This blog is mainly about the spectacular train wreck at The Sacramento Bee and its parent company, the McClatchy Company. But I also post about current events, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, politics, anything else that grabs my attention. Take a look around this blog, hope you enjoy it.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday October 25 -- Got news or an update?
If you have news or an update, leave it in comments. . . .
16 comments:
Anonymous
said...
NYT: White House Attacking Fox Because It Is News, and That's the Problem
The cat is out of the bag at the New York Times. The Times has exposed, albeit passively, the true motivation behind the White House's Fox News attacks.
Contrary to the administration's claims, it is deriding Fox not because it doesn't report the news, but rather because it does.
It is news, after all, when an organization potentially receiving billions in federal funds aids and abets what it thinks is a criminal organization.
It is news when a high-level White House adviser, responsible for the distribution of $80 billion in federal funds, is outed as a communist and a 'truther' conspiracy theorist.
It is news when the president's chief communications officer admits her admiration for a murderous dictator.
...officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level.
The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration's chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early fall -namely, past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn...
There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as "not a news network."
"It was an amalgam of stories covered, and our assessment of how others were dealing with those stories, that caused us to comment," Mr. Axelrod said in describing the administration's thinking...
Mr. Clemente suggested that the fight was part of a larger White House strategy to marginalize critics. He cited a report in Politico about a strategy session in August at which officials discussed plans to move more aggressively against opponents...
As Rich Lowry stated at The Corner, "their problem is not that Fox isn't a real news organization, their problem is that it is."
CBS exposes Obama administration lies about blocking Fox News (Examiner)
The Obama administration now claims it did not try to exclude Fox News from Thursday's round of network interviews with pay czar Ken Feinberg.
A treasury department spokesperson claimed, "There was no plot to exclude Fox News, and they had the same interview that their competitors did. Much ado about absolutely nothing".
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, four other networks are fully aware of the situation and have proof that the treasury department is lying.
Fox did have the same interview as their competitors, only because the other networks came to FNC's defense.
They refused to do the interviews with Feinberg unless Fox was given the same opportunity. Fox News Channel is not the only network reporting on this story.
CBS Evening News with Katie Couric did a full length story on the ongoing feud, with reporter Chip Reid describing the other networks' decision to standup to the White House bullying.
“All the networks said that’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” Reid reported.
Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik, who is a frequent detractor of Fox News, was appalled by the White House's blacklisting of Fox.
"What it's really about to me is the Executive Branch of the government trying to tell the press how it should behave.
I mean, this democracy -- we know this -- only works with a free and unfettered press to provide information," Zurawik said.
L.A. Times Fails to Disclose that Author of Fact-Challenged Pro-ACORN Op-Ed Has Been ACORN Consultant PATTERICO
Yesterday I posted about an L.A. Times op-ed by Peter Dreier, who wrote that only two ACORN offices engaged in wrongdoing related to a purported child prostitution ring (at least five did), and who also falsely claimed that no ACORN-registered fraudulent voter ever cast a vote (false; one has been convicted for exactly that).
How could somebody get the facts so badly wrong to ACORN’s benefit? In comments to my post, Bradley J. Fikes tipped us to one possibility:
Dreier has been ACORN’s (presumably paid) consultant. As Dreier’s online bio states:
He has worked closely with a wide range of community organizations, labor unions, and public interest organizations, and has worked as a consultant for a variety of foundations and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), VISTA, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the MacArthur Foundation, the Boston Foundation, the California AFL-CIO, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, ACORN, the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others.
Was this disclosed in the L.A. Times piece? Uh, no, it wasn’t.
The entire bio for Dreier at the end of the L.A. Times piece reads: Peter Dreier is a professor of politics at Occidental College.
His study of media coverage of ACORN can be found here. I’ll be writing Nick Goldberg about this today, as well as Dreier’s errors of fact.
For McClatchy, LA Times, NY Times and Pravda types, we the people who refuse to subscribe to your drivel realize that there are certain stories in the news that are far too important to rely on facts.
