It is often said that the new health care law will affect almost every American in some way. And, perhaps fittingly if unintentionally, no one may be more affected than members of Congress themselves.
In a new report, the Congressional Research Service says the law may have significant unintended consequences for the "personal health insurance coverage" of senators, representatives and their staff members. For example, it says, the law may "remove members of Congress and Congressional staff" from their current coverage, in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, before any alternatives are available.
The confusion raises the inevitable question: If they did not know exactly what they were doing to themselves, did lawmakers who wrote and passed the bill fully grasp the details of how it would influence the lives of other Americans? The question answers itself.
Posted by: Mike ||
04/13/2010 09:57 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11132 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Professor Joseph Olson of Hamline University School of Law, St. Paul , Minnesota , points out some interesting facts concerning last November's Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Obama: 19 McCain: 29
Square miles of land won by: Obama: 580,000 McCain: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Obama: 127 miles McCain: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by:
Obama: 13.2 McCain: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory McCain won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of the country.
Obama territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in low income tenements and living off various forms of government welfare..."
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy, with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegals and they vote, then we can say goodbye to the USA in fewer than five years.
If you are in favor of this, then by all means, delete this message.
If you are not, then pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake, knowing that apathy is the greatest danger to our freedom.
#3
ION NOT-NECESSARILY-UNRELATED, TOPIX > AFRICA: CAPITALISM OR SOCIALISM - WHICH WAY?, espec AFTER the "Global Econ Meltdown", as discussed in confab by Scholars-Perts at the UnIversity of Dar-Es-Salaam.
* SAME > SOMALI PIRATES TARGET FOOD, PUSHING UP PRICES. Approi 50% of Somalia's food is IMPORTED, so the various PIRATE CAPTS MY-NAME-IS-NOT-JACK-SPARROW hath decided to attack ships carrying foodstuffies into Somalia [food-jacking].
Also in the Artic > JUST-OFF-THE-COAST WORLD NAVIES CRITICIZED AS "NOT CARING" ABOUT PIRATE FOOD-JACKINGS NOR [seriously]STOPPING THE PIRATES???
Income tax day, April 15, 2010, now divides Americans into two almost equal classes: those who pay for the services provided by government and the freeloaders. The percentage of Americans who will pay no federal income taxes at all for 2009 has risen to 47 percent.
That isn't the worst of it. The bottom 40 percent not only pay no income tax, but the government sends them cash or benefits financed by the taxes dutifully paid by those who do pay income tax.
The outright cash handouts include the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which can amount to as much as $5,657 a year to low-income families. Other financial benefits can include child tax credits, welfare, food stamps, WIC (Women, Infants, Children), housing subsidies, unemployment benefits, Medicaid, S-CHIP and other programs.
This is both a massive transfer of wealth and a soak-the-rich racket. The top 10 percent pay 73 percent of the income taxes collected by the federal government.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., has become the congressional leader in explaining details of the recently passed Health Control Law. He says that, based on Congressional Budget Office figures, taxes to pay for Obamacare will have to skyrocket to an 88 percent income tax rate within 30 years.
Although all wage-earners help fund their own Social Security and Medicare benefits, only federal income taxpayers pay the costs of running the federal government, and are responsible for paying off our $12.8 trillion national debt and for bailing out Social Security, Medicare, and Fannie and Freddie when they collapse.
Even the recently passed Health Control Law contains financial subsidies to unmarried couples that are denied to married couples. This rewards the unmarried women who were the second largest demographic constituency that voted for Barack Obama for president in 2008.
When Obama told Joe the Plumber he wanted to spread the wealth around,' Obama wasn't kidding. That's exactly what he is now doing: taking money from taxpayers and spreading it around to non-taxpayers.
Nor was Obama kidding when, on the eve of his election, he threatened, We are going to fundamentally transform the United States of America.' Converting the earnings of American workers into handouts for those who voted for Obama in 2008 is certainly a fundamental transformation.
Obama's promise not to raise taxes on middle-Americans is already down the drain. Obama brought former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker out of obscurity to serve as chairman of an Economic Recovery Advisory Board and announce that we need to raise taxes.
