Why is a local story that’s three months old suddenly exploding online this week? I saw half a dozen people tweet this clip earlier this morning, all with the same expressions of horror and outrage, even though it was first reported in early March. I’d never seen it before myself. My half-assed theory on why it’s catching on belatedly is that someone rediscovered it last week during NSA-palooza and saw it as some kind of metaphor for the futility of protesting state abuse of the power to invade your privacy. The analogy’s not perfect – the marshal here was reportedly fired, although the fate of “multiple employees and managers” who were also under investigation remains, as far as I know, unclear – but the past two weeks have been a “libertarian moment” and this clip is very, very libertarian-friendly. Even Lindsey Graham would think twice about state power after watching it. For a moment. Reluctantly.
Exit quotation from the KLAS report that broke this story: “The I-Teams investigation shows how the internal affairs investigation is revealing much larger problems at family court. There are multiple marshals involved and allegations ranging from sexual assaults to choking a citizen in court.”
PBS’s “Sesame Street” is moving from ABCs and counting numbers to offering its young viewers a bigger lesson in life: how to cope when Mommy or Daddy lands behind bars.
Called “Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration,” the program is distributing “tool kits’’ to schools, community centers and even jails in 10 states – including New York – starting today to help kids ages 3 to 8, organizers said.
According to one “tip’’ for caregivers, “Before you visit your incarcerated loved one, let your child know some of the things she can expect to happen. For instance, ‘We won’t be able to sit in the same room with Mommy, but we can see her through a window and read a story together.’ ’’
“Phone calls are a great way to reach out,’’ another offers. “Help your child to think of something she’d like to tell her incarcerated parent, and give her a photo of her parent to hold during the call.”
And one instructs: “When explaining where an incarcerated parent is, you can say, ‘Daddy is in a place called prison (or jail) for a while. Grownups sometimes go to prison when they break a rule called a law.’ ’’
A video in the kit shows two Muppets – Abby the fairy and lovable monster Rosita – dealing with a little Muppet boy who shamefully admits to them that his father isn’t around to help him build a toy car because he’s in jail.A woman with the kids then tells the boy she knows what he’s going through – because her own dad was in jail when she was his age.
State Department whistleblower Aurelia Fedenisn, who accused the Obama State Department of covering up eight investigations including accusations of child prostitution, says she is being threatened and so are her kids.
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Fedenisn released documents that show the State Department may have covered up allegations of illegal and inappropriate behavior within their ranks.
The State Department whistleblower is Aurelia Fedenisn. She worked in the department’s inspector general’s office until her retirement in December 2012. According to USA Today, she has sought protection as an official whistleblower after the State Department directly threatened her, once at her home. It threatened her with criminal charges when she turned over documents to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) showing evidence that the department had watered down her report, in which she alleged that the department at the highest levels had scuttled eight investigations into a range of criminal wrongdoing.
Dallas lawyer Damon Mathias, who represents Fedenisn, said Fedenisn hired him after two diplomatic security agents spoke in a threatening manner to her teenage children at her home in a Virginia suburb of Washington. The agents arrived at the home to talk to Fedenisn about documents Fedenisn had given to Cruz and told the teens that they demanded to speak to their mom immediately, Mathias said…
…Mathias says Fedenisn’s claim is that agents from State’s Diplomatic Security and other divisions engaged in very questionable and possibly criminal conduct; the Inspector General has been hampered in performing its oversight role; “and the findings they wanted to put in the report end up being left out,” Mathias said. “So you have a coverup of the coverup.”
When Fedenisn and her lawyers met with lawyers for the Office of the Inspector General, the government lawyers demanded she hand over the documents or they would refer the matter to the Department of Justice and Fedenisn would face criminal prosecution, Mathias said.
“They made it clear that they would go after her criminally,” he said.
“We refused to turn over the documents” and Fedenisn is now seeking whistle-blower protection, he said.
Can’t wait to see how the Obama-media lapdogs spin this.