ACORN is one, global warming is another. We understand your position, “Fake but accurate” never died.
Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar, Wednesday night, he was a no show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation yesterday morning.
Vanity Fair's layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5percent late last year.
Additional people will be booted from the contributing editor ranks, a source said. A VF spokeswoman would confirm only that there were layoffs yesterday afternoon.
The ax also finally fell at GQ, with seven staffers let go from the men's fashion magazine.
As the third week of carnage came to a close, one source said that the end seemed to be in sight. The company is expected to have a net loss of $200 million on an ad revenue falloff of more than $400 million compared with a year earlier.
NPR analyst compares Obama to Nixon, issues full apology (Washington Examiner)
It's pretty unremarkable to describe the Obama White House's growing enemies list -- the insurance companies, Chamber of Commerce, Fox News -- as "Nixonian."
But there's one place where, if you venture such an opinion, you'd better be prepared to apologize -- quickly and profusely.
On National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" Wednesday, NPR political editor Ken Rudin said the White House campaign against Fox News is a bad idea.
"It's not only aggressive, it's almost Nixonesque," Rudin said. "I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew's constant denunciation of the media.
Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. That's an infringement on the freedom of press.'
And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing."
It's not the usual thing you hear from NPR analysts. Reaction from the NPR audience was negative, and within 24 hours, Rudin was in backtrack mode. "I made a boneheaded mistake yesterday," Rudin wrote on his NPR blog.
"Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration -- which bugged and intimidated and harrassed journalists -- to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me.
I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better. I was around during the Nixon years. I am fully cognizant of what they did and attempted to do." "I apologize for a dumb comparison."
Obama Replaces the War on Terror with the War on Critics (Canada Free Press)
For eight years Democrats pounded at the doors of D.C., throwing their own fecal matter around, and claiming that it was only a matter of time until Bush had them all rounded up for being unpatrotic.
And like the frenzied mob at a Black Friday sale waiting for the doors to open, shoving and shoving against the glass, until the doors finally open, and the mob bursts through stomping over any store personnel in the way, Democrats have been completely unable to let go of the attack dog politics of the last 8 years and actually govern.
Instead what we’ve gotten is massive incompetence, massive malfeasance and an enemy of the month. When in doubt the motto of the Obama Administration has been, ATTACK SOMEONE.
Whether it’s Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer or Glenn Beck—the party now in power, but still trapped in the vortex of their own hate, is obsessed with waging a war on all their enemies, both real and imaginary.
Attacking Fox News and defending President Barack Obama is a family affair for Anita Dunn, the White House communications director who has blasted Fox as an arm of the Republican Party and talked about "controlling" the news media.
She's married to Robert Bauer, the chief of the political law group at Perkins Coie, the Seattle law firm hired by the White House to defend President Obama in court cases challenging his "natural born" citizenship status in the United States.
Chief WH Economic Advisor Admits $Trillion Stimulus Job Creation Plan is a Bust! (Flopping Aces)
Yet, we're supposed to believe their promises for health care reform?
Readers may recall that the same White House bunch promising a "deficit neutral" health care plan promised that if we passed the $787 billion stimulus ($one trillion after debt cost) that we would save millions of American jobs.
They even put out a chart which showed their projections state by state on the jobs they expected to be created.
Earlier this week, I posted a report from the House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member which shows that instead of creating millions of new jobs, we have lost an additional 2.7 million since the stimulus bill was rushed through congress.
A reasonable person might say: well, perhaps more jobs will be created later as the stimulus spending increases?
That would conflict with the statement of Christina Romer, Chair of the WH Council of Economic Advisors. In prepared testimony she delivered before Congress on October 22, 2009 she dropped this bombshell:
"Most analysts predict that the fiscal stimulus will have its greatest impact on growth in the second and third quarters of 2009.
By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to growth."
So, we spent a trillion taxpayer dollars and exploded the deficit only to lose 2.7 million jobs?
It gets worse. Romer concluded: "We enter the fourth quarter of 2009 with the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent and likely to remain severely elevated."