Volcker was blunt in predicting that the new tax increase will be a Value-Added Tax (VAT). That's the tax European socialists love because its rates can be hidden and frequently raised, while producing rivers of revenue for the bureaucrats.
Volcker claimed that a VAT is not a toxic idea.' It really is Charles Krauthammer called it the ultimate cash cow' because it transfers so much money from individuals to the government.
Having already co-opted the executive and legislative branches of government for his fundamental transformation, Obama now wants to use the judiciary, too. The retirement of Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens gives him this opportunity.
On Jan. 18, 2001m on Public Radio WBEZ-FM, Chicago, Obama complained that the Earl Warren Court wasn't that radical' because it didn't break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution. The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and serve more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.'
Calling for the Supreme Court to participate in the redistribution of wealth' is shockingly revolutionary. Any judicial nominee who agrees with Obama's theory should be rejected.
Obama's game plan to fundamentally transform' America is based on both Saul Alinsky's modus operandi for community organizing and on the Cloward-Piven spending strategy. Saul Alinsky was a famous Chicago radical, and Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were less-well-known Columbia University sociologists.
The goal of all three of these agitators was the overthrow of the private enterprise system. The Alinsky strategy is to use community organizing and mass demonstrations by those he labeled the Have Nots,' and the Cloward-Piven strategy is to overload the bureaucracy with enormous demands for entitlements, thereby causing a financial crisis.
Obama used Alinsky methods by taxpayer financing of ACORN and subprime mortgages. Obama used Cloward-Piven methods by massive deficit spending for entitlements for more and more millions of people.
Fortunately, hardworking, taxpaying Americans are beginning to understand how they are being ripped off and rushed into bankruptcy. The one way to save ourselves and our country is to elect a Congress in November pledged to stop the spending.
The last time that President Obama's senior advisor and assistant Valerie Jarrett was in the news, her favored political recruit, Anthony "Van" Jones, was resigning his post as White House presidential advisor amid revelations of a radical background that included communist sympathies and his support for 9/11 Truther conspiracy. Now Jarrett, widely viewed as Obama's radical alter ego, has reemerged -- this time as a foreign policy guru.
As Obama and Russian President Medvedev signed a new nuclear arms treaty last week, Jarrett sat observing nearby. That Jarrett has once again found herself in a position of influence is not surprising. Jarrett proudly acknowledges her remarkable closeness to President Obama.
"We have kind of a mind meld" is the way she put it in a slurpyNew York Times magazine interview last summer. "When senior staff meetings in the Oval Office break up, Valerie Jarrett often stays behind" with the President, the Times article reported. In short, Jarrett is like a member of the Obama family, but one who has seized command of a variety of policies at the White House.
Posted by: ed ||
04/13/2010 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11129 views]
Top|| File under:
IIUC ARTIC > retaliation agz POTUS BAMMER = USA from the UAV Drone strikes will come, albeit not necesssarily within short lead time; + perhaps more importantly may not be limited to retaliation agz US targets in AFPAK or MIDDLE EAST [read CONUS]???
JosephM read an article in the Rupee News (RN), which I presume is either an Indian or Pakistani newspaper. The RN has an article/op-ed claiming that President Obama's use of UAVs to kill jihadis will eventually result in other countries doing the same to American targets... and some of those targets may be within the borders of the United States. The article claims the Obama doctrine is to kill rather than capture said jihadis.
I think JosephM's second comment is a play on the title of the film Kill Bill.
#9
Were trying, even using just the brain stem. Not worky... most of the time. So, for a year or so, simply not trying anymore. Gave up. Skippity, skip.
#12
She was married to the late Vernon Jarrett, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
Vernon Jarrett was also a fan of Barack Obama. He watched his career from its early stages and became an influential supporter.
In 1992 Obama worked for the ACORN offshoot, Project Vote to register black voters in aid of the Senate Campaign of Carol Moseley Braun-who had strong Communist Party USA ties and was Harold Washington's legislative floor leader.
Obama helped Carol Moseley Braun win her Senate seat, then took it over himself in 2004-backed by the same communist/socialist alliance that had elected Washington and Moseley Braun.
