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.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Wednesday November 18 -- Got news or an update?
If you have news or an update, leave it in comments. . . .
24 comments:
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Hu Too!… Obama Does It Again- Bows to Hu Jintao (Video) GatewayPundit
Oops… Obama bows again in China to President Hu Jintao.
Watch around the 1:00 minute mark as he makes several small bows, and one deep one:
Lou Dobbs: My downfall at CNN started when Barack Obama became President (nydailynews)
Former CNN veteran Lou Dobbs suggests his form of advocacy journalism fell out of favor when President Obama was elected and his ratings began to decline.
Dobbs, who had come under fire from watchdog groups because of his on-air, anti-immigration stance, told Bill O'Reilly Monday on the Fox News Channel that he never heard directly from CNN management that he made the network look bad - but there was a tonal change when Obama became President.
"You know, I discern more of a difference between then, which was under the Bush administration whom I was criticizing, and now, when it is the Obama administration and an entirely different tone was taken," Dobbs said.
Dobbs abruptly resigned from CNN last week after agreeing that he could no longer operate under CNN's push to avoid airing anchor opinions in prime time.
As for the future, Dobbs reiterated he's going to take his time. " I'm going to remain - I can guarantee you 100 percent - I'm going to remain in the in the public arena," Dobbs said.
AFP: 'Dozens' of layoffs at Associated Press: Guild (AFP Yahoo) Wow, the Associated Press reports some good news for a change.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US news agency the Associated Press (AP) laid off dozens of employees on Tuesday as part of a plan to reduce its global payroll by 10 percent this year, a union statement said.
Bet they didn't cut any of the eleven "Palin fact-checkers."
China questions costs of U.S. healthcare reform (Reuters Blogs)
Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit.
Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.
Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.
Less is more in new breast-cancer screening (ObamaCare Propaganda Alert)The Wall Street Journal
The long-standing recommendation that women age 40 and older at average risk of breast cancer get annual mammograms and the notion that women benefit from doing breast self-examination at home is being turned on its head.
In a nod to the risks of false positives and unnecessary procedures that mammograms can generate, especially in younger women, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines this week saying women in their 40s who have average risk generally don’t need regular screening and that women 50 to 74 should cut back and get mammograms no more than once every two years.
The group calls for a more individualized approach in deciding whether regular mammograms are warranted in cases that don’t involve a family history of the disease or genetic biomarkers that raise a woman’s risk for it.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent, nongovernmental body. Its new recommendations are at odds with those of other high-profile groups such as the American Cancer Society, which stands by its guidance that women in their 40s receive regular mammograms, and could affect the way private insurers and Medicare cover such screenings.
"Money is being wasted on men's prostate exams' -- White House (Fox News Channel)
Yesterday, the Obama gang released a report "proving" that money can be saved on the "wasteful" use of mammography on women under 50, and that for those over 50, the exam should be given only every two years.
Today we learn that Obama is also going after men. According to Fox, Obama has decided that yearly PSA tests need not be given, as it wastes money, as does all the prostate surgery given to men with bad PSAs or other cancer red flags.
ObamaCare hasn't even passed but it's already going down. And for all my fellow seniors who voted for "Hope and Change," live with it -- for as long as you can.
ObamaCare: A raid on Medicare and Social Security? PATTERICO
Senate Maj. Ldr. Harry Reid intended to introduce his version of ObamaCare for the Senate floor this week, but the New York Times is telling us: “don’t count the days.” As has often been the case, the problem has been getting favorable numbers from the Congressional Budget Office:
About 11 p.m. last Tuesday, the budget office sent Mr. Reid 11 pages of questions about his legislation. On Wednesday afternoon Mr. Reid’s staff met with budget office officials. And the back-and-forth continues.
But Mr. Reid has already received some substantial analysis of his measure, and if the numbers had been what he wanted, he would have released a bill by now.
Instead, he has repeatedly gone back to the budget office with variations of the legislation, trying to figure out how to limit the overall cost of the bill while increasing the number of people who would gain health coverage.
Mr. Reid has put forward a proposal to increase the Medicare payroll tax on wealthy taxpayers, in part to help reduce a proposed tax on high-price health insurance plans, which is opposed by organized labor interests.
