Media conservatives divided in reactions to Obama's Cairo address
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Friday, June 05, 2009
Sarah Palin says the government wants to "control people" from Crooks and Liars
http://crooksandliars.com/john-amato/sarah-palin-says-governments-wants-cont
Sarah Palin is on a new jag or an old one actually. She's ranting about some New World Order nonsense and while introducing wingnut radio host Michael Regan in Alaska, told the audience that the government wants to control the lives of "the people."
Via CNN: Alaska governor Sarah Palin let loose Wednesday on the Obama administration for enacting fiscal policies that "fly in the face of principles" and "defy Economics 101."
Palin: We need to be aware of the creation of a fearful population, and fearful lawmakers, being led to believe that big government is the answer, to bail out the private sector, because then government gets to get in there and control it," she said. "And mark my words, this is going to be next, I fear, bail out next debt-ridden states. Then government gets to get in there and control the people.
There's something pretty weird hearing the term "Economics 101," being uttered by Sarah because she showed little knowledge of economics on the campaign trail, but that being said...the right wing constantly is reaching out to the far depths of the conservative movement and are trying to instill more and more fear into that base which will only increase the violence that comes out of those merky depths. "People control," really Sarah? She should stop hanging out with nutty talk show hosts.
Just to help her out a little bit, it was under George Bush and conservative---neocon warhawks that the global financial markets melted down and led us down the path of being "afraid." And wasn't it under her governance that she took money from the oil companies and handed it out to her people?
It should just sit back and let the free market do its thing and, um, dispense the lucre…
In Alaska, where Palin is governor, natural resources are state-owned, and Alaska residents receive yearly dividend checks from a $30 billion state account built largely from oil royalties….
When home fuel and gas costs soared this year, Palin raised taxes on oil companies and used some of the money to boost residents' checks by $1,200. Every eligible man, woman and child got a record $3,269 this fall.
Even the grammar-challenged Governor knows there's word for that kind of redistributive policy. Starts with S.
Bank of America Wins Right To Seize Social Security Benefits To Pay Overdraft Fees [Lawsuits] from Consumerist
The California Supreme Court has effectively reversed a 2004 San Francisco trial court decision that ordered BofA to pay $284.4 million in damages to more than 1.1 million customers. The California Supreme Court ruled that banks can tap Social Security benefits in bank accounts to cover bounced-check fees, a practice consumer advocates say is abusive because Federal law prohibits Social Security benefits from being seized to pay a debt. California law apparently doesn't consider overdraft fees to be debt, so the fee party will be allowed to rock on indefinitely.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
The inspiration behind the new Conan O'Brien set from Home
http://afrojacks.com/pics/4-pics/3159-the-inspiration-behind-the-new-conan-obrien-set
Conan may be getting some heat for dumbing down his new show (so we've heard) but between his super mario background and "no bro for Coco" tweet I'm just not seeing it...
"New iPhone To Be Unveiled Next Week" from iPhone Savior by Mr. Besilly
http://www.iphonesavior.com/2009/06/new-iphone-to-be-unveiled-next-week.html
If you read veteran Wall Street Journal columnist Walt Mossberg's recent Palm Pre review, it's obvious that this longtime Apple fanboy is holding back intimate knowledge of Apple's next-generation iPhone and impending launch date. At one point, Mossberg almost deliberately blurts out a blatant reference that a newly improved iPhone device will be unveiled next week at Apple's WWDC event.
"Whether the Pre is better than the iPhone depends on your personal preferences, though I'd note that the new iPhone to be unveiled next week will have lots of added features that could alter those calculations." Mossberg wrote in his WSJ post.
Mossberg continues to wax on about Pre's features and benefits by way of comparison to the iPhone as he lets more hints slip through the cracks. He points to an iPhone release date within a month which lines up with my own Friday, July 10th prediction for launch. Like a true Apple fanatic even the title to Walt's post includes iPhone in it, "Palm's New Pre Takes On iPhone".
"Unfortunately for Palm, Apple has both a new iPhone operating system and new iPhone hardware coming, likely available within a month, that could obliviate many of these advantages."
"And, although Apple hasn't announced any new hardware features, I expect to see an iPhone with up to 32 gigabytes of memory, video recording, a higher-resolution camera, a compass, and greater operating speed." Source: WSJ
In his Palm Pre video post Mossberg goes onto say that at the WWDC 2009, "There will be changes to the iPhone, not all of which are known." Which sounds like code for "not known" to all of you lowly peasants out there. It's no secret that Walt Mossberg is accustom to getting Apple hardware weeks ahead of any public unveiling. iPhone has been no exception to that rule.