In advance of his successful reelection, President Obama took executive action to defer, for two years, deportation for illegal immigrants who entered the country as children. The result was a flood of requests to the immigration service for the temporary amnesty. As a result of this demand, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch, the Department of Homeland Security cut back on the legally-required criminal background checks of these immigrants. The revelation raises questions of how the agency could handle a blanket amnesty of all illegal immigrants.
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In October 2012, Judicial Watch, acting on a tip from a whistleblower, filed a FOIA request with DHS for “all communications, memoranda, emails, policy guidance, directives, initiatives, and any other correspondence respecting the scope and extent of background checks to be performed (or not) on aliens applying to the Obama administration’s DACA program.” [DACA is the acronym for Obama's temporary amnesty directive.]
Memos and emails obtained through the FOIA reveal that the agency suspended conducting full criminal background checks on illegals applying for the program and, instead, instituted a “lean and lite” process, which allowed the applicant to continue moving through the system.
DHS staff were even informed that that an immigrant’s failure to produce valid identification should not be a reason to delay their application for amnesty. In an October 3 memo, agents were told “Biometric processing should not be refused solely because an applicant does not present an acceptable ID.”
Interestingly, on November 9th, three days after President Obama won reelection, DHS staff were told to stop taking applications for the temporary amnesty. It was somehow no longer necessary to expedient the granting of temporary amnesty.
“The Obama administration seems to be throwing public safety and national security out the door in implementing its illicit and unilateral amnesty program for illegal aliens. The costs and security lapses of this program show that this administration can’t be trusted to implement any of the new security measures in the amnesty bill in the Senate,” Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton said in a statement.
Supporters of the Senate amnesty bill promise that no illegal immigrants will be placed on the path to citizenship without being a full criminal background check. If the agency couldn’t handle applications from several hundred thousand immigrants, how can it handle the 11 million would will be legalized after the bill passes?
It’s not just the number of requests, it’s the scope of them. They’re not demanding records related to particular investigations anymore, they’re demanding huge troves of records on random Americans for data-mining purposes, the same thing Patriot Act co-author Jim Sensenbrenner complained about a few days ago but somehow didn’t foresee in 2001.
“That they were using this (provision) to do mass collection of data is definitely the biggest surprise,” said Robert Chesney, a top national security lawyer at the University of Texas Law School. “Most people who followed this closely were not aware they were doing this. We’ve gone from producing records for a particular investigation to the production of all records for a massive pre-collection database. It’s incredibly sweeping.”…
[I]n the years since [2003], the FBI’s use of Section 215 quietly exploded, with virtually no public notice or debate. In 2009, as part of an annual report to Congress, the Justice Department reported there had been 21 applications for business records to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) under Section 215 – all of which were granted, though nine were modified by the court. (The reports do not explain how or why the orders were modified.)
In 2010, the number of requests jumped to 205 (all again granted, with 176 modified.) In the latest report filed on April 30, the department reported there had been 212 such requests in 2012 – all approved by the court, but 200 of them modified.
These sharp increase in the use of Section 215 has drawn little attention until now because the number of national security letters (NSLs) issued by the bureau has been so much greater – 15,229 in 2012. But FBI Director Mueller, in little-noticed written responses to Congress two years ago, explained that the bureau was encountering resistance from telecommunications companies in turning over “electronic communication transaction” records in response to national security letters.
Google, Facebook, and the gang started to resist NSLs on grounds that they were dubious legally, so Mueller shifted to Section 215 and got back to squeezing them for more and more and more data. Hence Google’s new move, announced just this afternoon: To take some of the heat off itself and push it back onto the feds where it belongs, the company’s lawyer is asking the DOJ to let it publish the number – and scope – of FBI requests for records it receives each year. Right now it’s forbidden to say because Section 215 imposes a gag order on the target of the record request. If Google can’t legally resist complying, at least it can soothe its critics by revealing just how much pressure it’s under from the Most Transparent Administration Ever.
