Vote had sufficiently fulfilled NVRA notification requirements, stating, “[T]he Court finds that the Letter satisfied the pre-suit notice requirement, inasmuch as the Letter, when read as a whole, makes it clear that Judicial Watch is asserting a violation of the NVRA and plans to initiate litigation if its concerns are not addressed in a timely fashion.”
In denying the defendants’ allegation that Judicial Watch and True the Vote did not have standing to sue, the court ruled that Judicial Watch “has satisfied this burden by alleging that its members who are registered to vote in Indiana are injured by Indiana’s failure to comply with the NVRA list maintenance requirements.” True the Vote, the court ruled, “has suffered injuries because of the Defendants alleged failure to comply with the NVRA and therefore has standing to bring its List Maintenance Claim.”
Needless to say, this is a major victory for the people of Indiana and everyone who values the integrity of the ballot box nationwide. Indiana’s election officials who shirked their responsibility to maintain clean voter registration lists have been put on notice that their lackadaisical attitude is no longer acceptable. This victory should put other states on notice that they need to take reasonable and responsible steps to remove dead and ineligible voters from the rolls. The Obama Justice Department has been AWOL on this issue so we will stand in the gap for election integrity. Actually, it’s worse than that. (The Department of Justice has, at times, behaved more like an enemy combatant against election integrity.)
The “true socialism” argument is what every would be tyrant (or useful idiot) says for the excuse of every human atrocity that has resulted from experiments in socialism and a state run economy.
“For out of such an ungoverned populace one is usually chosen as a leader, someone bold and unscrupulous who curries favor with the people by giving them other men’s property. To such a man the protection of public office is given, and continually renewed. He emerges as a tyrant over the very people who raised him to power.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, in De Republica
The Founders warned of just this very type of leader in the Federalist Papers; as did Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America.
Here is famed Hollywood Screen writer Andrew Klavan explaining de Tocqueville warning:
The elite media does a lousy job reporting the civil rights violations that happen almost every day in our public schools. Civil rights organizations such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, the Alliance Defense Fund, the Rutherford Institute, the Student Press Law Center, and more have so many complaints of abuse that they have have no hope of acting upon them all.
We report on a few of the most outrageous cases here, and we spend a lot of time on this issue, but in truth we barely scratch the surface of the problem, as the problem is just that that big.
Bureaucrats, and unfortunately that includes some school administrators seem to have the ability to make the most outrageous behavior sound reasonable. Even now the school principal insists that the school was within its rights (to stick their hands in a boys underwear, not tell the parents, and take the 4th Amendment and toss it out the window) to conduct the strip search. I suspect that the courts are going to give the school a rude awakening. But even so, the administrators won’t be punished, the tax payer will just have to pay the damages and the administrators will just go on violating students.
Notice what national news outlet is reporting this story?
Parents’ outrage as school strip searches a 10-year-old boy to find a ‘stolen’ $20 bill that was actually in the cafeteria
North Carolina parents are outraged after an assistant principal strip-searched a 10-year-old boy to find a $20 bill the student didn’t even have.
Union Elementary School assistant principal Teresa Holmes is named in a complaint filed against the school, alleging that she made a young boy strip down to his underwear.
She suspected fifth-grader Justin Cox of having the missing $20 and when he didn’t turn it over she demanded he remove his socks, shoes, pants, and shirt so that a manual search could be done.
Holmes defended herself, saying that other students and faculty had said that the money was missing and that Cox had dived under a table for it.
Holmes told Cox he ‘he left her no choice and that she had to search him,’ according to court records.
She then told him she was ‘within her legal rights to do so.’
The complaint against Holmes states that Cox was deprived of his constitutional rights barring unreasonable search and seizure.
According to court documents, Cox had gone under a lunch table after money a passing girl had dropped. Holmes returned the cash to the girl, and afterwards was told that there was still $20 missing.
When confronted, Cox told her he didn’t have it.
Ordered into her office with a custodian to act as a witness, Holmes went so far as to put her fingers inside the waistband of his underwear and run her fingers on his bare torso.
She explained she had the authority to search him ‘because teachers and students thought Justin had the money.’
But another teacher came into the office to announce that the money was ‘miraculously’ found on the cafeteria floor.
Now keep in mind that we were promised that the government would eventually make a profit in the deal just as we did when Reagan fixed the S&L crisis. We aren’t even getting cheaper cars out of the deal, unless of course you consider the government subsidized Chevy Volt that nobody wants and the taxpayers are took a shellacking on.