If Mossberg is not currently up close and personal with a private preview copy of "iPhone Video", he will be soon. Very, very soon!
Is Larry Summers Taking Kickbacks From the Banks He’s Bailing Out? from BlackListed News
Wait for it…
Via: AlterNet:
Last month, a little-known company where Summers served on the board of directors received a $42 million investment from a group of investors, including three banks that Summers, Obama's effective "economy czar," has been doling out billions in bailout money to: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, and Morgan Stanley. The banks invested into the small startup company, Revolution Money, right at the time when Summers was administering the "stress test" to these same banks.
A month after they invested in Summers' former company, all three banks came out of the stress test much better than anyone expected — thanks to the fact that the banks themselves were allowed to help decide how bad their problems were (Citigroup "negotiated" down its financial hole from $35 billion to $5.5 billion.)
The fact that the banks invested in the company just a few months after Summers resigned suggests the appearance of corruption, because it suggests to other firms that if you hire Larry Summers onto your board, large banks will want to invest as a favor to a politically-connected director.
Last month, it was revealed that Summers, whom President Obama appointed to essentially run the economy from his perch in the National Economic Council, earned nearly $8 million in 2008 from Wall Street banks, some of which, like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, were now receiving tens of billions of taxpayer funds from the same Larry Summers. It turns out now that those two banks have continued paying into Summers-related businesses.
According to filings obtained for this story, Summers first joined the board of directors of Revolution Money back in 2006 (when it was called "GratisCard"), the same year that Summers was forced to resign as president of Harvard after his disastrous tenure. Revolution Money/GratisCard was a startup headed by former AOL chief Steve Case. Revolution Money billed itself as the Next Big Thing in online payment, "PayPal meets Mastercard," according to their own pitch.
In September 2007, Revolution Money announced that it had raised $50 million from a group of investors including Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank. Some found the investment strange even then, because normally big banks don't get involved in seeding small startups — that's the domain of venture capitalists, not mega-banks. Especially not in September, 2007, when these same megabanks were Chernobyling their way into full-fledged balance-sheet meltdown.
What seems clear is that at least part of Revolution Money's success in raising funds is due to their star-studded board of directors — which included not only Larry Summers, but also the notorious Frank Raines, the former Fannie Mae chief whom Time Magazine named to its "25 People To Blame For The Financial Crisis" list. Raines is still a board member.
Over the next year and a half, Revolution Money didn't quite live up to its promise of competing with PayPal or Visa/Mastercard. At least some of this could be attributed to the difficulty of starting up an online credit card company in the middle of a triple-cluster credit crunch, banking crisis and recession.
Socialism, American-Style from Daily Kos
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/6/3/738403/-Socialism,-American-Style
Via Conor Clarke at The Atlantic, we get a visual on what dreaded state of encroaching socialism in the United States looks like after government intervention in American industry:
Let the right-wing panic begin!
Ballmer Says Tax Would Move Microsoft Jobs Offshore from ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM
http://www.roguegovernment.com/index.php?news_id=15879
Source: Bloomberg
Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Steven Ballmer said the world's largest software company would move some employees offshore if Congress enacts President Barack Obama's plans to impose higher taxes on U.S. companies' foreign profits.
"It makes U.S. jobs more expensive," Ballmer said in an interview. "We're better off taking lots of people and moving them out of the U.S. as opposed to keeping them inside the U.S."
Obama on May 4 proposed outlawing or restricting about $190 billion in tax breaks for offshore companies over the next decade. Such business groups as the National Foreign Trade Council, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have denounced the proposed overhaul.
U.S. tax rules let companies defer paying corporate rates as high as 35 percent on most types of foreign profits as long as that money remains invested overseas. Obama says he wants to end such incentives to keep foreign profits tax-deferred so that companies would invest them in the U.S.
Microsoft reported an overall effective tax rate of 26 percent for 2008 in its last annual report. "Our effective tax rates are less than the statutory tax rate due to foreign earnings taxed at lower rates," the report said.
Barry Bosworth, an economist in Washington at the Brookings Institution research center, said many software companies such as Microsoft have exploited tax and trade rules in the U.S. and other countries to achieve a low overall tax rate.