Exit question: This WaPo story is nothing more than a textbook pro-Obama leak authorized by the White House to take some heat off of him and maybe show the virtues of aggressive cyberwarfare, right?
A leading Republican senator on Tuesday described controversial U.S. spy programs as looking far deeper into Americans’ phone records than the Obama administration has been willing to admit, fueling new privacy concerns as Congress sought to defend the surveillance systems.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC., says the U.S. intelligence surveillance of phone records allows analysts to monitor U.S. phone records for a pattern of calls, even if those numbers have no known connection to terrorism.
Graham says the National Security Agency then matches phone numbers against known terrorists. Graham helped draft the surveillance law that governs the surveillance program.
In other words, they’re looking for patterns among the general population that match the phone patterns of people they’ve already identified as terrorists? So they’re not limiting themselves to targeting specific terrorist-linked numbers anymore, but suspicious “patterns” too?
University of Chicago (UC) administrators permanently removed pews from an 88-year old chapel on campus in order to accommodate Islamic prayers, according to a local news report.
. Photograph of the chapel before its pews were removed last year.
Chicago NPR affiliate, WBEZ news, reported on May 23, the pews, which are now part of display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago, were “removed in order to provide Muslim students a place to pray.”
Literature describing the artwork that was created by UC Director of Arts and Public Life Theaster Gates, also describes the removal of the pews as symbol of religious tolerance.
“The pews were recently removed from the chapel in order to offer Muslim students a place to pray, a symbolic gesture of religious tolerance,” according to an official description of the exhibit which includes a “set of repurposed pews from the University of Chicago’s campus church.”
A spokesperson for UC also appeared to confirm the reason for the pews’ removal in a statement emailed to Campus Reform on Friday.
“The benches were removed… to make Bond Chapel a more appropriate comfortable space for its many uses: ceremonial, spiritual, and artistic,” said Susie Allen.
Allen, however, said the primary purpose for the change, which was part of a broader renovation, was to “accommodate the installation of a Boroque-style organ.”
The UC Muslim Student Association (MSA) also announced in its 2012-2013 edition of The Complete Muslims Guide to UChicago that Friday prayers would be held in the chapel once renovation was complete.
“Bond Chapel is where Friday prayers will be held once construction is over,” it says.
“Insha’Allah, Jumuah prayer will be held in Bond Chapel every Friday this quarter,” reads another announcement on the MSA Chicago website.
Though it may seem inconceivable to the taxpayers that fund this atrocity, a major government agency with a monstrous annual budget loses such large sums of money to waste and fraud each year that it has no idea how much and nothing has been done to stop the hemorrhaging.
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What we do know, thanks to a federal audit released this month, is that the amount of public funds lost to waste and fraud amounted to at least $1.1 billion in one recent year alone though it’s likely much higher. The actual figure will never be pinned down because financial management shortcomings at the agency, the Department of Defense (DOD), are too severe.
The estimates “were neither reliable nor statistically valid because of long-standing and pervasive financial management weaknesses and significant deficiencies in the department’s procedures to estimate improper payments,” according to the audit. This means that, unbelievably, the enormous $1.1 billion waste figure listed in the report for fiscal year 2011 isn’t even credible due to “missing invoices and other flawed paperwork, as well as errors in arithmetic.”
Imagine if a private business, or even a household for that matter, was run in this manner. But this is the Pentagon and it has a never-ending cash flow that allows it to spend about a trillion dollars annually like it’s no big deal. The $1.1 billion in “erroneous payments” that year went to a variety of things, including overpayments of military health benefits, civilian, travel and commercial pay to vendors. It’s like a free for all, with large wads of cash distributed everywhere and little to no oversight.
The DOD doesn’t seem terribly worried about it and appears to have no sense of urgency to correct the problem. Investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, found that the DOD hasn’t bothered performing a required risk assessment to identify programs susceptible to significant improper payments or that the agency has implemented procedures to identify root causes of improper payments. Furthermore, the Pentagon hasn’t conducted recovery audits for any of its wasteful programs.