GM would have been fine if the government just stayed out of it, they would have reorganized with creditor protection form the courts just like every other company has who has gone through this process legitimately. Of course if that happened GM would have broke the over-reaching union who gives hundreds of millions in campaign money to Democrats. Anyone want a Twinkie?
The American taxpayers stand to lose billions as General Motors today announced a plan to buy back 40 percent of the company owned by the federal government.
“The Detroit automaker said it will purchase 200 million shares of GM stock held by Treasury for $5.5 billion — or $27.50 per share — nearly $2 above the stock’s closing price on Tuesday,” the Detriot News reports.
However, the break even price — the price that GM would need to pay for each share in order to pay back the money the government put in to the company —was $53 a share. That number has now risen dramatically.
“As a result of GM’s buy back, the government has recovered about $28.6 billion of its $49.5 billion GM bailout, which means it will most likely lose billions when selling its remaining shares,” MLive.com reports. “The government would need to sell its remaining shares at a price of $69.72 to break even. That’s up more than $15 from earlier this year, when the U.S. Treasury would have to sell its 500 million remaining shares at about $53 per share.”
The U.S. Treasury initially owned nearly 61 percent of GM as part of the auto bailout, which forced the automaker and crosstown rival Chrysler through a government-backed bankruptcy.
The Obama administration completely exited Chrysler last year after recovering $11.2 billion of its $12.5 billion bailout to the Auburn Hills-based automaker.
“If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, and the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 – establishes the repeated, complete, and inevitable failure of gun laws to control crime.”
–Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah)
Quoted from “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms, Report of the Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, February 1982, p. vii.”
Liberal activists stopped new laws in Connecticut that could have helped Adam Lanza get the mental help he needed…..
[Political Arena Editor’s Note: Before we get onto the the disturbing details, this very writer has a great deal of experience in helping treating a schizophrenic. I have pretty much seen it all. As well as read the articles, dealt with good doctors and as well as the bad ones who just “don’t get it”. I have dealt with the insurance issues, legal issues and the social issues of it. As much as any non MD can be I am an expert.
With that said, I was lucky in that most of the time mine wanted treatment because she was getting the “Clive Barker” treatment behind her eyes and that scared her. Some patients resist treatment which is a mistake. The legal system must back parents up and help the patient even if it is against their wishes. D.J. Jaffe has a GREAT editorial about changes in the law that can help such patients – LINK ]
There is little doubt that not only was Adam Lanza partially autistic, (Asperger’s syndrome – this disorder has no history of causing violence), he also suffered from extreme depression and/or schizophrenic disorder as he fits the profile like a glove.
What is schizophrenia?
It is not multiple personality disorder as is so often shown on television. Schizophrenia acts to change how your brain perceives what the five senses tell it. The signals to the brain intermix the schizophrenic’s perception of reality with ones own imagination and even memories such as what one has seen in a movie.
What the schizophrenic sees, feels, and hears sometimes becomes a jumble. At other times one can hallucinate and/or hear voices. Those with schizophrenia have a hard time relating with others because they misperceive the nonverbal cues that are so crucial in interpersonal communication. If the disorder is pronounced enough the direct verbal cues may also be misperceived.
The mind tries to make order out of the chaos. The mind does not wish to accept their condition so the schizophrenic invents elaborate conspiracies to attempt to rationalize and make order out of the chaos they are perceiving. Since schizophrenic events are often accompanied with a cognitive skills impact the conspiracies do not seem too outlandish to one so affected.
Most normal people can look at a problem of moderate complexity and come to the same conclusion. The schizophrenic will come to a different, completely irrational conclusion, and if you don’t agree with them YOU must be crazy, because to them it is so obvious. For Example:
Three plus seven is 18 and I can prove it by counting the clouds outside. If you can’t see that than you are either an effing idiot or a liar.
The unfortunate truth is that for those so affected such as Jarrod Loughner, who perpetrated the Gabby Giffords shooting in Arizona, in his schizophrenic mind he had to shoot Giffords and her party because reason demanded it.
In more severe cases the schizophrenic may hear voices, see people who aren’t there and have conversations with them that are as real to them as can be. For some schizophrenics the life they live behind their own eyes is like a Clive Barker horror movie that they can never escape from without treatment.
Those who get the help can usually be treated with the proper medication. Those who do not usually try to self medicate with drugs or alcohol to try to cope.
To compound the problem, there are a great many family doctors who simply “don’t get” schizophrenia and I have personally encountered a staff psychiatrist at a hospital who could not comprehend the condition. Why? Largely because of “Normalcy Bias”. In a nutshell, those with “Normalcy Bias” apply their ability to reason to everyone else and assume that simply because the person with the bias can make out the situation with relative ease, that the schizophrenic patient must also, so therefore the patient is just lying, or acting out for attention etc. They will ask things like, “Well if you heard things then how come you don’t now” and “you are all better now you faker?” Those with schizophrenia and associated conditions have episodes where the problem is much worse, and much better. Stress can bring about a psychotic episode even over the effects of medication.