Ireland Subsidiary
Typically, he said, a company like Microsoft develops a product like Windows in the United States and deducts those costs against U.S. income. It then transfers the technology to a subsidiary in Ireland, where corporate tax rates are lower, without charging licensing fees. The company then assigns its foreign sales to the Irish subsidiary so it doesn't have to claim the income in the United States.
"What Microsoft wants to do is deduct the cost at a high tax rate and report the profits at a low tax rate," Bosworth said. "Relative to where they are now, the administration's proposals are less favorable, so there will be some rebalancing on their part."
Ballmer is one of 10 U.S. software company executives pushing back against the tax proposals in meetings today with White House officials including Jason Furman, deputy director of the National Economic Council, and the heads of congressional committees such as House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel, a New York Democrat.
Expense Deductions
Among other things, Obama proposed limiting expense deductions such as those for employee compensation when companies defer U.S. tax on foreign profits.
In a roundtable discussion today, Ballmer, Symantec Corp. Chairman John Thompson and the heads of smaller companies such as privately held Bentley Systems, an Exton, Pennsylvania-based maker of engineering software, said such policies would hurt domestic investment, reduce shareholder value and increase the cost of employing U.S. workers.
Ballmer said that, while the Obama proposals would preserve expense deductions related to research and experimentation costs, the overall deduction limits for companies that defer tax on foreign profits would raise the cost of employing U.S. workers. Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders would require Microsoft to cut costs, he said, meaning many jobs would be moved out of the country.
Worldwide Employees
Microsoft employed 95,029 people worldwide as of April 21, of whom 56,552 were based in the United States, according to the company's Web site. The company announced it was firing up to 5,000 people in January while hiring some new workers; the company has shed about 1,000 jobs since then, spokesman Lou Gellos said.
Ballmer estimated that higher taxes under the proposal would reduce profits for companies that comprise the Dow Jones Industrial Average by between 10 and 15 percentage points.
"It's just a question of how much will the Dow come down," Ballmer said. "It's not about companies anyway; we're talking about shareholders."
In addition to limiting current deductions for companies that defer U.S. tax on their foreign profits, Obama proposed altering a set of rules known as "check the box" that allow companies to shelter foreign profits in offshore subsidiaries that can be disregarded for U.S. tax purposes.
Duck Liabilities
While the rules were designed in 1997 to protect U.S. companies from paying excessive tax to other governments, Obama administration officials say it has evolved into a way to duck U.S. liabilities. Altering the rule, which Obama dubbed a "loophole," would generate $86.5 billion in new revenue by 2019, the administration says.
The third international tax proposal would change rules governing how companies can claim tax credits for levies paid to foreign governments. Officials say some companies abuse the rule to accelerate tax credits before they could otherwise be claimed.
Obama has said his proposals would protect or create jobs in the United States.
Thompson of Symantec, the Cupertino, California-based maker of Norton anti-virus software and similar tools, said software companies are frustrated by being called tax cheats and compared with companies that moved their headquarters to low-tax countries such as Bermuda.
'Counterintuitive'
Thompson called the Obama proposals "counterintuitive" to the administration's other stated goals of fostering an innovation-oriented economy.
"It is a little bit ironic that most of our most significant trading partners and partners globally have taken the tack that they'll reduce corporate tax rates to stimulate economic growth and not raise corporate tax rates," Thompson said.
The roundtable was organized for Bloomberg News by the Business Software Alliance, a Washington trade group coordinating the executives' meetings with policymakers.
Bailout banks hoard oil, eyeing price hikes from ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM
Source: RawStory
The giant US bank JPMorgan Chase has reportedly hired a newly-built supertanker to store heating oil off the Mediterranean island of Malta. Other companies, including BP and a unit of Citigroup, have also hired ships to store either crude oil or oil products.
According to Bloomberg.com, "Traders were already using smaller tankers to store record volumes of jet fuel and heating oil in Europe as on-shore tanks filled up."
This latest move comes amid suggestions that recent increases in oil prices may be the result of speculators looking for a new financial bubble, prompting fears that increases in energy costs could stall any hope of an economic recovery.
According to MSNBC, "Even though most analysts say crude is still overpriced, the market has created its own momentum with an enormous amount of money fleeing equity and currency markets. … With so much money flowing into the market, prices are likely to hold close to where they are, until market fundamentals can take hold."
It has recently been suggested, however, that "prices will fall substantially" once speculators run out of storage.
The practice of storing oil on ships began last winter, when the price went as low as $32 a barrel. Bloomberg reported in January that the world's biggest owner of supertankers, Frontline Ltd., had already hired out about 20 supertankers for oil storage and had requests for up to 10 more. "I've never before seen storage demand on this scale," a shipbroker told Bloomberg.