You can’t help but get the feeling that the DOD simply doesn’t care about correcting this rather large problem, which has been documented over two decades in a variety of federal probes. Just a few months ago the DOD Inspector General revealed that a company that had “overbilled” the Pentagon an astounding $757 million was rewarded with a monstrous no-bid contract extension worth more than $4 billion. A Florida lawmaker, John Mica, investigating the matter offered this assessment during a congressional hearing: “This has to be one of the prime poster childs for a government contract spun out of control.”
Prior this that the DOD has been under fire for wasting large sums of money, including $70 billion on dubious projects unrelated to its mission. This includes billions on research that has little or nothing to do with national defense or medical needs related to military service, including $5.2 billion to study fish that overcome political polarization and $1.4 million to create beef jerky treats. You can’t make this stuff up!
Who could forget the billions wasted in Iraq reconstruction efforts? Audit after audit has exposed how the DOD projects are rife with waste, fraud and abuse and that the spending is so out of control the government has lost track of a large portion of the money. At last count at least $6 to $8 billion earmarked to rebuild Iraq by training local police, building schools, hospitals and transportation systems could not even be accounted for.
On the heels of that unbelievable revelation Americans learned that the Pentagon had somehow lost $475 million worth of oil destined for the Afghan National Army. It simply vanished with no trace. It’s unlikely we will ever know how the oil disappeared because the DOD improperly shredded records that could solve the mystery, according to federal auditors.
The last time we heard from Ambassador Gutman (who raised $500,000 for Obama’s campaign) he was blaming Israel for rampant Muslim anti-Semitism.
WASHINGTON – A State Department whistleblower has accused high-ranking staff of a massive coverup – including keeping a lid on findings that members of then-Secretary Hillary Clinton’s security detail and the Belgian ambassador solicited prostitutes.
A chief investigator for the agency’s inspector general wrote a memo outlining eight cases that were derailed by senior officials, including one instance of interference by Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl Mills.
Any mention of the cases was removed from an IG report about problems within the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS), which provides protection and investigates crimes involving any State Department workers overseas.
“It’s a coverup,” declared Cary Schulman, a lawyer representing the whistleblower, former State Department IG senior investigator Aurelia Fedenisn. “The whole agency is impaired.
“Undue influence… is coming from political appointees. It’s coming from above the criminal- investigation unit,” added Schulman, whose client provided the document with the revelations.
Some of the revelations were first reported by CBS News.
Among the bombshell findings:
* A DS agent was called off a case against US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman over claims that he solicited prostitutes, including minors.
“The agent began his investigation and had determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children,” says the memo.
“The ambassador’s protective detail and the embassy’s surveillance detection team… were well aware of the behavior.”
Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy ordered the investigation ceased, and the ambassador remains in place, according to the memo.
Gutman was a big Democratic donor before taking the post, having raised $500,000 for President Obama’s 2008 campaign and helping finance his inaugural.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is really struggling to explain why he told Congress in March (see video above) that the National Security Agency does not intentionally collect any kind of data on millions of Americans. His latest take: It’s an unfair question, he said, like “When are you going to stop beating your wife?” And it seems to depend on the meaning of “collect.”
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“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no,’” Clapper told NBC News on Sunday.
A newly revealed NSA program, however, in which the agency secretly vacuumed up the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers seems to fit the definition of both “data” and “millions of Americans.”
Last week, Clapper said his “no” meant that NSA analysts don’t read Americans’ emails. Some have noted that could explain his earlier answer because “collect” has a precise meaning in intelligence-gathering circles, and it’s along those lines.
On Sunday, Clapper elaborated: “This has to do with of course somewhat of a semantic, perhaps some would say too cute by half. But it is – there are honest differences on the semantics of what – when someone says ‘collection’ to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him.”