As in the case of Jarrod Loughner, the signs were there, lots of people including parents, teachers, administrators and even police saw them and yet, no one took the appropriate action.
The UK Daily Mail published a quite complete bio of Adam Lanza that shows that he fit the profile of someone with a schizophrenic or similar disorder. Here are excerpts:
Crazed killer Adam Lanza was a ‘ticking time bomb’ who suffered from Asperger’s Syndrome and was painfully shy and awkward, former classmates said yesterday.
Last night, a troubling portrait began to emerge of the ‘Goth’ loner, who dressed all in black and was obsessed with video games.
Goth like “death music” with theses about rejection, suicide, and the horrors of the world seem appealing to schizophrenics as in some ways it is how they perceive their own world. Some video games are popular with schizophrenics because in them they can have some control over their reality and create dramatic scenarios , again, in which unlike in the real world, they have some control.
Others say Lanza used to be a mild-mannered student in high school, making the honor roll, and living with his mother, Nancy Lanza, who in turn loved playing dice games and decorating their upscale home for the holidays.
‘No one is surprised. He always seemed like he was someone who was capable of that because he didn’t really connect with our high school, with our town.’
Another former school friend, Jamie Crespo, 19, said: ‘He used to hang with the freaks, guys who dressed in trench coats.’
Other students remember him walking through school dressed in black, carrying a black briefcase.
Family friends said Lanza’s problems started to escalate when his parents divorced in 2008 after 18 years together.
His father Peter, a wealthy executive for General Electric, who is believed to earn $1 million a year, moved out of the family home in 2006, citing ‘irreconcilable differences’.
One of Lanza’s former classmates spoke of his ‘noticeable decline’ after his parents’ divorce. ‘He was a loner at school and hyper intelligent,’ he said. ‘But in recent years he disappeared off the radar.
‘The word is that he was badly affected when his parents split and that might be what pushed him over the edge.’
‘He was always weird but the divorce affected him. He was arguing with his mother. He was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode.’
In several press accounts, Adam Lanza went from a typical Asperger’s kid, to a dark, more disturbed, more isolated troubled young man. This is typical of those with schizophrenia because it tends to manifest itself after puberty. Stress tends to bring on more psychotic events and makes the condition worse.
A relative to the family said that Adam Lanza was ‘obviously not well,’ adding that he often seemed troubled.
Lanza’s aunt, Marsha Lanza, said her nephew was raised by kind, nurturing parents who would not have hesitated to seek mental help for him if he needed it.
Everyone hesitated including mom and dad. As is so often the case, parents and some relatives just won’t see it. Some are shamed into inaction, some are just too proud to admit that “their offspring is schizo” because of the stigma. Some are simply in denial. “Oh he just had a bad day”, “but he only does that sometimes”, “the stressful situation made him do it”, “no really he is better now (until the next psychotic episode)”, “but what can I do”, “it’s just kids being kids” and “every kid now a days acts strange” are typical rationalities.
How long did mom (who is now dead sadly) hesitate?
Less than a week before her son would launch his horrifying attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School, Nancy Lanza knew “she was losing him” and that “he was getting worse.”
A drinking buddy of Lanza told The Daily News that her son Adam had long been troubled and rarely came up in conversation.
“She just looked down at the glass and said, ‘I don’t know. I’m worried I’m losing him,’” said the bar pal, who did not wish to be named, of the ominous conversation at the bar My Place in Newtown, Conn.
“She said it was getting worse. She was having trouble reaching him.”
Adam, who the coroner’s office said Sunday shot Nancy Lanza, 54, several times in the head before unleashing a nightmarish attack that killed 20 schoolchildren and six others Friday, was prone to hurting himself, the drinking buddy said.
“Nancy told me he was burning himself with a lighter. In the ankles or arms or something,” he recalled of a conversation they had about a year ago. “It was like he was trying to feel something.”
Self mutilation such as cutting and burning actually provide temporary relief to those having psychotic events of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.
Criminal Psychologist Dr. Alan Lipman:The FACT is that every One of these episodes Is proceeded by an undiagnosed mental illness:
Joshua Flashman, 25, who grew up not far from where the shooting took place. Flashman, a U.S. Marine, is the son of a pastor at an area church where many of the victims’ families worship.