Commenting on the 1992 race, Vernon Jarrett wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times of August 11th 1992;
Good news! Good news! Project Vote, a collectivity of 10 church-based community organizations dedicated to black voter registration, is off and running. Project Vote is increasing its rolls at a 7,000-per-week clip...If Project Vote is to reach its goal of registering 150,000 out of an estimated 400,000 unregistered blacks statewide, "it must average 10,000 rather than 7,000 every week," says Barack Obama, the program's executive director... Dee Myles, a Chicago based chair of the Education Commission of the Communist Party USA penned a tribute to Vernon Jarrett, for the People's Weekly World of June 5th, 2004.
Readers like me can be extremely selective of the journalists we read habitually... We are selective about the journalists to whom we become insatiably addicted, and once hooked we develop a constructive love affair without the romance...
Such was my experience with Vernon Jarrett, an African American journalist in Chicago who died at the age of 86 on May 23. I became a Vernon Jarrett addict, and I am proud of it!
Vernon Jarretts career as a journalist in Chicago began and ended at the Chicago Defender, the African American daily paper. In between, he was the first Black journalist at the Chicago Tribune, and I first began to read his articles during his tenure at the Chicago Sun-Times.
Jarretts claim to fame is that he was a partisan of the cause of African Americans in the broad democratic tradition of Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois...
Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois were both Communist Party USA members. On April 9th, 1998 at Chicago's South Shore Cultural Center, Vernon Jarrett hosted a Paul Robeson Citywide Centennial Celebration event, with his old comrade and Party sympathiser Margaret Burroughs and former Communist Party USA members Studs Terkel and his old friend Oscar Brown, Jr.
Dee Myles went on to say;
Jarrett was fanatical about African Americans registering and voting in mass for socially conscious candidates. He championed Harold Washington like a great warrior, and this March, from his hospital bed, wrote an article appealing to Black Chicago to turn out to vote for Barack Obama in the Illinois primaries. Obama astounded everyone with an incredible landslide victory as the progressive, Black candidate for the Democratic Party nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. From his sickbed, Vernon Jarrett issued a clarion call, and the people responded.
Link
Additional link....but please remain seated on this one please.
#13
Shit like this makes me believe that there is an Illuminati and they are trying to pull the US down so they can conquer and subjugate it from the inside.
#16
Just to throw some gasoline on the fire, I hear Rush suggest that Valerie Jarrett was born in Iran, to US parents who were teaching at a school there and lived there some undefined time.
Obama grew up in Indonesia fora time and Jarrett in Tehran - both issed some formative years in their country of nationality and both had Muslim influences, and both hung out with communists (genuine, card carrying communists) during adolesence. Manchurian Candidate has become Bambi's nickname with my wife....Jeebus how did this happen?
Pray for the Republic!
ARTIC > NOT just AQ or even the Taliban [TTP]. LESSOR, INDEPENDENT OR SEMI-AUTONOMOUS, ETC. LETHAL-N-AMBITIOUS-N-JIHAD-HAPPY MILTERR GROUPS ALSO HAVE THE NUCLEAR, WMD, + LR MISSLE LOVEBUG.
THE GOOD NEWS FOR AMERS IS THAT THE LeT PROB WANT TO NUKE INDJUH [India] FIRST BEFORE IT NUKES AMERIKA.
Valerie Bowman Jarrett was born to American parents James E. Bowman and Barbara Taylor Bowman in Shiraz, Iran, where her father, a pathologist and geneticist, ran a hospital for children as part of a program where American doctors and agricultural experts sought to help jump-start developing countries' health and farming efforts. When she was five, the family moved to London for one year, returning to Chicago in 1963.
RUSH: From Ft. Lauderdale: "A woman battling a cancer battle was dealt a surprise blow by Uncle Sam this month. Diana Smith has gone through six months of radiation and chemotherapy -- one week out of every month. She is in remission and had a donor for a transplant; being in remission is prerequisite for the transplant. But her hopes of receiving the transplant were dashed in March, when she says, the Social Security Administration contacted her -- without her soliciting it -- and told her that her three-year-old son was entitled to receive Social Security disability payments. Even though she didn't ask for it, she signed the form and received her son's first check check [sic]. In April, Medicaid canceled her universal health care policy because her income level had risen with her son's payments -- making her ineligible for the insurance program."