By February, the Times of London was noting, "Shipping brokers in Tokyo say that Morgan Stanley has joined a growing international scramble to secure an oil supertanker and use it to store millions of barrels of crude in what commodity dealers believe may be the "trade of the year'."
Oil prices are currently running between $65 and $70 a barrel, more than twice what they were four months ago. With ship rental costs being kept low by the slump in global trade, anyone who bought oil last winter could be looking at a substantial profit.
Vatican endorses genetically modified organisms for food security from ROGUEGOVERNMENT.COM
http://www.roguegovernment.com/index.php?news_id=15877
ROME, Italy – In what seemed largely a foregone conclusion, a May 15-19 study week on genetically modified organisms sponsored by the Pontifical Academy for Sciences ended with a strong endorsement of GMOs as "praiseworthy for improving the lives of the poor," and promising "improved food safety and health benefits, better food security, and enhanced environmental performance in a sustainable manner."
Although the Pontifical Academy for Sciences is a prestigious Vatican body, it does not set official church teaching, and it remains unclear whether its conclusions will drive the Vatican toward a formal position on GMOs.
While a concluding document from the study week had not been released as NCR went to press, participants who characterized its content said its pro-GMO conclusions enjoyed "unanimous agreement" among the 41 experts from 17 countries who took part.
Organized by German scientist Ingo Potrykus, the inventor of "golden rice," the study week had beencriticized by anti-GMO activists for including only voices already convinced of the benefits of genetically modified crops. This is the second time that the Pontifical Academy of Sciences has endorsed GMOs, following an initial report adopted in 2001 and published in 2004.
Critics charge that GMOs give excessive control over farming practices to large agribusiness corporations, and pose unknown risks to both the environment and human health.
In general, the aim of the academy's weeklong event seemed less to conduct an objective appraisal of GMOs than to mobilize public support, aiming to overcome what participants see as burdensome regulations and negative public images that sometimes stand in the way of the wider adoption of GMOs, especially in Europe and in parts of the developing world, above all Africa.
Participants told NCR that after the final conclusions from this study week are published, plans call for three other documents:
A set of short versions of the papers delivered at the study week, possibly including PowerPoint versions of the talks;
A book-length collection of expanded versions of the papers, which could be published by winter 2010;
A "white paper" laying out the major conclusions and recommendations of the study week, intended for broad public distribution.
"In light of eight years of experience with growing transgenic crops, many additional field trials, and many additional published research reports, the conference concluded that the scientific evidence is overwhelming that transgenic crops … improve the lives of the poor and offer additional significant improvements in their lives in the years to come," said Drew Kershen of the University of Oklahoma, a professor of agricultural law at the University of Oklahoma and a study week participant.
The Academy for Sciences event drew fire from Catholic opponents of GMOs. Irish missionary and environmental writer Fr. Sean McDonagh, who organized a small demonstration in Rome on May 18 to protest the event, charged that its purpose was "to use the prestige of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, its good name, to beat governments so that you can reduce the minimal regulation that we have."
The demonstration near Rome's Piazza del Popolo featured a banner reading, "Pontifical Academy of Sciences, do not ally with those who, promoting GMOs, contribute to hunger in the world."
McDonagh objected that no Catholic critic of GMOs was invited.
"Who are the church's real experts in this area?" McDonagh said. "[They're from] aid and development agencies, such as Misereor, Cafod and Caritas. [The academy] thought so little of the expertise in the Catholic church that they didn't invite a single person from any one of those agencies. … What are they afraid of?"
It's a point that study week participants largely conceded.
"We didn't invite a bunch of naysayers to the table, who are convinced that GMOs don't work or who are going to make fallacious scientific arguments that have been rejected by the bulk of the scientific community and by the regulators who approved them," said Bruce Chassy, a food safety expert at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"This is not a 'balanced' meeting, in the sense that you bring every point of view to the table and seek some kind of idiotic consensus," Chassy said.
Though the position of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences seems clear, the broader Catholic debate over GMOs appears as yet unresolved.
Two months ago, the working paper for next October's Synod of Bishops for Africa appeared, containing critical language on GMOs. That document asserted that they risk "ruining small landholders, abolishing traditional methods of seeding, and making farmers dependent on production companies."