“From what I’ve been told, Adam was aware of her petitioning the court for conservatorship and (her) plans to have him committed,” Flashman told FoxNews.com. “Adam was apparently very upset about this. He thought she just wanted to send him away. From what I understand, he was really, really angry. I think this could have been it, what set him off.”
Off the cuff, I do not think this update is true. If it is where is the court petition and where is the attorney? I do think that it is entirely possible that she discussed doing this at one point. However, if Connecticut had an AOT law such as “Laura’s Law” Nancy Lanza would have been able to get Adam Lanza the help he needed with little difficulty. But who is it who actively resists such laws? Read below.
Far Left Groups Defeated Connecticut Mental Health Protection Laws Just Months Before Shooting (Via Jim Hoft):
Here’s a fact you might not know – Connecticut is one of only SIX states in the U.S. that doesn’t have a type of “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT) law (sometimes referred to as “involuntary outpatient treatment”). There’s no one standard for these types of laws, but (roughly speaking) these are laws that allow for people with mental illness to be forcibly treated BEFORE they commit a serious crime. Whereas previous legal standards held that the mentally ill cannot be institutionalized or medicated until they harm someone or themselves, or until they express an immediate intent to do so, AOT laws (again, roughly speaking) allow for preventative institutionalization or forced medication (I highly recommend reading the data cited in the link I provided in this paragraph, especially regarding what is known as “first episode psychosis”).
AOT laws vary state-by-state, and often bear the name of a person murdered by an untreated mentally ill person (“Kendra’s Law” in New York, “Laura’s Law” in California, etc.).
Most states have laws and even a 1-800 mental health hotline and free clinics to help those who are mentally ill. Arizona had such laws and facilities, but not even the local police called the number after they determined that Jarod Loughner had troubles perceiving reality. Loughner, like Lanza should have been forcibly evaluated. If evaluated, Jarrod Loughner would not have been able to buy the weapon that he bought to do his terrible deed as his evaluation would have been reported to the proper authorities.
We have gun laws that work pretty well, but no system works unless the people on the ground take action to put those laws and resources into action.
Those who engage in “Normalcy Bias” when it comes to mental illness have plenty of cover in leftist academia (also via Jim Hoft):
For Your Country posted this back after schizophrenic Jared Loughner went on his shooting rampage in Arizona that left several people dead and US Rep. Gabby Giffords seriously wounded.
It actually very hard to force people with severe mental diseases to be treated because of a range of reforms pushed by progressives starting in the 60′s:
Ronald David Laing, a Scottish Psychiatrist, In the 60′s put forth the foundation of the Anti-Psychiatry movement. He maintained that schizophrenia was “a theory not a fact”. The popularity of Laing’s theories is blamed for decline in students entering the psychology profession.
Kenneth Kesey, wrote “One Flew over the Cukoo’s Nest” based in part on Laing’s thinking (and his own intensive use of drugs). “Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.” The Book,play, and later the movie, portrayed a anti-psychiatry philosophy leading to a public displeasure with residential mental facilities resulting in further deinstitutionalization policies.
As a result of Laing, Kennedy, Kesey and public efforts to transform the mental health care system to be more humane, to characterize mentally ill people as “Just thinking differently”, and characterizing mental health care as some form of evil, we now have a system that makes it virtually impossible to get folks like Loughner the care they need.
Deinstitutionalization policies driven by “do good” liberals and the federal government put focus on limited bad acts. Kesey wrote a story based on his LSD induced observations in one VA mental hospital. Once his story was put into film, his small example falsely characterized the bulk of mental health care as dehumanizing and made it impossible to force the Loughners of the world to get treatment.
Critics will focus on gun control after today’s school massacre. The focus should be on failed liberal policies that excuse rather than assist extremely dysfunctional individuals.
We here at Political Arena are the last to look for government to offer up solutions, but in the case of the mentally ill, most do not have insurance and need state assistance for treatment. Only by education and treatment on a level comparable to that which has been used to combat AIDS will this problem get seriously better.
But What About Guns
Israeli Teacher Protecting Children
[Editor’s Note – While not every teacher in Israel carries a rifle, military personnel, reservists, and those with a gun license may carry a weapon openly in Israel. Israel provides armed security for most of its institutions including schools.]
While there is no question that those who are bent on destruction will often find a way to do so with or without access to firearms, sometimes access to guns, in this case stolen guns from a relative, amplifies the damage a disturbed person can cause.
It is important to examine the big picture. In Switzerland and Israel where guns are everywhere there is very little gun crime and very few mass shootings, but in areas of Europe that have gun control laws that essentially turn the citizens into mere subjects, according to studies by Dr. John R. Lott and others, per capita they have about the same number of deaths via mass shooting as the United States does. In states areas where more citizens carry guns legally there are drops in crime and gun violence in almost every instance. Put simply, criminals and those with ill intent prefer helpless unarmed victims.