But the tax on high-price insurance plans is one of the few proposals still included in the legislation that the Congressional Budget Office has said would help slow the growth of the nation’s health care costs.
So Mr. Reid must choose between following the recommendation of experts on health economics and angering a crucial Democratic constituency.
Left unreported is the effect of the two taxes. The intended effect of tax on so-called “Cadillac” health insurance policies is to get people to adjust their compensation, shifting the ratio away from coverage toward wages (whether employees would actually end up with higher wages is debatable).
The CBO accounting of the Baucus poposal made clear that its supposed deficit reduction depended on skimming the new Social Security taxes, perhaps the clearest example of “raiding the trust fund” on record.
Reid apparently hopes to appease Big Labor by reducing the effect of the “Cadillac” tax, but plans to do so by increasing the Medicare payroll tax.
That looks suspiciously like Reid is planning to siphon funds ostensibly collected for Medicare to fund healthcare for non-seniors — i.e., a raid on the Medicare trust fund. Seniors have consistently been one of the groups most opposed to ObamaCare.
Reid’s willingness to raid their safety net will only increase that opposition.
I think this is the Achilles heel of the health care bills. They don’t add up. There is a $500 billion cut in Medicare. We know that won’t happen. It never has.
There is a 21% cut in physicians’ fees. That won’t happen. It has been overridden each year and if they don’t, doctors will abandon Medicare faster than they already are.
That’s $750 billion. The CMS estimates 23 million uninsured after it takes effect. Why bother ? GIve them the money for insurance. It’s cheaper.
Medicare cuts approved by House may affect access to providers (JamieWearingFool)
A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending -- one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system -- would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.
The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.
Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but "so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings" than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.
More generally, the report questions whether the country's network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.
In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, "exacerbating existing access problems" in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Obama ‘Reaches Out’ by Naming ‘Devout’ Muslims to Security Posts (INN)
U.S. President Barack Obama continues to “reach out to Muslims” by appointing them to key security posts amid charges he wrongly ignored internal Muslim terror.
One recent appointee was harshly criticized for appearing on a British-based television station whose host is a member of a radical Muslim group.
President Obama has continued to “reach out Muslims,” as he said in his keynote speech in Cairo last June, and this past week he swore in a Muslim rights advocate to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, shortly after the Fort Hood massacre. HSAC members are involved in expertise on national security.
Is Obama planning a $3 trillion income tax increase? (Reuters)
Did I just see a trail balloon launched?
Over at a Wall Street Journal conference, Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers had this to say about deficit reduction:
But the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers admitted that health reform and a growing economy isn’t enough to bring down the deficit.
She did mention one other place that revenue could come from: letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
Me: Since Obama already wants to get rid of the income and capital gains tax cuts for wealthier Americans that expire at the end of 2010, clearly what Romer is referring to is the rest of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.
Letting all the 2001 cuts — rate reductions, child tax credit marriage penalty relief — expire would raise tax revenues by $2.5 trillion through 2019. (These CBO numbers assume no negative economic feedback impact from higher taxes.) And letting the 2003tax cuts on capital gains and dividends expire would be tantamount to a $350 billion tax increase through 2019.
And none of this includes possible plans for a VAT that could raise $400 billion a year more to close the huge projected gap — maybe 7 percentage points — between spending as a percentage of GDP and revenues as a percentage of GDP.
New debt milestone: United States combined national debt officially hits $12 trillion (The United States Department of the Treasury)
The total combined national debt has just officially hit $12.
In the 300+ days that Obama has been our president, Obama and Pelosi have accumulated more than $1.4 trillion dollars of debt, an astounding rate of increase of nearly $4.7 billion a day.
Congratulations federal government, you're the best! Our children and grandchildren will really appreciate it.
Obama Stimulus Bill ‘Saves or Creates” Thousands of Green Manufacturing Jobs… In China (GatewayPundit)
When the Obama White House is not “saving or creating” fantasy jobs here at home they’re “saving or creating” manufacturing jobs in China.
The Obama Stimulus Plan will help pay for a $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas. The project will mean thousands of new jobs for wind turbine manufacturers...in China.
The Dallas News reported: Two weeks ago, U.S. Renewable Energy Group, led by Dallas investor Cappy McGarr, announced plans to build a $1.5 billion wind energy farm in West Texas.