Below is the exchange in the March hearing of the relevant Senate Intelligence Committee. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. – who has long warned about excessive government surveillance of Americans, though in veiled terms because the information is classified – had just one question for Clapper. The especially important parts are in bold.
Wyden: “And this is for you, Director Clapper, again on the surveillance front. And I hope we can do this in just a yes or no answer, because I know Sen. Feinstein wants to move on.
“The reason I’m asking the question is, having served on the committee now for a dozen years, I don’t really know what a dossier is in this context. So what I wanted to see is if you could give me a yes or no answer to the question: Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”
Clapper: “No, sir.”
Wyden: “It does not.”
Clapper: “Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently perhaps collect, but not wittingly.”
Wyden: “All right. Thank you. I’ll have additional questions to give you in writing on that point, but I thank you for the answer.”
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On Sunday, NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell pressed him on the NSA collection and on the exchange with Wyden.
Clapper suggested that the senator’s question was unfair.
“As I said, I have great respect for Sen. Wyden. I thought, though in retrospect, I was asked [a] ‘When are you going to stop beating your wife’ kind of question, which is… not answerable necessarily by a simple yes or no,” Clapper said.
“So I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying ‘no,’” Clapper said, indicating that he did not consider it “collection” unless government officials actually reviewed the content of the communications. The NSA program, regarding phone records, scoops up “metadata” – phone numbers called, duration of calls, location and the like.
Data surveillance is an acceptable measure if done within the law, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin told RT while visiting the channel in the capital.
“Such methods are in demand. But you can’t just listen to the phone call in Russia; you need a special order from court. This is how this should be done in civilized society while tackling terrorism with the use of any technical means. If it is in the framework of the law, then it’s ok. If not it is unacceptable,” Putin said answering the question of RT’s Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan. Commenting on Obama’s statement that “You can’t have 100 per cent security and 100 per cent privacy,” Putin disagreed, saying it is possible if done within the law.
Russia said it could consider the possibility of granting political asylum to 29-year-old Edward Snowden, if such request is made. The ex-CIA worker disclosed the existence of PRISM, the National Security Agency’s (NSA) massive data-mining surveillance program, to The Guardian.
“If we receive such a request, we will consider it,” President Vladimir Putin’s press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
The whereabouts of whistleblower remain unknown after he checked out of a Hong Kong hotel. A day earlier Snowden revealed his identity to The Guardian newspaper.
Now we can confirm that Barack Obama is the Worst Economic President in US history.
In fact, if President Obama could go back in time and find a way to double his GDP performance, he’d still hold the record for the worst economic president in the past 60 years.
The Las Vegas Review Journal reported:
You don’t have to be a financial whiz to know that the economy isn’t good. Times are tough, and they’ve been tough for some time. The middle class has shrunk; wealth has diminished; poverty is up; and unemployment, especially for minorities, is nothing short of miserable.
But how bad is it, really?
Up until very recently, this was hard to quantify and thus became in large part a political argument. Today, however, enough time has passed that economists now have data points to scientifically put President Barack Obama’s economic policy in its proper place.
On the old legacy-o-meter, things aren’t looking good for Obama and his supporters, who so desperately wanted him to succeed…
…In an article for Investor’s Business Daily, Anderson writes: “Prior to Obama, the second term of President Bush featured the weakest gains in the gross domestic product in some time, with average annual (inflation-adjusted) GDP growth of just 1.9 percent … but average annual real GDP growth during Obama’s entire first term was less than half as much at a pitiful 0.8 percent.”
That performance will establish Obama firmly as the worst president ever on the economy.
Obama’s GDP growth is less than half as much as the worst president in the past 60 years.
Let that process slowly. That means that if President Obama could go back in time and find a way to double his GDP performance, he’d still hold the record for the worst economic president in the past 60 years.