In fact, it seems that the Aurora, Colorado Cinemark shooter, aside from being schizophrenic, targeted that particular theater because it had signs up announcing that it was a “Gun Free Zone”.
UPDATE– When Adam Lanza discovered that armed responders were on the scene, that is when the rampage ended – “We surmise that it was during the second classroom episode that he heard responders coming and apparently at that, decided to take his own life,” Mr. Malloy said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Dana Loesch has put together a handy list of sourced and credible statistics about gun crime in general. Notice how violent crime, according to government and academic sources, is much higher in areas where citizens are restricted from using firearms for self defense.
Those with a knee jerk reaction may blame the guns, but do they credit guns with the killing of Osama bin Laden or do they credit the Navy Seals? There is clearly a double standard at play here, and in the case of politicians who know better, the double standard is an agenda driven one.
That agenda is parroted by a liberal elite media which not only focuses on the guns due to their statist ideology, that agenda is also what results in that same elite media not reporting cases where armed citizens prevented mass shooting such as the case of Appalachian Law School, and just two days ago an armed citizen stopped a mall shooting in Portland. When the deranged gunman saw the armed citizen he took cover and then took his own life. When heroic Sandy Brook School principal Dawn Hochsprung lunged at Adam Lanza, she deserved to have the right to lunge at him with something better than a ball point pen.
Many critics are being nakedly political by blaming the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA trains every police firearms instructor and almost every civilian firearms safety instructor in the country. The NRA runs the largest firearm safety program for kids in the country and teaches in many schools. The NRA is also the most powerful political lobby in Washington DC.
Blaming the NRA for this tragedy is like blaming anti-drug war groups for substance abuse and drug overdoses. It really does not get much more irrational than that.
At least one student in Chicago’s public school system is mad as hell. And if the YouTube video posted Thursday by the urban culture website World-Star Hip-Hop is any indication, she’s definitely not going to take it any more.
The video shows a student from a high school on Chicago’s South Side berating a music teacher because, she says, he isn’t teaching students anything despite striking for a week for better wages.
“You went on strike for a whole week to get paid to teach us,” the furious student says. “And now you’re here, and you don’t want to teach. Man, you better teach me something.”
“You get paid, right? I want an education!” she continues. “I refuse to sit in this class and not be taught.”
“Every day I walk out of this class with nothing. Why? Because you don’t do your job,” she yells.
At least it is starting to improve after years of socialized medicine bringing quality down to the gutter. Largely because of the efforts of Prime Minister Harper and his TEA Party brand of economic conservatism have been introducing reforms and partial privatization back into the Canadian Healthcare System.
CALGARY, AB—Patients face a median wait of 17.7 weeks for surgical and other therapeutic treatments in Canada, down from 19.0 weeks in 2011, according to the 22nd annual edition of Waiting Your Turn: Wait Times for Health Care in Canada, released today by the Fraser Institute, Canada’s leading public policy think-tank.
On a national basis, median wait times have hovered between 16 and 19 weeks since 2000, following a marked deterioration in wait times during the 1990s when surgical waits grew steadily from 9.3 weeks in 1993 to 14 weeks in 1999. This year’s median wait of 17.7 weeks is 91 per cent longer than in 1993.
“While wait times have improved since last year, Canadians are still forced to wait more than four months, on average, for medically necessary treatment. Physicians, not to mention patients, consider this unreasonable,” said Nadeem Esmail, Fraser Institute senior fellow and co-author of the report.
This week, Jeffrey Zeints, Deputy Director for Management of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote a letter to Speaker of the House John Boehner in which he pled for a huge chunk of cash, supposedly to help the victims of Hurricane Sandy. “As the impacted region addresses the damage caused by the hurricane,” he wrote, “the Administration believes additional Federal resources are necessary to fund response, recovery, and mitigation efforts.” All in all, the Obama administration asked for $60.4 billion. The letter stated, “the Administration proposes that controls be put in place to ensure that funds are used appropriately to protect against waste, fraud, and abuse.”
They don’t need another set of controls. The request itself is full of waste, fraud, and abuse. Zients’ proposal accompanied the letter. And, among other frivolous propositions, it requested tons of money … for cars. Yes, cars:
$300,000 to replace Secret Service law enforcement vehicles and other equipment;
$855,000 to replace Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicles and other equipment;
$2.4 million to replace destroyed or damaged vehicles and other equipment for the Department of Homeland Security;
$20,000 for the Department of Justice to “repair and replace vehicles”;
$4 million to the FBI to “replace vehicles, laboratory and office equipment, and furniture damaged”;
Another $1 million for the Department of Justice to “repair or replace over 15 vehicles”;
$230,000 to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to replace three vehicles.”