About a third of the money would come from federal stimulus funds. All of the wind turbines (and much of the remaining investment capital) would come from China.
“We believe that this project will greatly contribute to job creation, the goals of the Obama administration and our desire to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and increase our energy independence,” McGarr said in announcing the deal.
There would be perhaps 330 jobs created in Texas. Most would be temporary construction jobs.
Meanwhile, thousands of Chinese workers in the northeastern industrial city Shenyang would build the labor-intensive turbines.
Most of the wind energy projects seeking money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act rely on foreign-made turbines. Even the industry we have here at home, led by GE, is looking abroad. GE’s technology will power the gearboxes of the turbines for the U.S. Renewable Energy Group. The gearboxes will be made in China.
Twitter Ends List Service After Democratic Favoritism Surfaces (NewsBusters)
Twitter has announced that it will end a list service that blatantly favored Democratic politicians by attracting viewers to their profiles while excluding GOP officials from the service.
The list service provided new Twitter users with lists of prominent message-posters they might like to follow.
Watchdog groups discovered late last month that Democratic officials were prominently listed by the service, and gaining large swaths of followers as a result, while many prominent GOP politicians were excluded.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has since withdrawn his bid for Governor, was one suggested user, and had roughly 1.2 million followers when the Associated Press reported the story on October 27. His opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination also appeared on the lists, and garnered 960,000 followers.
But none of the GOP's gubernatorial contenders appeared on the lists, and all three had fewer than 5,000 followers.
"It's a dumb move," said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, an independent nonpartisan think tank in Los Angeles. "Somebody should have been thinking that it's pretty obvious you don't put just the Democrats on it."
Jane Fonda: Obama Funder Jodie Evans Met With Taliban; Code Pink Gives Terrorists Direct Line to O (Big Government)
Top Obama donor and fundraiser Jodie Evans met with the Taliban in Afghanistan on a recent trip there, according to a report by Jane Fonda of a discussion she had with Evans last month.
The meeting with the Taliban took place just weeks before Evans was videotaped directly handing to President Barack Obama a package of information about her trip to Afghanistan at a high dollar fundraiser in San Francisco.
The meeting with the Taliban was kept secret by Evans and her group Code Pink in reports she and the group posted from Kabul and in interviews with the media and bloggers about the trip.
Fonda, a close friend of Evans, let the secret meeting slip in an account of her dinner with Evans at a fundraiser for the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles:
Terror-abetting attorney ordered to prison immediately ( Lynne Stewart ) Hot Air.
Perhaps Lynne Stewart should have quit while she was behind. Convicted of abetting terror while acting as an attorney for the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, Stewart had remained free on bail while appealing her conviction.
Today, the federal appeals court not only upheld her conviction and revoked her bail, but they also sent the case back to the district court for reconsideration of the shockingly light 28-month sentence Stewart initially received (via JWF):
Disbarred radical lawyer Lynne Stewart is going to jail – maybe for a lot longer than she thought.
A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld her conviction for smuggling messages to her jailed terrorist client, and said she deserves more than the 28 months she got because she may have lied at her trial.
Stewart, 70, is to surrender to U.S. Marshals immediately. The Brooklyn resident has been free on bail since 2006.
Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted Rahman and faced off against Stewart in the courtroom, explains the issue of sentencing more clearly than the initial news reports:
Yes, the sentence — that’s the interesting part. The court has sent Stewart’s case back to the trial judge for reconsideration of her absurdly short 28-month jail term (after the government asked for 30 years). The sentence has divided the appellate panel. All three judges agree that the sentence needs to be reconsidered.
Unreal. Biggest Spender in History Says Too Much Debt Could Fuel Second Recession (GatewayPundit)
Unreal. This is infuriating. After spending nearly a trillion of US taxpayer dollars on his record stimulus bill that produced bogus results Obama says that too much debt could result in a second recession.
Barack Obama’s budget deficit in October was greater than George Bush’s budget deficit for all of 2007.
Obama tripled the national deficit his first year in office and he’s off to a record-setting start in fiscal year 2010.
By the way, as your read this remember- Team Obama told us a few months ago that, “Elevated deficits are beneficial.” Reuters reported:
President Barack Obama gave his sternest warning yet about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying on Wednesday that if government debt were to pile up too much, it could lead to a double-dip recession.