Sorry if that headline is a bit unfathomable. Now that I can put it into a real sentence: The IRS leaked the National Organization for Marriage’s donor lists to its political opponent, Human Rights Watch. This is illegal. In fact, this is breathtakingly illegal.
NOM wants to know which IRS agent did this.
The IRS is claiming they can’t tell NOM who illegally leaked confidential information, because the law forbidding the disclosure of confidential information also protects the confidentiality of those who illegally leak such information!
In April 2012, the NOM asked the IRS for an investigation. The inspector general’s office gave them a complaint number. Soon they were in touch. Even though the leaked document bore internal IRS markings, the inspector general decided that maybe the document came from within the NOM. The NOM demonstrated that was not true.
For the next 14 months they heard nothing about an investigation. By August 2012, the NOM was filing Freedom of Information Act requests trying to find out if there was one. The IRS stonewalled. Their “latest nonresponse response,” said Mr. Eastman, claimed that the law prohibiting the disclosure of confidential tax returns also prevents disclosure of information about who disclosed them. Mr. Eastman called this “Orwellian.” He said that what the NOM experienced “suggests that problems at the IRS are potentially far more serious” than the targeting of conservative organizations for scrutiny.
This is one of those situations where you cannot write a joke because the joke is actually the facts of the matter. For example: here’s the joke version.
NOM: I want to know who broke the law protecting confidentiality of taxpayer information.
IRS: We can’t tell you that.
NOM: Why not?
IRS: The law protecting the confidentiality of taxpayer information protects the confidentiality of those who break the law of protecting the confidentiality of taxpayer information.
That’s the joke version. It also happens to be the actual account of the IRS’ position.
Senator Marco Rubio appeared on “Al Punto” the Sunday morning news program on Univision. Rubio was asked to respond to the concern that legalization might be delayed and therefore be subjected to the policies of future administration.
Let’s be clear. Nobody is talking about preventing the legalization. The legalization is going to happen. That means the following will happen: First comes the legalization. Then come the measures to secure the border. And then comes the process of permanent residence. What we’re talking about here is the system of permanent residence. As for the legalization, the enormous majority of my colleagues have accepted that it has to happen and that it has to begin at the same time we begin the measures for [the border]. It is not conditional. The legalization is not conditional.
That’s different from what the Junior Senator from Florida says in English. He has always said the bill must secure the borders first.
In April he told Chris Wallace that border security is a trigger for the legalization process:
Yes. Let me tell you why it’s a trigger because, basically, homeland security will have five years to meet that goal. If after five years, Homeland Security has not met that number, it will trigger the Border Commission who will then take over this issue for them. So, they’ll have five years to get it done. They have to create these two plans – a fence plan, there has to be a fence component to this, and a border security plan.
Is Marco Rubio adopting the strategy of the Palestinians first championed by Yasser Arafat? Which was talking peace in English but talking war in Arabic? It certainly seems that way.
Democrats continue to try to dismiss the evidence that Obamacare will dramatically increase the cost of insurance for people who buy it on their own. But on Thursday, the Ohio Department of Insurance announced that, based on the rates submitted by insurers to date, the average individual-market health insurance premium in 2014 will come in around $420, “representing an increase of 88 percent” relative to 2013. “We have warned of these increases,” said Lt. Gov. Mary Taylor in a statement. “Consumers will have fewer choices and pay much higher premiums for their health insurance starting in 2014.”
The rates that Ohio reported are proposed rates; the Department of Insurance still has to formally approve them. “A total of 14 companies proposed rates for 214 plans to the Department. Projected costs from the companies for providing coverage for the required [by Obamacare] essential health benefits ranged from $282.51 to $577.40 for individual health insurance plans.”
It’s called “rate shock,” but it’s not shocking to people who understand the economics of health insurance. In August 2011, Milliman, one of the nation’s leading actuarial firms, predicted that Obamacare would increase individual-market premiums in Ohio by 55 to 85 percent. This past March, the Society of Actuaries projected that the law would increase premiums in that market by 81 percent. Like good players on “The Price is Right,” they both came in just under the Dept. of Insurance’s figure.