Every appropriations bill these days includes a large cash request for vehicles. That might have something to do with the fact that the government now owns General Motors. No government in history has bought more civilian vehicles than this one. From 2005 to 2011, the Department of Justice, which has a grand total of 114,873 positions, grew its number of vehicles by 12 percent to 40,111. That’s one vehicle for every 2.9 employees. The Department of Homeland Security now has 56,534 vehicles, a 48 percent jump over 2005, to serve 240,000 employees – one vehicle for every 4.2 employees. If you took those cars and lined them up end-to-end, they’d stretch for 308 miles.
Samuel L. Jackson is a very talented actor to be sure, but this is about how his political activism and his actions are exactly the opposite, as is the case with limousine liberals in general.
Jackson sticks up for the most extreme in the Democratic Party, their taxes, the excessive regulation, the union over reach and thuggery, right down the line. But when Jackson wants to make a movie does he make it in Los Angeles where he will pay the taxes, deal with the regulations and pay the union labor with all of their rules? Nope. He goes to Canada so he can make the movie cheaper up there and increase his already ridiculous profits and wealth; all while the working man in America is losing work.
Part of engaging the culture, is bringing culture to the young. Most people under age 35 might have no idea that this lovely Judy Garland was a household name known all over the world. After you hear her sing you will not doubt why.
This is a demonstration of the elaborate type of bullshit that politicians use to confuse people and spread false narratives. Today’s example is from Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.
The thing to keep in mind in all of this: If money is not proposed to be spent or appropriated for XXX then not doing XXX is NOT a spending cut.
For example: Lets say that I make $30,000 a year and I need to go on a budget to help pay my debt. So I say, “I just cut $50,000 from my budget because I am not buying a new Mercedes Benz 500 Convertible”. Has your budget changed? No. Has your savings increased? No. Is more money going to paying your debt? No.
Why? Because you never took out a loan and never was spending money or had money set aside for the Mercedes in the first place. This is the scam you are watching happen before your eyes. And look at the intensity Sec. Geithner uses while he pushes his lie. Then rather than admitting it he starts tossing in distractions about Republicans etc etc.
Do you ever wonder why every politician will tell you that he wants a balanced budget, but we don’t get one, and in fact we get record deficits and spending year after year?
WALLACE: Or they now say because you’re not willing to cut spending enough.
GEITHNER: No, but that’s not true. Again, if they want to do more on the spending side than the $600 billion we proposed on top of the trillion already enacted, in top of the savings from the wars, then they can tell us how they propose –
WALLACE: Savings in the wars that we were never going to fight?
GEITHNER: No, that’s not true. We’re — as you know, we’re winding down two wars.
WALLACE: I understand that.
(CROSSTALK)
WALLACE: And you are thinking savings that nobody thought that you were going to spend that money any way. It’s a budget gimmick, sir.
GEITHNER: No, that’s not right. You know, let me say it this way, those were expensive wars, not just in Americans lives but in terms of the taxpayers’ resources. And when you end them as the president is doing, they reduce our long term deficits and like in the Republican budget proposals, the world should reflect and recognize what that does in savings.
And we propose to use those savings to reduce the deficits and help invest in rebuilding America. We think that makes a lot of sense.
WALLACE: But it was money that wasn’t going to be spent anyway, and –
GEITHNER: If those wars have gone on, they would be spent.
WALLACE: I understand. But you’re not saving — you’re not ending the wars for budget purposes. You’re ending the wars because of a foreign policy decision. The wars weren’t going to be fought. You’re not really saving money.
GEITHNER: Chris, we all agree –
WALLACE: I mean, it’s a budget gimmick, but it’s money never intended to spend.
GEITHNER: No, it’s not a budget gimmick unless you are — when Republicans propose, it’s a budget gimmick?
WALLACE: Sure, absolutely.
GEITHNER: And you should address that to them. But what it does is –
As reported by the Daily Mail, Florida restaurant owner John Metz says he will offset the costs of Obamacare by “adding a five percent surcharge to customers’ bills and will reduce his employees’ hours.”
Obamacare is so filled with senseless mandates, bureaucratic overhead and taxes that it has already driven up the cost of family health insurance by $2,500 a year and this will just get worse as more of Obamacare is implemented.
Obamacare requires businesses or franchises with more than 50 workers must offer an approved insurance plan or pay a penalty of $2,000 for each full-time worker over 30 workers.