With the U.S. unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, Obama told Fox News his administration faces a delicate balance of trying to boost the economy and spur job creation while putting the economy on a path toward long-term deficit reduction.
His administration was considering ways to accelerate economic growth, with tax measures among the options to give companies incentives to hire, Obama said in the interview with Fox conducted in Beijing during his nine-day trip to Asia.
“It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession,” he said.
Marxist journalists hack types, politicians and the AP have more in common than meets the eye
Ana Marie Cox: Here Is My Review of Sarah Palin’s Book, Which I Have Not Read PATTERICO
I cannot claim to have read Ana Marie Cox’s entire review of Sarah Palin’s new book. I stopped cold when I read this line:
I cannot claim to have completely read “Going Rogue” — I had to skim the last 150 pages (or more than one-third). I only got the thing into my hands late Monday afternoon with a deadline of early evening.
I had to skim the rest of Cox’s five-paragraph “review.” Something about smoking, I think.
Wrong! CBS Early Show Claims Hillary 'Never Seen Before' in Vogue Magazine (NewsBusters)
CBS’s eagerness to embrace Hillary Clinton has outpaced their embrace of facts. In the 8:30 half hour of The Early Show on Tuesday, co-host Harry Smith announced: "Also coming up this morning, you’re going to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton like you have never seen her before, right?
She’s in next month’s Vogue Magazine."
Two minutes later, co-host Maggie Rodriguez returned to the Vogue pictures: "When Hillary Clinton was running for president, her image was tightly controlled, but now that she’s secretary of state, she has started to reveal a whole new side that we’ve never seen before."
In reality, a Vogue photo shoot isn't new: Hillary Clinton was featured on the cover of Vogue in December 1998, smack-dab in the middle of impeachment proceedings. She was also on the cover in December 1993.
Vogue has been an obsequious promotional outlet for Hillary, and CBS spotlighted that again in its story:
Olbermann Crudely Cheers 'Teabagger' as Word of the Year Finalist (NewsBusters)
One of the media members who made the disgusting term "teabagger" popular did a victory lap Tuesday after the New Oxford American Dictionary declared the epithet a finalist for its 2009 Word of the Year.
Like a child giggling as he tries to say "truck" with his fingers in his mouth, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was not only visibly pleased with himself as a result of this announcement, he also used the occasion to juvenilely offer his tiny "Countdown" audience numerous double entendres in perverse celebration.
The following makes one wonder if THIS is what the White House considers REAL NEWS
Dobbs is smart to get away from CNN, a dying cable news channel that is only watched by ultra libs. CNN needs to get more to the middle if they even have a hope of surviving in the future. No credibility equals no viewers.
Palin is doing an hour interview on Hannity tonight. Viewership might exceed 4 million - or maybe 5 million? Has O'Reilly ever had more than 5 million? Olbermann is lucky to draw 1 million viwers a night.
Olbermann and MSNBC are tanking big time. Fox News is kicking their asses. You have to be a clueless, out of touch, far lefty to swallow the crap that comes out of the pie holes of Olbermann, Maddow and Matthews. Add together all their viewers in one night and they'd have fewer than O'Reilly gets all by himself. They must stew about that all day!
24 comments:
Hu Too!… Obama Does It Again- Bows to Hu Jintao (Video) GatewayPundit
Oops… Obama bows again in China to President Hu Jintao.
Watch around the 1:00 minute mark as he makes several small bows, and one deep one:
Lou Dobbs: My downfall at CNN started when Barack Obama became President (nydailynews)
Former CNN veteran Lou Dobbs suggests his form of advocacy journalism fell out of favor when President Obama was elected and his ratings began to decline.
Dobbs, who had come under fire from watchdog groups because of his on-air, anti-immigration stance, told Bill O'Reilly Monday on the Fox News Channel that he never heard directly from CNN management that he made the network look bad - but there was a tonal change when Obama became President.
"You know, I discern more of a difference between then, which was under the Bush administration whom I was criticizing, and now, when it is the Obama administration and an entirely different tone was taken," Dobbs said.
Dobbs abruptly resigned from CNN last week after agreeing that he could no longer operate under CNN's push to avoid airing anchor opinions in prime time.