My friends, the largest insurance company in the United States, the United States government and its CEO Obama, tricked a woman! They tricked a woman out of getting off her medical coverage. Since when does the Social Security Administration start soliciting? We know the food stamp crowd does. But now the Social Security Administration called her up. "Hey, you want to get your kid on disability payments?" And of course she said, "Yeah," and that income vaulted her above her eligibility level. "The problem is Jackson Memorial Hospital cannot provide the procedure because the risk is too high. The universal policy from Medicaid helps shield the hospital from liability in this kind of case. Without it, they are subject to liability issues. Even though Smith offered to cancel her son's disability benefits, she was told it's too late.
The SSA notifications of eligibility are done through an automated process. Its a big country with lots of people and coincidences are going to happen.
Posted by: lord garth ||
04/13/2010 9:04 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Automated process?
I thought it took years and hearings and whatnot to get on social security disability these days. I know people who have gone through the process, it's time-consuming and laborious.
#4
Lord Garth, the point is that whether by deliberate or accidental action, the government has basically killed this woman by preventing her from getting the medical care she needed when she needed it. They denied her on medicare and the lack of tort reform prevented her from getting the care on charity in the time frame she needed.
Her blood is on the hands of inflexible bureaucrats who cannot make decisions clearly, and the people that empower them with life and death powers and give them a convoluted opaque rules system. Obama and the Democrats.
The blood is also on the hands of the trial lawyers who put the threat of such a high risk on this procedure that the lawyers for the hospital would not even let them do this as a charitable act of mercy.
That blood also rests on Obama and the Democrats who obey the trial lawyers one of the Democrat party biggest money supporters.
This is where health care in the US is going under the corrupt Democrat party and fascist regime leader Barak Obama.
#5
It's a little different for kids, Thing. We were asked by a social worker if we wanted to apply for disability benefits for our new daughter when she was only about a week old (she has a heart defect called Tetralogy of Fallot). Supposedly it would help us to get her on Medicaid, so the state could pay for her treatments, too.
This lady might have gotten a similar pitch from what we got. (Before anyone asks....no, we didn't sign her up.)
#6
Don't buy it? Automated process? I applied for SSI disability and after supplying SSA with two extensive VA medical records, numerous phone calls to dead ends, 54 weeks later I recieved a form requesting an explaination of my disability! Disability approval is decided by private doctors in your state, to avoid conflict of interest, not SSA. Four months ago I was informed I was third in line for review. Nothing yet and no chance of a face to face at this point.
Two attornies told me nothing can be done to speed the process. Only after you are denied can you be represented by an attorney to present your clain to a judge. Delay, delay, delay payment of my money held by the gum't contributed over a lifetime of work. By the way, the attorney commonly charges 25% of the award, from the date of initial filing.
And it's only going to get worse.
Posted by: Flaper Scourge of the Algonquins4926 ||
04/13/2010 13:40 Comments ||
Top||
#8
Flapper, I got the same run-around when I applied. It's a sad state of affairs, but I got a lawyer that specialized in Social Security Disability. It took me five minutes in front of a SSA judge to be granted full disability, retroactive to the time I first filed. The lawyer took the case on contingency, and received a set amount limited by law in Colorado. It amounted to about 5% of my back payments.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
04/13/2010 15:12 Comments ||
Top||
#9
Gentlemen....I believe you guys when you talk about what kind of a nightmare it is to get approved as an adult for disability. I worked for a state pension fund that handled the state's disability plans, plus one of my dear friends died while waiting to get approved for disability. I've heard stories similar to yours, and everyone who works with that system knows that it is virtually impossible to get approved for disability payments the first time you apply (even though the people who work for Social Security swear that isn't the case). They hope that you either give up, or die before you get approved.
But this story is talking about getting a 3 year old approved for disability. It is expedited for kids, and you do get solicited to sign up for it (my experience was similar to that of my brother, who has a 3 year old daughter with Down syndrome. They were also approached to sign up, and didn't take it, either.)
It probably wasn't a SS employee who solicited her. Most likely it was a social worker who did, because that is who approached both of us to sign up at the children's hospitals. In our case, we were even told how much the benefit payment would be for our daughter by the social worker.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.