In the video posted at right you can hear the incredulity expressed by the panel of the Fox News program Special Report. No wonder the White House wants to silence Fox News!
High Jobless Rates in Michigan Cities Force Exodus (Michigan Messenger)
The September unemployment stats for Michigan came out this week and they are high — as expected.
Mlive.com highlighted the statistics on a municipal level, showing the five cities with the highest jobless rates are all over 25 percent.
The cities of Highland Park and Pontiac, which leaned heavily on auto-related employment, had the highest unemployment with 35.2 percent of residents reportedly jobless. Both cities have declared bankruptcy in the recent past.
Highland Park recently emerged from state receivership and Pontiac just slipped under state control last year.
While the overall state’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation at 15.3 percent, the top five hardest hit cities in the state are all former automobile production hubs.
According to Mlive.com: 1.Highland Park 35.2% 2. Pontiac 35.2% 3. Detroit 27.9% 4. Flint 26.3% 5. Port Huron 25.7%
Small Business Faces Sharp Rise in Costs of Health Care (NYTimes)
As Congress nears votes on legislation that would overhaul the health care system, many small businesses say they are facing the steepest rise in insurance premiums they have seen in recent years.
Insurance brokers and benefits consultants say their small business clients are seeing premiums go up an average of about 15 percent for the coming year — double the rate of last year’s increases.
HHS Chief Actuary on ObamaCare: Total Health Care Spending Will Go Up, Not Down (BigGovernment.com)
Richard Foster, Chief Actuary for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released this week to several Congressional offices a financial analysis of HR 3200, the House version of ObamaCare.
He reached some inconvenient conclusions for President Obama and Congressional Leadership:
-“Total national health expenditures under this bill would increase by an estimated 2.7 percent in 2019…”
-“The additional demand for health services could be difficult to meet initially with existing health provider resources and could lead to price increases, cost-shifting, and/or changes in providers’ willingness to treat patients with low-reimbursement health coverage.”
-More than half of the expansion in coverage (18 million out of 34 million) would be from increased Medicaid coverage.
-12 million people would lose employer-sponsored coverage.
-The productivity adjustments to Medicare are “unrealistic” and providers “might end their participation” because the cuts would make serving Medicare beneficiaries unprofitable.
-Medicare Advantage enrollment would decrease by 64 percent (from a projected level of 13.2 million to 4.7 million under the proposal).
As of today, HHS still hadn’t published the analysis on their website, even though it was written by its own staff.
We have a feeling it may never find a home there. So, we’ve brought it to you directly. Full financial analysis below.
CMS OACT – Memo on Financial Impact of H R 3200 09-10-21 –
Doctors Warn Medicare Patients Will Have Fewer Options If Congress Allows 21.5% Reduction In Payment (The Grand Rapids Press)
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., center, flanked Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., left, and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., discuss "the urgent need for health insurance reform".
GRAND RAPIDS — Senior citizens will find it harder to find a doctor who accepts Medicare if Congress does not stop a 21.5 percent cut in payment rates, say physicians and hospitals.
“We might as well start building bigger emergency rooms, because that’s where people will be if they don’t have access to a regular physician,” said Micki Benz, vice president of development for Saint Mary’s Health Care.
“In the end, people’s care will suffer, and we will all end up paying more.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, failed to get the needed votes Wednesday for legislation she sponsored that would prevent the rate reduction and eliminate the Medicare sustainable growth rate formula.
Obama Declares Swine Flu a National Emergency... But Won’t Inoculate Daughters (GatewayPundit)
Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency today. Over 1,000 people have died from the swine flu in the US this year.
The declaration, signed Friday night and announced Saturday, comes with the disease more prevalent than ever in the country and production delays undercutting the government’s initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October.
Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.
But, despite the national emergency, Barack and Michelle have decided not to inoculate their two girls against the H1N1 virus.
Obama Can’t Find a Single Pentagon Official to Sign Off on Biden’s Afghanistan Plan
Vice President Joe Biden, for supposed foreign policy wonk in the Obama Administration, can’t find a single military strategist to sign off on his Afghanistan plan.