As for the future, Dobbs reiterated he's going to take his time. " I'm going to remain - I can guarantee you 100 percent - I'm going to remain in the in the public arena," Dobbs said.
AFP: 'Dozens' of layoffs at Associated Press: Guild (AFP Yahoo) Wow, the Associated Press reports some good news for a change.
WASHINGTON (AFP) – The US news agency the Associated Press (AP) laid off dozens of employees on Tuesday as part of a plan to reduce its global payroll by 10 percent this year, a union statement said.
Bet they didn't cut any of the eleven "Palin fact-checkers."
China questions costs of U.S. healthcare reform (Reuters Blogs)
Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit.
Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.
Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.
Less is more in new breast-cancer screening (ObamaCare Propaganda Alert)The Wall Street Journal
The long-standing recommendation that women age 40 and older at average risk of breast cancer get annual mammograms and the notion that women benefit from doing breast self-examination at home is being turned on its head.
In a nod to the risks of false positives and unnecessary procedures that mammograms can generate, especially in younger women, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force issued new guidelines this week saying women in their 40s who have average risk generally don’t need regular screening and that women 50 to 74 should cut back and get mammograms no more than once every two years.
The group calls for a more individualized approach in deciding whether regular mammograms are warranted in cases that don’t involve a family history of the disease or genetic biomarkers that raise a woman’s risk for it.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is an independent, nongovernmental body. Its new recommendations are at odds with those of other high-profile groups such as the American Cancer Society, which stands by its guidance that women in their 40s receive regular mammograms, and could affect the way private insurers and Medicare cover such screenings.
"Money is being wasted on men's prostate exams' -- White House (Fox News Channel)
Yesterday, the Obama gang released a report "proving" that money can be saved on the "wasteful" use of mammography on women under 50, and that for those over 50, the exam should be given only every two years.
Today we learn that Obama is also going after men. According to Fox, Obama has decided that yearly PSA tests need not be given, as it wastes money, as does all the prostate surgery given to men with bad PSAs or other cancer red flags.
ObamaCare hasn't even passed but it's already going down. And for all my fellow seniors who voted for "Hope and Change," live with it -- for as long as you can.
ObamaCare: A raid on Medicare and Social Security? PATTERICO
Senate Maj. Ldr. Harry Reid intended to introduce his version of ObamaCare for the Senate floor this week, but the New York Times is telling us: “don’t count the days.” As has often been the case, the problem has been getting favorable numbers from the Congressional Budget Office:
About 11 p.m. last Tuesday, the budget office sent Mr. Reid 11 pages of questions about his legislation. On Wednesday afternoon Mr. Reid’s staff met with budget office officials. And the back-and-forth continues.
But Mr. Reid has already received some substantial analysis of his measure, and if the numbers had been what he wanted, he would have released a bill by now.
Instead, he has repeatedly gone back to the budget office with variations of the legislation, trying to figure out how to limit the overall cost of the bill while increasing the number of people who would gain health coverage.
Mr. Reid has put forward a proposal to increase the Medicare payroll tax on wealthy taxpayers, in part to help reduce a proposed tax on high-price health insurance plans, which is opposed by organized labor interests.
But the tax on high-price insurance plans is one of the few proposals still included in the legislation that the Congressional Budget Office has said would help slow the growth of the nation’s health care costs.
So Mr. Reid must choose between following the recommendation of experts on health economics and angering a crucial Democratic constituency.
Left unreported is the effect of the two taxes. The intended effect of tax on so-called “Cadillac” health insurance policies is to get people to adjust their compensation, shifting the ratio away from coverage toward wages (whether employees would actually end up with higher wages is debatable).
The CBO accounting of the Baucus poposal made clear that its supposed deficit reduction depended on skimming the new Social Security taxes, perhaps the clearest example of “raiding the trust fund” on record.
Reid apparently hopes to appease Big Labor by reducing the effect of the “Cadillac” tax, but plans to do so by increasing the Medicare payroll tax.
That looks suspiciously like Reid is planning to siphon funds ostensibly collected for Medicare to fund healthcare for non-seniors — i.e., a raid on the Medicare trust fund. Seniors have consistently been one of the groups most opposed to ObamaCare.