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What are the drivers of the increase? According to Milliman, the two biggest drivers are (1) risk pool composition changes, such as forcing the young to subsidize the old, and the healthy to subsidize the sick; and (2) Obamacare’s required expansion of insurance benefits, particularly its mandated reductions in deductibles and co-pays.
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This is a significant concept to understand. Some people have the impression that the main reason that rates are going up under Obamacare is because of the law’s requirement that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions. But that accounts for only a fraction – around a quarter – of the rate hike. The rest comes from all the other things that Obamacare does, such as forcing people to buy richer insurance benefits; to buy products with all sorts of add-ons they might not need; to pay Obamacare’s premium tax; and to pay a lot more, if they’re young, to subsidize older individuals.
There is an important difference between these analyses and the one I conducted for California last week. Ohio has reported average premiums across the individual market, for everyone; for California, I looked at the lowest-priced individual-market plans for 25- and 40-year-old men, both pre- and post-Obamacare. We’ll need to go through Ohio’s individual rate filings, especially after they’ve been approved by the state, to get a more detailed sense of what is going on.
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But the bottom line is this: President Obama and then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised that premiums would go down for those who already have insurance. And yes, for those lower-income folks who benefit from the subsidies provided by other taxpayers, the costs they see may go down. But middle-class Ohioans will pay more in taxes to pay for those subsidies, and more in premiums. It will be interesting to see how those Ohioans feel about that.
UPDATE 1: Dave Dysinger, who runs a growing manufacturing business in Dayton, is worried about being subjected to the employer mandate as premiums in Ohio rise, according to the Dayton Daily News:
Dave Dysinger of the Dayton-based precision machine business, Dysinger Inc., said business is booming, putting pressure on the firm with just under 50 employees to expand its workforce.
But if the company crosses the 50-worker threshold, it would be forced to comply with the provisions of the health care law or pay a fine.
The cost of insurance could skyrocket if Dysinger brings on a fresh new crop of younger workers, but the law would limit how much of that cost he could pass onto his employees in the form of deductibles, co-payments, and coinsurance.
“I am very concerned about what’s going to happen with the cost of health care,” Dysinger said. “But I’m going to save my whining until I actually see what’s going to happen.”
UPDATE 2: For those who are curious about the details of the Society of Actuaries’ estimate about pre-ACA insurance costs (which were cited by the Ohio Department of Insurance), the SOA calculated that “average costs in the non-group market” pre-ACA were $223 per month. The SOA estimates that post-ACA, non-group coverage will cost $403 per month, an increase of 81 percent.
According to SOA, that $223 figure reflects a risk pool in which 21.4 percent had a chronic condition. 1.7 percent of non-group individuals who were “high risk” were outside of that pool. If you incorporate them, the average cost goes up to $254; this leads to a premium increase of 59 percent by the SOA estimates. In other words, 22 percent of the absolute increase is due to guaranteed issue, and 59 percent is due to other factors.
There is one issue to nail down with the Ohio Dept. of Insurance’s figures. The Society of Actuaries data appears to describe medical costs; the Dept. of Insurance figures appear to describe rates. Rates include administrative costs, medical costs do not. If we assume an administrative cost ratio of 20 percent, the SOA baseline is closer to $279, which means that the rate shock is around 51 percent, not 88 percent.
INVESTORS’ NOTE: Publicly-traded insurers who participate in public and private health insurance exchanges include Aetna AET +1.64% (AET), UnitedHealth (UNH), Humana HUM +0.34% (HUM), WellPoint WLP -0.97% (WLP), and Cigna CI +1.52% (CI).
President Obama will announce on Monday that he’s tapping longtime economic adviser Jason Furman to be the next chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, according to a White House official.
The appointment of Furman, who had previously been identified as the leading candidate for the job, will be announced officially by the president on Monday afternoon, according to the official who asked not to be identified because the president has yet to make the announcement. [...]