FBN fails to disclose climate-change skeptic's position in industry-funded organization
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Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Baucus Tells Single-Payer Advocates No from AfterDowningStreet.org
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/43219
By David Swanson
Senator Max Baucus met Wednesday with advocates for single-payer healthcare, including Senator Bernie Sanders, and told them that he might drop criminal charges against 13 people arrested for speaking up in his hearings, but that he would not include any supporters of single-payer health coverage in any future hearings. According to one report, Baucus suggested that he'd been mistaken to exclude single-payer but asserted that the process of creating healthcare reform legislation was too far along now to correct that omission.
Senator Sanders said after the meeting that if healthcare reform did not create a single-payer system it shouldn't be done at all, and that within three or four years we would realize we'd solved nothing. He said that it would be better to increase funding for community health centers and take steps to make it easier for medical students to go into primary care, than to enact major reforms that didn't go to the root of the problem.
Sanders has a bill (S 486) that makes some of the changes he advocates, as well as a bill (S 703) to facilitate the creation by states of single-payer healthcare systems. Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin has introduced resolutions on the same topic in the House. Dr. Margaret Flowers, co-chair of the Maryland chapter of Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), attended a press conference following the meeting on Wednesday and filled me in. She said that while states are pursuing single-payer legislation, it would be much easier for them to succeed if they had waivers allowing federal healthcare dollars to go to the states, and if needed changes were made to the Employee Retirement Income Security Act.
Advocates of single-payer emerged from the meeting with Baucus declaring their determination to push ahead with what they see as a fundamental struggle for human rights. Rose Ann DeMoro, executive director of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee and national vice president of the AFL-CIO, said the fight for single-payer is a civil rights movement, and that people "have to turn up the heat." When someone questions the political viability of single payer, she said, we should question "allowing people to die and suffer for lack of political will."
The press conference, in which Baucus did not participate, was attended by the New York Times, Politico, the Associated Press, Pacifica Radio, Congressional Quarterly, and a camera that Flowers believed belonged to CNN. Sanders opened the press conference with a statement on the domination of the private for-profit health insurance companies wasting $350 billion per year in billing, profiteering, and complexity. If we were serious about healthcare reform, he said, we would be having a serious discussion of single-payer.
Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine and senior lecturer at Harvard, said that in her diagnosis the disease was market-driven healthcare in which access is based on the ability to pay.
Dr. David Himmelstein, co-founder of PNHP and associate professor medicine at Harvard Medical School, reported that Baucus had said he might be willing to drop charges of unlawful conduct and disruption of Congress against 13 people but had no intention of opening up any hearings to include single-payer. Himmelstein also announced the release of two new studies. The first, being released Wednesday, reportedly finds that some of the largest investors in tobacco stock are private health insurance companies. The second, to be released Thursday, reportedly shows that not only are personal bankruptcies increasing, but 62 percent of them are now due to medical debt.
Geri Jenkins, RN, co-president of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee and a practicing registered nurse, reported that Baucus had implied he'd made a mistake in not including single-payer but that it was too late now.
And, finally, Dr. Oliver Fein, president of PNHP and associate dean at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, said that he and his colleagues had asked Baucus for a full hearing on the merits of single payer and asked for the Congressional Budget Office to create a comparison of single payer with whatever plan Congress produces that is not single payer. Senator Sanders said that he would continue to push Baucus to hold a hearing.
Dr. Flowers said that in her analysis the single-payer movement is largely inclined to go in the direction that Sanders stated on Wednesday: support for a single-payer bill or nothing. I asked her whether she believed that those pushing for single payer would ever support a public option as doing more good than harm and whether she thought those pushing for a public option would ever advocate allowing states to enact single payer. Flowers acknowledged that there are many (perhaps even most) people in the public option movement who prefer single payer. In fact, it is difficult to find a supporter of the public option who does not claim to "personally" want single payer but to find it "politically unfeasible." But Flowers said that PNHP does not support a public option and backs only single payer. And she said she was unaware of any advocates of a public option also advocating for allowing states to create single payer.
UPDATE: This Just in from the President:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release June 3, 2009
TEXT OF A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT TO
SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY AND SENATOR MAX BAUCUS
June 2, 2009
The Honorable Edward M. Kennedy
The Honorable Max Baucus
United States Senate
Washington, D.C. 20510
Dear Senator Kennedy and Senator Baucus:
The meeting that we held today was very productive and I want to commend you for
your leadership -- and the hard work your Committees are doing on health care reform, one
of the most urgent and important challenges confronting us as a Nation.