Reid’s willingness to raid their safety net will only increase that opposition.
I think this is the Achilles heel of the health care bills. They don’t add up. There is a $500 billion cut in Medicare. We know that won’t happen. It never has.
There is a 21% cut in physicians’ fees. That won’t happen. It has been overridden each year and if they don’t, doctors will abandon Medicare faster than they already are.
That’s $750 billion. The CMS estimates 23 million uninsured after it takes effect. Why bother ? GIve them the money for insurance. It’s cheaper.
Medicare cuts approved by House may affect access to providers (JamieWearingFool)
A plan to slash more than $500 billion from future Medicare spending -- one of the biggest sources of funding for President Obama's proposed overhaul of the nation's health-care system -- would sharply reduce benefits for some senior citizens and could jeopardize access to care for millions of others, according to a government evaluation released Saturday.
The report, requested by House Republicans, found that Medicare cuts contained in the health package approved by the House on Nov. 7 are likely to prove so costly to hospitals and nursing homes that they could stop taking Medicare altogether.
Congress could intervene to avoid such an outcome, but "so doing would likely result in significantly smaller actual savings" than is currently projected, according to the analysis by the chief actuary for the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid. That would wipe out a big chunk of the financing for the health-care reform package, which is projected to cost $1.05 trillion over the next decade.
More generally, the report questions whether the country's network of doctors and hospitals would be able to cope with the effects of a reform package expected to add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the insured, many of them through Medicaid, the public health program for the poor.
In the face of greatly increased demand for services, providers are likely to charge higher fees or take patients with better-paying private insurance over Medicaid recipients, "exacerbating existing access problems" in that program, according to the report from Richard S. Foster of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
Obama ‘Reaches Out’ by Naming ‘Devout’ Muslims to Security Posts (INN)
U.S. President Barack Obama continues to “reach out to Muslims” by appointing them to key security posts amid charges he wrongly ignored internal Muslim terror.
One recent appointee was harshly criticized for appearing on a British-based television station whose host is a member of a radical Muslim group.
President Obama has continued to “reach out Muslims,” as he said in his keynote speech in Cairo last June, and this past week he swore in a Muslim rights advocate to the Homeland Security Advisory Council, shortly after the Fort Hood massacre. HSAC members are involved in expertise on national security.
A breakdown of Obama's stimulus lies (The Examiner)
The Recovery.gov website is full of these fraudulent claims nationwide.
The White House blames the problems on clerical errors, and even claims their tracking of the $787 billion stimulus funds has been a "huge success".
The egregious lies spewing from the mouth's of Obama administration officials have become farcical. The complete breakdown of "clerical errors"....
Is Obama planning a $3 trillion income tax increase? (Reuters)
Did I just see a trail balloon launched?
Over at a Wall Street Journal conference, Christina Romer, chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers had this to say about deficit reduction:
But the chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers admitted that health reform and a growing economy isn’t enough to bring down the deficit.
She did mention one other place that revenue could come from: letting the Bush tax cuts expire.
Me: Since Obama already wants to get rid of the income and capital gains tax cuts for wealthier Americans that expire at the end of 2010, clearly what Romer is referring to is the rest of the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts.
Letting all the 2001 cuts — rate reductions, child tax credit marriage penalty relief — expire would raise tax revenues by $2.5 trillion through 2019. (These CBO numbers assume no negative economic feedback impact from higher taxes.) And letting the 2003tax cuts on capital gains and dividends expire would be tantamount to a $350 billion tax increase through 2019.
And none of this includes possible plans for a VAT that could raise $400 billion a year more to close the huge projected gap — maybe 7 percentage points — between spending as a percentage of GDP and revenues as a percentage of GDP.
Obama Has Failed the World (Climate Change Meltdown)via drudge
US President Barack Obama came to office promising hope and change.
But on climate change, he has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor George W. Bush.
Now, should the climate summit in Copenhagen fail, the blame will lie squarely with Obama.
New debt milestone: United States combined national debt officially hits $12 trillion (The United States Department of the Treasury)
The total combined national debt has just officially hit $12.
In the 300+ days that Obama has been our president, Obama and Pelosi have accumulated more than $1.4 trillion dollars of debt, an astounding rate of increase of nearly $4.7 billion a day.
