Thursday, February 25, 2010
Barker's Newsbites: Thursday, February 25, 2010
Today... something different.
In "honor" of today "Health Reform Summit" in Washington I'm posting "newsbite" digests of three separate articles which appear in three different British newspapers today concerning how "national health care" is working out across the Pond.
First...
Patients were routinely neglected or left “sobbing and humiliated” by staff at an NHS trust where at least 400 deaths have been linked to appalling care.
An independent inquiry found that managers at Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust stopped providing safe care because they were preoccupied with government targets and cutting costs.
[P]atients went unwashed for weeks, were left without food or drink and were even unable to get to the lavatory. Some lay in soiled sheets that relatives had to take home to wash, others developed infections or had falls, occasionally fatal.
The report, which follows reviews by the Care Quality Commission and the Department of Health, said that “unimaginable” suffering had been caused.
Second...
Not a single official has been disciplined over the worst-ever NHS hospital scandal, it emerged last night.
Up to 1,200 people lost their lives needlessly because Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust put government targets and cost-cutting ahead of patient care.
But none of the doctors, nurses and managers who failed them has suffered any formal sanction.
Indeed, some have either retired on lucrative pensions or have swiftly found new jobs.
Former chief executive Martin Yeates, who has since left with a £1million pension pot, six months' salary and a reported £400,000 payoff, did not even give evidence to the inquiry which detailed the scale of the scandal yesterday.
Third...
The Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, yesterday described the appalling treatment of patients at Stafford hospital as "ultimately a local failure". This misses the point. For one thing, Stafford is not the only NHS hospital that has put patients' lives at risk in recent years. Basildon and Colchester hospitals were also discovered to have jeopardised safety in 2009.
What is more, Mr Burnham's efforts to quarantine this disaster suggest an unwillingness to face up to the scale of the problem that has been revealed. The failure in Stafford is not just the tale of one badly run hospital, but the failure of a regulatory system that did little to sound the alarm until very late in the day. From 2005 to 2008 Stafford hospital was judged by regulators and the Government to be performing well. It passed many inspections and the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust even achieved foundation status, supposedly the benchmark of excellence.
Well... there you go folks.
Anyway... check out the Comments Page of this thread for the rest of today's "Barkerbites."
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http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/25/news/economy/initial_claims/
The number of Americans filing for initial unemployment insurance surged to just below the 500,000 level last week, and have climbed more than 12% over the past two weeks, the government said Thursday.
http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=94747
China extended its position as the world’s leading food producer in 2008, when its agricultural production jumped 30%, measured by value, World Trade Organization data show.
Chinese farm production rose to $759,94 billion in 2008, the latest year for which figures are available, from $584,25 billion in 2007, according to a note by the WTO secretariat, circulated on the WTO website and dated February 23.
US agricultural production was $311,23 billion in 2007, the latest year for which data are available...China was already ahead of the US in 1995 when the WTO series starts.
http://www.detnews.com/article/20100225/METRO01/2250391/Detroit-Mayor-Bing-emphasizes-need-to-shrink-city
Detroit Mayor Dave Bing said Wednesday he "absolutely" intends to relocate residents from desolate neighborhoods and is bracing for inevitable legal challenges when he unveils his downsizing plan.
In his strongest statements about shrinking the city since taking office, Bing [said] the city is using internal and external data to decide "winners and losers." The city plans to save some neighborhoods and encourage residents to move from others, he said.
"If we don't do it, you know this whole city is going to go down. I'm hopeful people will understand that," Bing said. "If we can incentivize some of those folks that are in those desolate areas, they can get a better situation."
"If they stay where they are I absolutely cannot give them all the services they require."
He said there's no timeline, price tag or estimate on the number of people who would have to be moved, but said federal funding would be needed.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704240004575085452585399236.html
[By Karl Rove]
The congressional Republicans at today's televised health-care "summit" at the White House naturally want to prevent the president from turning it into a PR stunt. This is no easy task. They'll not only have to point out problems with his plan and offer their own ideas, but correct the president when he makes statements that are not true.
* FUNNY ENOUGH, AS I'M ACTUALLY LISTENING TO THE SUMMIT AS I TYPE AND OVER THE PAST FEW MINUTES I'VE BEEN THINKING TO MYSELF THAT THE AP AND OTHER WIRE SERVICES AND OTHER NEWS ORGANIZATION NEED TO UNMASK THE LIES I JUST HEARD NANCY PELOSI AND HARRY REID SPOUT. YES... IT'S AMAZING... THE DEMS ARE JUST LYING - ONE LIE AFTER THE OTHER; I'M WATCHING IT LIVE!
President Obama has a habit of making false statements, and getting away with them. At a Republican conference in Baltimore last month, for example, he denied that his budget nearly triples the national debt over 10 years. He got away with it because he didn't face follow-up questions or objections.