Bill Roggio at The Weekly Standard Blog reported: If you want to see just how little credence Vice President Joe Biden’s plan for Afghanistan has inside military circles, look no further than this paragraph from an article written by Peter Spiegel and Yochi Dreazen for the Wall Street Journal:
People familiar with the internal debates say Mr. Obama rejected a strictly counter-terror approach during White House deliberations in early October.
One official said Pentagon strategists were asked to draft brief written arguments making the best case for each strategy, but the strategists had difficulties writing out a credible case for the counter-terror approach — prompting members of Mr. Biden’s staff to step in and write the document themselves.
In case that wasn’t clear, not a single strategist in the Pentegon was willing to draft a paper to defend the Biden plan.
No one wanted to put their name on the document. So, members of Biden’s staff — political appointees — had to write the brief.
EDITOR’S NOTE The Olympian had nothing to do with the production of a mock newspaper called “The Olympiun” that has been distributed at several locations in Olympia. The mock newspapers contain environmental news and opinions and are similar in appearance to The Olympian.
16 comments:
NYT: White House Attacking Fox Because It Is News, and That's the Problem
The cat is out of the bag at the New York Times. The Times has exposed, albeit passively, the true motivation behind the White House's Fox News attacks.
Contrary to the administration's claims, it is deriding Fox not because it doesn't report the news, but rather because it does.
It is news, after all, when an organization potentially receiving billions in federal funds aids and abets what it thinks is a criminal organization.
It is news when a high-level White House adviser, responsible for the distribution of $80 billion in federal funds, is outed as a communist and a 'truther' conspiracy theorist.
It is news when the president's chief communications officer admits her admiration for a murderous dictator.
...officials at the White House had decided that if anything, it was time to take the relationship to an even more confrontational level.
The spur: Executives at other news organizations, including The New York Times, had publicly said that their newsrooms had not been fast enough in following stories that Fox News, to the administration's chagrin, had been heavily covering through the summer and early fall -namely, past statements and affiliations of the White House adviser Van Jones that ultimately led to his resignation and questions surrounding the community activist group Acorn...
There followed, beginning in earnest more than two weeks ago, an intensified volley of White House comments describing Fox as "not a news network."
"It was an amalgam of stories covered, and our assessment of how others were dealing with those stories, that caused us to comment," Mr. Axelrod said in describing the administration's thinking...
Mr. Clemente suggested that the fight was part of a larger White House strategy to marginalize critics. He cited a report in Politico about a strategy session in August at which officials discussed plans to move more aggressively against opponents...
As Rich Lowry stated at The Corner, "their problem is not that Fox isn't a real news organization, their problem is that it is."
CBS exposes Obama administration lies about blocking Fox News (Examiner)
The Obama administration now claims it did not try to exclude Fox News from Thursday's round of network interviews with pay czar Ken Feinberg.
A treasury department spokesperson claimed, "There was no plot to exclude Fox News, and they had the same interview that their competitors did. Much ado about absolutely nothing".
Unfortunately for the Obama administration, four other networks are fully aware of the situation and have proof that the treasury department is lying.
Fox did have the same interview as their competitors, only because the other networks came to FNC's defense.
They refused to do the interviews with Feinberg unless Fox was given the same opportunity. Fox News Channel is not the only network reporting on this story.
CBS Evening News with Katie Couric did a full length story on the ongoing feud, with reporter Chip Reid describing the other networks' decision to standup to the White House bullying.
“All the networks said that’s it, you’ve crossed the line,” Reid reported.
Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik, who is a frequent detractor of Fox News, was appalled by the White House's blacklisting of Fox.
"What it's really about to me is the Executive Branch of the government trying to tell the press how it should behave.
I mean, this democracy -- we know this -- only works with a free and unfettered press to provide information," Zurawik said.