The program mandates that only employees working more than 30 hours a week are covered under their employers health insurance plan, chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster are already considering reduced worker hours.
“Obviously, I’d love to cover all our employees under that insurance,” said Metz.
“But to pay $5,000 per employee would cost us $175,000 per restaurant and unfortunately, most of our restaurants don’t make $175,000 a year. I can’t afford it.”
Democrat campaign operatives had tried to paint those businesses reacting to as just a few actors disgruntled by the election and tried to fool people into believing that Obamacare makes healthcare more affordable.
A new web site called The Daily Job Cuts is attempting to catalogue the layoffs and business closings and even though they are making a worthy full time effort to list them all, they are still only able to report a fraction of the actual job losses.
In the last month:
Aside from the evil Papa Johns, Democrat political operatives need to be prepared to also ‘boycott’ these companies who are laying off thousands of people due to Obamacare and associated taxes: Olive Garden, Applebee’s, Red Lobster, Domino’s Pizza, Pizza Hut, Burger King, McDonald’s, Longhorn Steakhouse……
…..Google, Martha Stewart Living, Pepsi, PayPal, Groupon, Best Buy, Cisco Systems, Kraft Foods, Lockheed Martin, Sears, Lexmark, Yahoo!, Dupont, Boeing, Bristol-Myers, Cummins, Smithfield Foods, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, NBC/Universal, American Airlines, United Continental Holdings, JC Penney, Wausau Paper, Procter & Gamble, Texas Instruments, Pierce Manufacturing, Panasonic, Xerox, Citigroup, Atlantic City Casinos, Majestic Star Casino, RIM (Blackberry), Vestas Wind Systems, Utah American Energy, Turkey Point Nuclear Plant FL, United Technologies, Gamesa Energy, Wingspan Portfolio Advisors, Stryker Corp (A big Obama Donor), First Solar, Solel Solar Systems, LuLu Publishing, New Energy Corp, Supervalue (Albertson’s), Dana Corp, American Coal, Gamestop, Commercial Appeal, Patriot Coal, Archer-Daniels-Midland, SAS, CIGNA, 169 Shaws Supermarkets, Judson University, ATI Career Training Centers, …
But boycotting these companies may be tough if you get sick or injured:
Nebraska Medical Center, Northwestern Memorial Hospital, Aveo Oncology, Kaiser Permanente, St Jude Medical, Lawrence & Memorial Hospital, St Lukes Cornwall Hospital, Emanuel Medical Center, GE Healthcare, WPS Health Insurance, Lower Bucks Hospital, United Blood Services Gulf Region, NY Center for Hospice/Palliative Care, CVPH Medical Center, Ameridose, Crouse Hospital Syracuse NY, San Diego Hospice, Glens Falls Hospital NY, Wake Forest Baptist Medical NC, Southwest Vermont Health Care, St Mary’s of Michigan Hospital, Orlando Health (hospitals), Carney Hospital, Good Samaritan Hospital, Englewood Hospital, LSU’s 7 Hospitals, Westchester Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, UMass Memorial Medical Center, NCH Healthcare System, Peace Health, Northwest Community Healthcare, Cooley Dickinson Hospital, E.J. Noble Hospital, Health Alliance of the Hudson Valley, St. Joseph Hospital, St. Josepth Hospital East, Community Memorial Health System, Danbury Hospital, New Milford Hospital, Marian Regional Medical Center, Inland Hospital, Lawrence General Hospital, Blue Hill Memorial Hospital, Hutchinson Regional Medical Center, Gerald Champion Regional Medical Center, St Vincent Health System (hospital), Mercy Health Partners’ Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Jordan Hospital, Brattleboro Retreat (psychiatric hospital), CVPH Medical Center Pittsburg, Western Maryland Regional Medical Center (hospital), Cook Medical.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to boycott Hostess or the closings of 10 Boston area Upper Crust Pizzas, or the 200 Gamestop outlets. All are closing. There are so many closures that we just don’t have the space…
MORE:
Abbott Labs, Activision, Adventist Health, Airlines SAS, AMD, American Cotton Growers, Arcelor Mittal, American Independence Museum, Ameridose, American Airlines, American Coal, Atlantic Lottery Corporation, Assc Milk Producers, Aveo Oncology, Bankia, Bechtel Power Corp, Bigpoint Games, Boston Scientific, Brake Parts, Brattleboro Retreat,
Career Education, Cigna, Commerzbank, Consol Energy in W.V., Covidien, Crouse Hospital Syracuse NY, CVPH, DEP in Tallahassee FL, DuPont, Eagle-Tribune, Emanuel Medical Center, Energizer Holdings, Ericsson, Exide Tech, First Energy, Gameforge Berlin, GenOn Energy Inc, Groupon, GT Advanced Tech, Harris’ Broadcast, Hawker Beechcraft, Hill Rom,