In 2009, health care reform is not a luxury. It's a necessity we cannot defer. Soaring
health care costs make our current course unsustainable. It is unsustainable for our families,
whose spiraling premiums and out-of-pocket expenses are pushing them into bankruptcy and
forcing them to go without the checkups and prescriptions they need. It is unsustainable for
businesses, forcing more and more of them to choose between keeping their doors open or
covering their workers. And the ever-increasing cost of Medicare and Medicaid are among
the main drivers of enormous budget deficits that are threatening our economic future.
In short, the status quo is broken, and pouring money into a broken system only
perpetuates its inefficiencies. Doing nothing would only put our entire health care system at
risk. Without meaningful reform, one fifth of our economy is projected to be tied up in our
health care system in 10 years; millions more Americans are expected to go without insurance;
and outside of what they are receiving for health care, workers are projected to see their
take-home pay actually fall over time.
We simply cannot afford to postpone health care reform any longer. This recognition has
led an unprecedented coalition to emerge on behalf of reform -- hospitals, physicians, and health
insurers, labor and business, Democrats and Republicans. These groups, adversaries in past
efforts, are now standing as partners on the same side of this debate.
At this historic juncture, we share the goal of quality, affordable health care for all
Americans. But I want to stress that reform cannot mean focusing on expanded coverage
alone. Indeed, without a serious, sustained effort to reduce the growth rate of health care costs,
affordable health care coverage will remain out of reach. So we must attack the root causes
of the inflation in health care. That means promoting the best practices, not simply the most
expensive. We should ask why places like the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, the Cleveland Clinic
in Ohio, and other institutions can offer the highest quality care at costs well below the national
norm. We need to learn from their successes and replicate those best practices across our
country. That's how we can achieve reform that preserves and strengthens what's best about
our health care system, while fixing what is broken.
The plans you are discussing embody my core belief that Americans should have better
choices for health insurance, building on the principle that if they like the coverage they have
now, they can keep it, while seeing their costs lowered as our reforms take hold. But for those
who don't have such options, I agree that we should create a health insurance exchange -- a
more
(OVER)
2
market where Americans can one-stop shop for a health care plan, compare benefits and prices,
and choose the plan that's best for them, in the same way that Members of Congress and their
families can. None of these plans should deny coverage on the basis of a preexisting condition,
and all of these plans should include an affordable basic benefit package that includes
prevention, and protection against catastrophic costs. I strongly believe that Americans should
have the choice of a public health insurance option operating alongside private plans. This will
give them a better range of choices, make the health care market more competitive, and keep
insurance companies honest.
I understand the Committees are moving towards a principle of shared responsibility --
making every American responsible for having health insurance coverage, and asking that
employers share in the cost. I share the goal of ending lapses and gaps in coverage that make us
less healthy and drive up everyone's costs, and I am open to your ideas on shared responsibility.
But I believe if we are going to make people responsible for owning health insurance, we must
make health care affordable. If we do end up with a system where people are responsible for
their own insurance, we need to provide a hardship waiver to exempt Americans who cannot
afford it. In addition, while I believe that employers have a responsibility to support health
insurance for their employees, small businesses face a number of special challenges in affording
health benefits and should be exempted.
Health care reform must not add to our deficits over the next 10 years -- it must be at
least deficit neutral and put America on a path to reducing its deficit over time. To fulfill this
promise, I have set aside $635 billion in a health reserve fund as a down payment on reform.
This reserve fund includes a number of proposals to cut spending by $309 billion over
10 years --reducing overpayments to Medicare Advantage private insurers; strengthening
Medicare and Medicaid payment accuracy by cutting waste, fraud and abuse; improving care
for Medicare patients after hospitalizations; and encouraging physicians to form "accountable
care organizations" to improve the quality of care for Medicare patients. The reserve fund also
includes a proposal to limit the tax rate at which high-income taxpayers can take itemized
deductions to 28 percent, which, together with other steps to close loopholes, would raise
$326 billion over 10 years.
I am committed to working with the Congress to fully offset the cost of health care
reform by reducing Medicare and Medicaid spending by another $200 to $300 billion over the
next 10 years, and by enacting appropriate proposals to generate additional revenues. These
savings will come not only by adopting new technologies and addressing the vastly different
costs of care, but from going after the key drivers of skyrocketing health care costs, including
unmanaged chronic diseases, duplicated tests, and unnecessary hospital readmissions.