L.A. Times Fails to Disclose that Author of Fact-Challenged Pro-ACORN Op-Ed Has Been ACORN Consultant PATTERICO
Yesterday I posted about an L.A. Times op-ed by Peter Dreier, who wrote that only two ACORN offices engaged in wrongdoing related to a purported child prostitution ring (at least five did), and who also falsely claimed that no ACORN-registered fraudulent voter ever cast a vote (false; one has been convicted for exactly that).
How could somebody get the facts so badly wrong to ACORN’s benefit? In comments to my post, Bradley J. Fikes tipped us to one possibility:
Dreier has been ACORN’s (presumably paid) consultant. As Dreier’s online bio states:
He has worked closely with a wide range of community organizations, labor unions, and public interest organizations, and has worked as a consultant for a variety of foundations and government agencies, including the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), VISTA, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the MacArthur Foundation, the Boston Foundation, the California AFL-CIO, the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, ACORN, the Industrial Areas Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and others.
Was this disclosed in the L.A. Times piece? Uh, no, it wasn’t.
The entire bio for Dreier at the end of the L.A. Times piece reads:
Peter Dreier is a professor of politics at Occidental College.
His study of media coverage of ACORN can be found here. I’ll be writing Nick Goldberg about this today, as well as Dreier’s errors of fact.
For McClatchy, LA Times, NY Times and Pravda types, we the people who refuse to subscribe to your drivel realize that there are certain stories in the news that are far too important to rely on facts.
ACORN is one, global warming is another. We understand your position, “Fake but accurate” never died.
Graydon AWOL as Vanity Fair cuts staff (NY Post)
VANITY Fair yesterday took some of the deepest staff cuts at Condé Nast, but Editor Graydon Carter didn't deliver the bad news himself.
Although Carter was said to have been at his restaurant, The Monkey Bar, Wednesday night, he was a no show in the office yesterday because he had jetted off on a vacation yesterday morning.
Vanity Fair's layoffs were said to be in the double-digit range, and hit as high as senior editors and as low as fact checkers, and were deep, in part, because Carter largely ignored the edict to chop 5percent late last year.
Additional people will be booted from the contributing editor ranks, a source said. A VF spokeswoman would confirm only that there were layoffs yesterday afternoon.
The ax also finally fell at GQ, with seven staffers let go from the men's fashion magazine.
The total number of people fired this year from S.I. Newhouse's Condé Nast is now believed to be more than 450.
As the third week of carnage came to a close, one source said that the end seemed to be in sight.
The company is expected to have a net loss of $200 million on an ad revenue falloff of more than $400 million compared with a year earlier.
NPR analyst compares Obama to Nixon, issues full apology (Washington Examiner)
It's pretty unremarkable to describe the Obama White House's growing enemies list -- the insurance companies, Chamber of Commerce, Fox News -- as "Nixonian."
But there's one place where, if you venture such an opinion, you'd better be prepared to apologize -- quickly and profusely.
On National Public Radio's "Talk of the Nation" Wednesday, NPR political editor Ken Rudin said the White House campaign against Fox News is a bad idea.
"It's not only aggressive, it's almost Nixonesque," Rudin said. "I mean, you think of what Nixon and Agnew did with their enemies list and their attacks on the media; certainly Vice President Agnew's constant denunciation of the media.
Of course, then it was a conservative president denouncing a liberal media, and of course, a lot of good liberals said, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. That's an infringement on the freedom of press.'
And now you see a lot of liberals almost kind of applauding what the White House is doing to Fox News, which I think is distressing."
It's not the usual thing you hear from NPR analysts. Reaction from the NPR audience was negative, and within 24 hours, Rudin was in backtrack mode. "I made a boneheaded mistake yesterday," Rudin wrote on his NPR blog.
"Comparing the tactics of the Nixon administration -- which bugged and intimidated and harrassed journalists -- to that of the Obama administration was foolish, facile, ridiculous and, ultimately, embarrassing to me.
I should have known better and, in fact, I do know better. I was around during the Nixon years. I am fully cognizant of what they did and attempted to do." "I apologize for a dumb comparison."