Hills Holdings. HMX Group, Iberia Airlines, ICM of Colwich, ING, Juniper Networks, Kinetic Concepts, Kratos Defense Security, Lightyear Network Solutions, Lonza, Majestic Star Casino, Major Wind Company, Medtronic, Mills Manufacturing NC, Momentive Inc, Monitor Group, Montco Behavioral Health, NBC, Nebraska Medical Center, Neovia Logistics Services, New Energy, Ormet, Panasonic, PayPal, Penn Refrigeration, Penske Logistics, Pepsi, Philips Electronics, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, Research in Motion, Rheem Manufacturing, Sentry Foods, Shaw’s Supermarket, Shawano Foundry WI, Smith & Nephew, Smithfield Packing Co., Southeastern Container, SpaceX, SRA Intl Inc, St. Jude Medical, Sulake, Sun Media, TE Connectivity, TECO Coal Corporation, The Providence Journal Co, TMX Group Ltd., Turbocare, Oce North America, UBS, US Cellular, Volvo Trucks Pulaski County, West Ridge Mine, Westinghouse, World Media Enterprises Inc, WPS Health Insurance, Wright Patterson AFB, Wyodak Coal Mine, Yakima Reg Med Ctr Washington.
Special thanks to C. Steven Tucker for helping me to build this list.
Why is “tax the rich” false narrative not going to lower the deficit but will only lower the economy? Tony Robbins illustrated just how ridiculous the Obama “class warfare” model is in this short film. This is simply devastating…..
So the only way to get a break, is to get favors legislated for you into the tax code. Or have the means to use lawyers and tax accountants to game the system as most possible, which isn’t an option for smaller players. Once again Democrats rig the game to favor the super rich and mega-corps but harm domestic small and medium sized investors, retirement funds and businesses.
Democrats say this is about deficit reduction, but these kinds of taxes harm long term economic growth by making disincentives to invest and risk. Democrats also wish to add in new spending far more than anything they could bring in with new taxes.
The Internal Revenue Service has released new rules for investment income taxes on capital gains and dividends earned by high-income individuals that passed Congress as part of the 2010 healthcare reform law.
The 3.8 percent surtax on investment income, meant to help pay for healthcare, goes into effect in 2013. It is the first surtax to be applied to capital gains and dividend income.
The tax affects only individuals with more than $200,000 in modified adjusted gross income (MAGI), and married couples filing jointly with more than $250,000 of MAGI.
The tax applies to a broad range of investment securities ranging from stocks and bonds to commodity securities and specialized derivatives.
The 159 pages of rules spell out when the tax applies to trusts and annuities, as well as to individual securities traders.
Released late on Friday, the new regulations include a 0.9 percent healthcare tax on wages for high-income individuals.
Both sets of rules will be published on Wednesday in the Federal Register.
The proposed rules are effective starting January 1. Before making the rules final, the IRS will take public comments and hold hearings in April.
Together, the two taxes are estimated to raise $317.7 billion over 10 years, according to a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis released in June.
To illustrate when the tax applies, the IRS offered an example of a taxpayer filing as a single individual who makes $180,000 in wage income plus $90,000 from investment income. The individual’s modified adjusted gross income is $270,000.
The 3.8 percent tax applies to the $70,000, and the individual would pay $2,660 in surtaxes, the IRS said.
The IRS plans to release a new form for taxpayers to fill out for this tax when filing 2013 returns.
The new rules leave some questions unanswered, tax experts said. It was unclear how rental income will be treated under the new rules, said Michael Grace, managing director at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP law firm in Washington.
“The proposed regulations surely will increase tax compliance burdens for individuals,” said Grace, a former IRS official. “There’s clearly some drafting left to be done.”
In the video you will see Democrats complaining that the Republican Party hasn’t offered a health care alternative bill, they are lying. Republicans in the House have offered and passed several bills but Democrats in the Senate refused to even debate them.
Why was our embassy staff in Benghazi allowed to die over the course of seven hours when we had assets in range? Why did Obama order the CIA, the State Department, and the military response teams to stand down while they watched on live video feeds from our drones overhead?
This is one of the best videos Pat Condell has put out.
Radical Islamists are great at playing the victim card when in the minority, but when in the majority they become “aggressive oppressors” as Condell says. .
I will add that I am friends with some Shiia Muslims who escaped the Mullah’s in Iran and they hate the radicals such as Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood.
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
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