To identify and achieve additional savings, I am also open to your ideas about giving
special consideration to the recommendations of the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission
(MedPAC), a commission created by a Republican Congress. Under this approach, MedPAC's
recommendations on cost reductions would be adopted unless opposed by a joint resolution
of the Congress. This is similar to a process that has been used effectively by a commission
charged with closing military bases, and could be a valuable tool to help achieve health care
reform in a fiscally responsible way.
These are some of the issues I look forward to discussing with you in greater detail in
the weeks and months ahead. But this year, we must do more than discuss. We must act. The
American people and America's future demand it.
I know that you have reached out to Republican colleagues, as I have, and that you have
worked hard to reach a bipartisan consensus about many of these issues. I remain hopeful that
many Republicans will join us in enacting this historic legislation that will lower health care
costs for families, businesses, and governments, and improve the lives of millions of Americans.
So, I appreciate your efforts, and look forward to working with you so that the Congress can
complete health care reform by October.
Sincerely,
BARACK OBAMA
# # #
California To Fight Health Insurance Rescissions? [Rescission] from Consumerist
http://consumerist.com/5277455/california-to-fight-health-insurance-rescissions
The LA Times is reporting that California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner will reveal new regulations aimed at stopping a controversial health insurance practice in which customers with costly illnesses are retroactively dropped.
The practice, known as "rescission," is explained in this Q&A from Frontline with Karen Pollitz, a research professor at Georgetown University who studies health care finance:
How does this work?
[It works] particularly in underwritten policies, particularly where you had to show eligibility to get into a policy. It happens most in the individual insurance market, but it can happen in group policies as well.Once you make a big claim, particularly in the first year or two of coverage, there's an incentive for the insurer to go back and investigate and see, is there any reason why you shouldn't have been in this policy in the first place? Maybe the claim is for a brain tumor, and the insurer can go back and comb through your records and realize: "Oh! Six months before you bought this policy, you complained to the doctor that you were having headaches. That's a symptom. This was pre-existing. Had I known you had a brain tumor when I sold you the policy, I wouldn't have sold you the policy, and so I'm taking it back, and I won't be paying the claim"; or, "I'll declare that this tumor was pre-existing. You can keep the policy, but I won't pay the claims related to your pre-existing condition."
Or they may find out you weren't eligible. I heard a story once about somebody who made a claim for their child, and she was remarried. Her husband was not the child's father, and the policy that he had through work didn't cover stepchildren. And no one had really asked about child/stepchild when they applied, and they were perfectly happy to get the premiums while nobody was making claims, but once the kid got sick, this got investigated, and retroactively he was taken off the policy.
According to the LA Times the new regulations would :
- Require insurers to write applications for coverage in plain English
- Allow applicants a "not sure" answer to questions about their preexisting medical conditions
- Bar insurers from dropping someone if the companies failed to thoroughly investigate an applicant's medical history before issuing a policy.
- Bar a cancellation if the patient was unaware of the medical information being sought on the application or failed to appreciate its significance.
For more info about rescission check out this episode of Frontline.
Proposal would combat rescissions of health insurance policies in California [LA Times]Amateur Abortions in Africa
from http://carnalnation.com/content/7963/10/amateur-abortions-africa
An article in the New York Times gives a good portrait of the world that Dr. George Tiller's assassin and his ideological backers, such as Randall Terry and Bill O'Reilly, want you to live in. In Tanzania, abortion is illegal, punishable by up to seven years in prison for the women. Physicians who perform them can get up to 14 years. Like America in the bad old days, Tanzanian women who want to terminate their pregnancies wind up seeking alternatives from untrained and sometimes unscrupulous people. Common methods of abortion in Tanzania include ingesting herbs or other substances, pounding on the belly, or inserting objects into the vagina, causing infections and internal bleeding. Doctors sometimes find fragments of sticks left in the vagina by amateur abortionists.
Dr. Paschal Mdoe, the medical director of a small hospital in Tanzania, sees a steady stream of women coming in for treatment for the aftereffects of amateur abortions. "They just poke, poke, poke," Mdoe says. "And then the woman has to come here."
The high rate of abortions also reflects a low rate of education about and use of contraception. Only about 25 percent of Tanzanians use contraception, in contrast to 60 percent in South Africa and 39 percent in Kenya. According to an assistant medical officer, Telesphory Kaneno, "Talking about sexuality and the sex organs is still a taboo in our community. For a woman, if it is known that she is taking contraceptives, there is a fear of being called promiscuous." Myths about contraceptives also abound in Tanzania: "[S]ome young women from the area who had given birth as teenagers said they had not used birth control," the Times writes, "because they did not know about it or thought it was unsafe: they had heard that condoms were unsanitary and that birth control pills and other hormonal contraceptives could cause cancer." Judging from that, a lot of Tanzanians may have been getting their sex ed materials straight from us.