Obama Replaces the War on Terror with the War on Critics (Canada Free Press)
For eight years Democrats pounded at the doors of D.C., throwing their own fecal matter around, and claiming that it was only a matter of time until Bush had them all rounded up for being unpatrotic.
And like the frenzied mob at a Black Friday sale waiting for the doors to open, shoving and shoving against the glass, until the doors finally open, and the mob bursts through stomping over any store personnel in the way, Democrats have been completely unable to let go of the attack dog politics of the last 8 years and actually govern.
Instead what we’ve gotten is massive incompetence, massive malfeasance and an enemy of the month. When in doubt the motto of the Obama Administration has been, ATTACK SOMEONE.
Whether it’s Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer or Glenn Beck—the party now in power, but still trapped in the vortex of their own hate, is obsessed with waging a war on all their enemies, both real and imaginary.
Look who's married to Obama's media 'controller'
Attacking Fox News and defending President Barack Obama is a family affair for Anita Dunn, the White House communications director who has blasted Fox as an arm of the Republican Party and talked about "controlling" the news media.
She's married to Robert Bauer, the chief of the political law group at Perkins Coie, the Seattle law firm hired by the White House to defend President Obama in court cases challenging his "natural born" citizenship status in the United States.
Chief WH Economic Advisor Admits $Trillion Stimulus Job Creation Plan is a Bust! (Flopping Aces)
Yet, we're supposed to believe their promises for health care reform?
Readers may recall that the same White House bunch promising a "deficit neutral" health care plan promised that if we passed the $787 billion stimulus ($one trillion after debt cost) that we would save millions of American jobs.
They even put out a chart which showed their projections state by state on the jobs they expected to be created.
Earlier this week, I posted a report from the House Ways and Means Committee Ranking Member which shows that instead of creating millions of new jobs, we have lost an additional 2.7 million since the stimulus bill was rushed through congress.
A reasonable person might say: well, perhaps more jobs will be created later as the stimulus spending increases?
That would conflict with the statement of Christina Romer, Chair of the WH Council of Economic Advisors. In prepared testimony she delivered before Congress on October 22, 2009 she dropped this bombshell:
"Most analysts predict that the fiscal stimulus will have its greatest impact on growth in the second and third quarters of 2009.
By mid-2010, fiscal stimulus will likely be contributing little to growth."
So, we spent a trillion taxpayer dollars and exploded the deficit only to lose 2.7 million jobs?
It gets worse. Romer concluded:
"We enter the fourth quarter of 2009 with the unemployment rate nearing 10 percent and likely to remain severely elevated."
In the video posted at right you can hear the incredulity expressed by the panel of the Fox News program Special Report. No wonder the White House wants to silence Fox News!
High Jobless Rates in Michigan Cities Force Exodus (Michigan Messenger)
The September unemployment stats for Michigan came out this week and they are high — as expected.
Mlive.com highlighted the statistics on a municipal level, showing the five cities with the highest jobless rates are all over 25 percent.
The cities of Highland Park and Pontiac, which leaned heavily on auto-related employment, had the highest unemployment with 35.2 percent of residents reportedly jobless. Both cities have declared bankruptcy in the recent past.
Highland Park recently emerged from state receivership and Pontiac just slipped under state control last year.
While the overall state’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation at 15.3 percent, the top five hardest hit cities in the state are all former automobile production hubs.
According to Mlive.com:
1.Highland Park 35.2%
2. Pontiac 35.2%
3. Detroit 27.9%
4. Flint 26.3%
5. Port Huron 25.7%
Small Business Faces Sharp Rise in Costs of Health Care (NYTimes)
As Congress nears votes on legislation that would overhaul the health care system, many small businesses say they are facing the steepest rise in insurance premiums they have seen in recent years.
Insurance brokers and benefits consultants say their small business clients are seeing premiums go up an average of about 15 percent for the coming year — double the rate of last year’s increases.
HHS Chief Actuary on ObamaCare: Total Health Care Spending Will Go Up, Not Down (BigGovernment.com)
Richard Foster, Chief Actuary for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, released this week to several Congressional offices a financial analysis of HR 3200, the House version of ObamaCare.