During his time in the White House, he helped shape the president’s stimulus program at the beginning of Obama’s first term, and he was a core contributor to the shaping of the president’s health care law. More recently, he played a public role in warning that the $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts that went into effect in March could cause dire consequences for the economy.
Federal employees were given advance notice of an April 1 Medicare decision worth billions of dollars to private insurers. And in the weeks before the decision was officially announced, shares in those firms spiked, the Washington Post reports.
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Naturally, the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission suspect Wall Street investors and fed workers engaged in insider trading.
The April 1 decision was about increasing funding to Medicare Advantage by $8 billion
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said last week that his office “reviewed the e-mail records of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services and found that 436 of them had early access to the Medicare decision as much as two weeks before it was made public,” the report notes.
“The number of federal employees with advance knowledge is surely higher; the figures Grassley’s staff compiled did not include people at the White House’s Office of Management and Budget who also saw the information,” the report adds.
“The e-mail records of those employees have not been made available to Grassley.”
The sensitive – and valuable – information was so widely circulated among federal employees that it will no doubt make it difficult to pinpoint the source of the leak (if there was indeed a leak). Also, the fact that so many employees had access to this valuable information calls into question the government’s practice of handling of information coveted by Wall Street insiders.
“This should sound an alarm,” said the Iowa senator. “It should result in better controls to avoid unfair access to information that the average investor could never tap.”
Sen. Grassley said he he plans to introduce legislation that would require “political-intelligence consultants to disclose their activities, as lobbyists are required to do,” the report notes.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services officials do not question Grassley’s headcount of fed employees who were made privy to the April 1 announcement, but they stress that Medicare policy is complex and would require review.
“CMS takes the security and integrity of sensitive information very seriously,” spokesman Brian Cook said in a statement. “Our agency regularly handles sensitive information regarding payment rates, coverage decisions, and other technical policy decisions that need to be safeguarded until public release.”
There are a few things that we all know and accept about human beings, and one of them is that we all need food and water to survive.
But one local nutbagmoron woman wants to challenge that fundamental concept of life.
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Her name is Naveena Shine, and some of her ideas can best be described as being “out there.” The 65-year-old England native who now lives in the Seattle area is aiming big with her goals.
“This will literally save the Earth,” she said of her most recent experiment.
Shine claims she doesn’t need food to survive, and she’s out to prove it to the world.
“Well, the intention of what I’m doing is I want to provide evidence that it is possible, should it be possible, that human beings can live and thrive and do really well without having to eat solid food,” she said.
To prove her point, she quit eating. She’s now living on water and tea with a dab of milk. She claims she hasn’t had a thing to eat since May 3.
Because she knew people would doubt her claims, Shine set up cameras in every corner of her home that record 24 hours a day. When she goes outside, she takes a mobile camera.
It’s all so she can prove to the world that humans don’t need food.
“There’s got to be a point that’s a shift-over point, you either go into starvation and death or you go into finding the place within and without that creates living on light,” Shine said.
She often talks about light – both the kind that comes from the sun and the inner power source she can’t fully define.
She said she sometimes has sudden drops in blood pressure where she gets dizzy and needs to sit down.
Dr. Rich Lindquist from Swedish Hospital doesn’t doubt that Shine can survive for a while on tea and water – maybe as long as three months – but he said it’s a bad idea.
“People can live for extended periods of time, but people need food in order to live,” he said.
Lindquist said the body will cannibalize itself for a while by burning up stored fat and muscle, but that can’t go on forever.
“Long term, over time, if you don’t eat, you die,” he said.
Shine said she originally hoped people would be fascinated by her experiment and sponsor her efforts, but that hasn’t happened.
She insists she’ll stop if she feels like she’s in any danger. She said she’s lost some weight since starting the experiment, but she isn’t gaunt. She also said she’s not hungry.
darcprynce
Dave C
Gatordoug