Monday, June 01, 2009
Drudge, NY Post report Obamas' NYC trip cost, ignore Bush's Crawford vacations
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Who Killed GM? [Blame Game] from Gawker
http://gawker.com/5273898/who-killed-gm
General Motors is bankrupt. Whoops. It was probably going to happen no matter what, but lots of people hoped that bankruptcy would remain a threat that would encourage everyone to band together to save the company. Who is to blame for the death of the American auto industry?
The Gubmint
Maybe an energy policy that for years consisted entirely of "keep gas prices as low as possible" directly encouraged overproduction of the huge cars that no one wants anymore because oil will no longer be so ridiculously cheap ever again.
And maybe the young liberal technocrats in charge of things now don't care about the industrial midwest and don't understand the importance of preserving American manufacturing jobs, which is why they'll give the banks a blank check and let them fight even the most basic of new regulatory legislation while demanding crippling concessions from the automakers in exchange for a fraction of the cash.
Also now they will seize all the automakers because they are Kenyan Communists.
The Foreigners
"George Washington would roll over in his grave and call it treason for letting foreigners come in here and take away what we had built," a longtime autoworker says in The New Yorker's April story on the death of Detroit. And it's true! The Japanese waltzed in here offering better, more fuel-efficient cars during the oil crisis in the '70s, manufactured in non-union plants down in the lawless South, and next thing you know no one wants a Firebird anymore.
And these foreigners also won the affection of all these southern Republican lawmakers, who refused to help Detroit because Nissan owned their districts. It's un-American.
The Hippies
Wah wah we want an electric car the hippies all said. And so California made Detroit build an electric car. But it was expensive, and real Americans, who only buy cars based on how loud, big, and cheap they are (gas is still so cheap whee!), didn't want anything to do with the EV1.
Now G.M. is sinking billions into the Chevy Volt, an all-electric car that will cost twice as much as a Prius, and still be a Chevy, so no one will want it.
The Elitists
The only people left in America with any money are various liberal New York Times-reading coastal elitists. And guess what? They don't buy American! If they don't take trains, they buy Toyotas and Hondas. Because American cars aren't hip enough for them.
The Jews?
In addiction to controlling the New World Order, the Jews caused the first oil crisis with that whole Yom Kippur War thing.
The Arabs?
They still have allllll the oil (besides all the oil we haven't yet drilled for, in Alaska, because of hippies), and they won't just give it to us for free! What jerks!
The Unions
Ok, so, G.M. spends more than $1,000 per car manufactured on the entirely useless and stupid act of "providing health care to current and retired workers." And the stubborn unions that crippled the industry refuse to negotiate in good faith, demanding crazy things like "equitable sacrifices from bondholders" in exchange for the various concessions they've made, like accepting half their pension funds in Ford stock and introducing a two-tiered wage plan for new hires!
And yes, workers won the right to get paid even when they weren't working, so that the robots wouldn't steal their jobs, and they could retire after thirty years and hold on to very nice health plans and pensions. All in all it was a lot like France or something.
It could be argued that these out-of-control labor costs pale in seriousness to the various ridiculous missteps and idiotic business decisions management made over the last 30 years but only if you are a communist.
Once again those foreign-owned plants did it right. Their non-unionized workers contribute to the cost of their own health care, encouraging many of them to not get sick so much, and instead of fancy guaranteed pensions they all have 401(k)s, which encourages them to work even harder, because now those 401(k)s are worth zero dollars.
Gremlins
This seems like the most likely explanation.
Debbie Schlussel, says because Jlo and Sotomayor are both Puerto Rican, they are therefore both extremely stupid and undeserving of their success
Finally, Someone Brave Enought To Call Sonia Sotomayor "J-Lo" [Commentary]
While at first blush it may seem inappropriate to compare Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to Jennifer Lopez simply because both are Latina women from modest backgrounds, you've got hear conservative commentator Debbie Schlussel out: she's got a compelling argument for calling Sotomayor "J-Lo":
See, Sonia Sotomayor, like singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, is a Latina woman from a modest background. So it is pretty much exactly like nominating Jennifer Lopez, whose nickname, for a time, was J-Lo, to the highest court in the land. They are both Puerto Rican, and so therefore they are both extremely stupid and undeserving of their success.