Congratulations federal government, you're the best! Our children and grandchildren will really appreciate it.
Obama Stimulus Bill ‘Saves or Creates” Thousands of Green Manufacturing Jobs… In China (GatewayPundit)
When the Obama White House is not “saving or creating” fantasy jobs here at home they’re “saving or creating” manufacturing jobs in China.
The Obama Stimulus Plan will help pay for a $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas. The project will mean thousands of new jobs for wind turbine manufacturers...in China.
The Dallas News reported:
Two weeks ago, U.S. Renewable Energy Group, led by Dallas investor Cappy McGarr, announced plans to build a $1.5 billion wind energy farm in West Texas.
About a third of the money would come from federal stimulus funds. All of the wind turbines (and much of the remaining investment capital) would come from China.
“We believe that this project will greatly contribute to job creation, the goals of the Obama administration and our desire to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and increase our energy independence,” McGarr said in announcing the deal.
There would be perhaps 330 jobs created in Texas. Most would be temporary construction jobs.
Meanwhile, thousands of Chinese workers in the northeastern industrial city Shenyang would build the labor-intensive turbines.
Most of the wind energy projects seeking money under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act rely on foreign-made turbines. Even the industry we have here at home, led by GE, is looking abroad. GE’s technology will power the gearboxes of the turbines for the U.S. Renewable Energy Group. The gearboxes will be made in China.
Twitter Ends List Service After Democratic Favoritism Surfaces (NewsBusters)
Twitter has announced that it will end a list service that blatantly favored Democratic politicians by attracting viewers to their profiles while excluding GOP officials from the service.
The list service provided new Twitter users with lists of prominent message-posters they might like to follow.
Watchdog groups discovered late last month that Democratic officials were prominently listed by the service, and gaining large swaths of followers as a result, while many prominent GOP politicians were excluded.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who has since withdrawn his bid for Governor, was one suggested user, and had roughly 1.2 million followers when the Associated Press reported the story on October 27. His opponent in the race for the Democratic nomination also appeared on the lists, and garnered 960,000 followers.
But none of the GOP's gubernatorial contenders appeared on the lists, and all three had fewer than 5,000 followers.
"It's a dumb move," said Bob Stern, president of the Center for Governmental Studies, an independent nonpartisan think tank in Los Angeles. "Somebody should have been thinking that it's pretty obvious you don't put just the Democrats on it."
Jane Fonda: Obama Funder Jodie Evans Met With Taliban; Code Pink Gives Terrorists Direct Line to O
(Big Government)
Top Obama donor and fundraiser Jodie Evans met with the Taliban in Afghanistan on a recent trip there, according to a report by Jane Fonda of a discussion she had with Evans last month.
The meeting with the Taliban took place just weeks before Evans was videotaped directly handing to President Barack Obama a package of information about her trip to Afghanistan at a high dollar fundraiser in San Francisco.
The meeting with the Taliban was kept secret by Evans and her group Code Pink in reports she and the group posted from Kabul and in interviews with the media and bloggers about the trip.
Fonda, a close friend of Evans, let the secret meeting slip in an account of her dinner with Evans at a fundraiser for the Armand Hammer Museum in Los Angeles:
Terror-abetting attorney ordered to prison immediately ( Lynne Stewart ) Hot Air.
Perhaps Lynne Stewart should have quit while she was behind. Convicted of abetting terror while acting as an attorney for the Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman, Stewart had remained free on bail while appealing her conviction.
Today, the federal appeals court not only upheld her conviction and revoked her bail, but they also sent the case back to the district court for reconsideration of the shockingly light 28-month sentence Stewart initially received (via JWF):
Disbarred radical lawyer Lynne Stewart is going to jail – maybe for a lot longer than she thought.
A federal appeals court Tuesday upheld her conviction for smuggling messages to her jailed terrorist client, and said she deserves more than the 28 months she got because she may have lied at her trial.
Stewart, 70, is to surrender to U.S. Marshals immediately. The Brooklyn resident has been free on bail since 2006.
Andy McCarthy, who prosecuted Rahman and faced off against Stewart in the courtroom, explains the issue of sentencing more clearly than the initial news reports:
Yes, the sentence — that’s the interesting part. The court has sent Stewart’s case back to the trial judge for reconsideration of her absurdly short 28-month jail term (after the government asked for 30 years). The sentence has divided the appellate panel. All three judges agree that the sentence needs to be reconsidered.