He reached some inconvenient conclusions for President Obama and Congressional Leadership:
-“Total national health expenditures under this bill would increase by an estimated 2.7 percent in 2019…”
-“The additional demand for health services could be difficult to meet initially with existing health provider resources and could lead to price increases, cost-shifting, and/or changes in providers’ willingness to treat patients with low-reimbursement health coverage.”
-More than half of the expansion in coverage (18 million out of 34 million) would be from increased Medicaid coverage.
-12 million people would lose employer-sponsored coverage.
-The productivity adjustments to Medicare are “unrealistic” and providers “might end their participation” because the cuts would make serving Medicare beneficiaries unprofitable.
-Medicare Advantage enrollment would decrease by 64 percent (from a projected level of 13.2 million to 4.7 million under the proposal).
As of today, HHS still hadn’t published the analysis on their website, even though it was written by its own staff.
We have a feeling it may never find a home there. So, we’ve brought it to you directly. Full financial analysis below.
CMS OACT – Memo on Financial Impact of H R 3200 09-10-21 –
Doctors Warn Medicare Patients Will Have Fewer Options If Congress Allows 21.5% Reduction In Payment (The Grand Rapids Press)
Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., center, flanked Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., left, and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., discuss "the urgent need for health insurance reform".
GRAND RAPIDS — Senior citizens will find it harder to find a doctor who accepts Medicare if Congress does not stop a 21.5 percent cut in payment rates, say physicians and hospitals.
“We might as well start building bigger emergency rooms, because that’s where people will be if they don’t have access to a regular physician,” said Micki Benz, vice president of development for Saint Mary’s Health Care.
“In the end, people’s care will suffer, and we will all end up paying more.”
Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Lansing, failed to get the needed votes Wednesday for legislation she sponsored that would prevent the rate reduction and eliminate the Medicare sustainable growth rate formula.
Obama Declares Swine Flu a National Emergency... But Won’t Inoculate Daughters (GatewayPundit)
Barack Obama declared the swine flu outbreak a national emergency today. Over 1,000 people have died from the swine flu in the US this year.
The declaration, signed Friday night and announced Saturday, comes with the disease more prevalent than ever in the country and production delays undercutting the government’s initial, optimistic estimates that as many as 120 million doses of the vaccine could be available by mid-October.
Health authorities say more than 1,000 people in the United States, including almost 100 children, have died from the strain of flu known as H1N1, and 46 states have widespread flu activity.
But, despite the national emergency, Barack and Michelle have decided not to inoculate their two girls against the H1N1 virus.
Obama Can’t Find a Single Pentagon Official to Sign Off on Biden’s Afghanistan Plan
Vice President Joe Biden, for supposed foreign policy wonk in the Obama Administration, can’t find a single military strategist to sign off on his Afghanistan plan.
Bill Roggio at The Weekly Standard Blog reported: If you want to see just how little credence Vice President Joe Biden’s plan for Afghanistan has inside military circles, look no further than this paragraph from an article written by Peter Spiegel and Yochi Dreazen for the Wall Street Journal:
People familiar with the internal debates say Mr. Obama rejected a strictly counter-terror approach during White House deliberations in early October.
One official said Pentagon strategists were asked to draft brief written arguments making the best case for each strategy, but the strategists had difficulties writing out a credible case for the counter-terror approach — prompting members of Mr. Biden’s staff to step in and write the document themselves.
In case that wasn’t clear, not a single strategist in the Pentegon was willing to draft a paper to defend the Biden plan.
No one wanted to put their name on the document. So, members of Biden’s staff — political appointees — had to write the brief.
Unusual front-page note in today's Olympian:
EDITOR’S NOTE
The Olympian had nothing to do with the production of a mock newspaper called “The Olympiun” that has been distributed at several locations in Olympia. The mock newspapers contain environmental news and opinions and are similar in appearance to The Olympian.
http://theolympiun.com
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