Unreal. Biggest Spender in History Says Too Much Debt Could Fuel Second Recession (GatewayPundit)
Unreal. This is infuriating.
After spending nearly a trillion of US taxpayer dollars on his record stimulus bill that produced bogus results Obama says that too much debt could result in a second recession.
Barack Obama’s budget deficit in October was greater than George Bush’s budget deficit for all of 2007.
Obama tripled the national deficit his first year in office and he’s off to a record-setting start in fiscal year 2010.
By the way, as your read this remember- Team Obama told us a few months ago that, “Elevated deficits are beneficial.”
Reuters reported:
President Barack Obama gave his sternest warning yet about the need to contain rising U.S. deficits, saying on Wednesday that if government debt were to pile up too much, it could lead to a double-dip recession.
With the U.S. unemployment rate at 10.2 percent, Obama told Fox News his administration faces a delicate balance of trying to boost the economy and spur job creation while putting the economy on a path toward long-term deficit reduction.
His administration was considering ways to accelerate economic growth, with tax measures among the options to give companies incentives to hire, Obama said in the interview with Fox conducted in Beijing during his nine-day trip to Asia.
“It is important though to recognize if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the U.S. economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession,” he said.
Marxist journalists hack types, politicians and the AP have more in common than meets the eye
Ana Marie Cox: Here Is My Review of Sarah Palin’s Book, Which I Have Not Read PATTERICO
I cannot claim to have read Ana Marie Cox’s entire review of Sarah Palin’s new book. I stopped cold when I read this line:
I cannot claim to have completely read “Going Rogue” — I had to skim the last 150 pages (or more than one-third). I only got the thing into my hands late Monday afternoon with a deadline of early evening.
I had to skim the rest of Cox’s five-paragraph “review.” Something about smoking, I think.
Wrong! CBS Early Show Claims Hillary 'Never Seen Before' in Vogue Magazine (NewsBusters)
CBS’s eagerness to embrace Hillary Clinton has outpaced their embrace of facts. In the 8:30 half hour of The Early Show on Tuesday, co-host Harry Smith announced: "Also coming up this morning, you’re going to see Secretary of State Hillary Clinton like you have never seen her before, right?
She’s in next month’s Vogue Magazine."
Two minutes later, co-host Maggie Rodriguez returned to the Vogue pictures: "When Hillary Clinton was running for president, her image was tightly controlled, but now that she’s secretary of state, she has started to reveal a whole new side that we’ve never seen before."
In reality, a Vogue photo shoot isn't new: Hillary Clinton was featured on the cover of Vogue in December 1998, smack-dab in the middle of impeachment proceedings. She was also on the cover in December 1993.
Vogue has been an obsequious promotional outlet for Hillary, and CBS spotlighted that again in its story:
Olbermann Crudely Cheers 'Teabagger' as Word of the Year Finalist (NewsBusters)
One of the media members who made the disgusting term "teabagger" popular did a victory lap Tuesday after the New Oxford American Dictionary declared the epithet a finalist for its 2009 Word of the Year.
Like a child giggling as he tries to say "truck" with his fingers in his mouth, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann was not only visibly pleased with himself as a result of this announcement, he also used the occasion to juvenilely offer his tiny "Countdown" audience numerous double entendres in perverse celebration.
The following makes one wonder if THIS is what the White House considers REAL NEWS
Dobbs is smart to get away from CNN, a dying cable news channel that is only watched by ultra libs. CNN needs to get more to the middle if they even have a hope of surviving in the future. No credibility equals no viewers.
Palin is doing an hour interview on Hannity tonight. Viewership might exceed 4 million - or maybe 5 million? Has O'Reilly ever had more than 5 million? Olbermann is lucky to draw 1 million viwers a night.
Olbermann and MSNBC are tanking big time. Fox News is kicking their asses. You have to be a clueless, out of touch, far lefty to swallow the crap that comes out of the pie holes of Olbermann, Maddow and Matthews. Add together all their viewers in one night and they'd have fewer than O'Reilly gets all by himself. They must stew about that all day!
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