It's not easy to criticize a president face to face. During my White House years, congressmen and senators would sit in my office, pound the table, and vow to tell the president he mishandled an issue. Then we'd walk the 15 steps to the Oval Office, and they would instantly turn soft. The presidency commands respect. Americans expect the president to be treated with dignity and deference, making criticizing him to his face politically risky.
But it's necessary, because Mr. Obama is basing his health-care pitch on the false premise that he can drive down health-care prices by creating a pricey new entitlement. He also maintains that he can do this without creating a mountain of federal debt or a bureaucracy that will determine when Americans can receive care.
Americans intuitively know these things cannot be true...
If the president says his health-care plan "would reduce costs and premiums for millions of families and businesses," as he did in his State of the Union, Republicans must point out that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says premiums under ObamaCare would be higher than if nothing were done.
* AGAIN... AMAZING... OBAMA IS ACTUALLY DOING THAT RIGHT AT THIS ACTUAL MOMENT!
If Mr. Obama repeats his frequent claim that his proposal "won't add a penny to the deficit," Republicans can point out that to do so means 10 years of Medicare cuts and tax increases to pay for just four full years of the expensive insurance subsidies at the heart of his plan. This gimmick foreshadows a huge flood of red ink in the coming decades.
* AGAIN... THIS IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. THE DEMS ARE BEING DELIBERATELY MISLEADING. FOLKS... YOU JUST CAN'T HAVE REASONABLE, RATIONAL DEBATE WITHOUT TRUTH!
Mr. Obama will probably say that his proposal would give 30 million additional Americans health coverage. Republicans can counter that claim by noting his plan dumps about half of those people into Medicaid, a program even Mr. Obama admits is driving state budgets into the red.
Mr. Obama might say that only wealthy individuals, or insurance, drug and medical-device companies will pay higher taxes under his plan. Republicans can point out that tens of billions in new taxes will be passed on to families paying insurance premiums and patients in need of those drugs and medical devices.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703510204575085922830174374.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_news
The Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify program might be failing to detect one out of two illegal workers whose employment authorizations are screened, outside consultants have told the agency.
An evaluation of E-Verify carried out for DHS by research group Westat found the program couldn't confirm whether information workers were presenting was their own, and, as a result, "many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify," Westat told the department. Westat put the "inaccuracy rate for unauthorized workers" at about 54%.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704804204575069133264585068.html
To bring down costs, we need to change the incentives that govern spending. Right now, $5 out of every $6 of health-care spending is paid for by someone other than the person receiving care—insurance companies, employers, or the government. Individuals are insulated from the reality of what their decisions cost. This breeds overutilization of low-value health care and runaway spending.
To reduce the growth of costs, individuals must take greater responsibility for their health care, and health insurers and health-care providers must face the competitive forces of the market. Three policy changes will go a long way to achieving these objectives: (1) eliminate the tax code's bias that favors health insurance over out-of-pocket spending; (2) remove state-government barriers to purchasing and providing health services; and (3) reform medical malpractice laws.
We estimate these three changes will reduce health-care costs by over $100 billion per year and permanently reduce the number of uninsured by up to 13 million.
[I]ndividuals must be allowed to buy health insurance offered in states other than those in which they live. The current approach of state-by-state regulation has raised costs by reducing competition among insurance companies. It has also allowed state legislatures to impose insurance mandates that raise prices, while preventing residents from getting policies more suitable for their needs.
[R]easonable caps on damages for pain and suffering need to be established in medical malpractice cases. Caps on these kind of damages reduce costs and decrease unnecessary, defensive medicine.
These three policies offer advantages over the president's plan. Instead of raising health-care costs, they fundamentally change incentives among individuals, insurers, and providers to gradually slow the growth in costs by reducing inefficient demand without sacrificing quality and innovation. Instead of radically changing health care overnight, they take an incremental approach, respecting the tremendous uncertainty surrounding the effectiveness of different approaches to rein in costs. And instead of massively increasing government spending, our policies have only a negligible federal budget impact. We estimate that the three policies will reduce federal revenues by approximately $3 billion per year; a small amount of the government's $2.2 trillion revenue intake.
Taken together, the policy changes outlined here will produce a substantial decline in health-insurance premiums. Premiums will fall as workers opt for health plans with higher copayments. Insurance companies will lower premiums in the face of stiffer competition. And doctors will practice less defensive medicine. As tax-deductible, employer-sponsored health-insurance costs decline, workers' taxable wages will rise so as to leave total labor compensation unchanged. The increased tax revenue collected on higher wages nearly offsets the revenue loss from the new health care tax deduction.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522146
Spiking premiums are telling us something important — about why costs are out of control and why ObamaCare won't work. It's time to listen to these price signals, not try to squelch them.
True to form, Democrats were quick to jump on the recent flap in California over the request by Wellpoint Inc.'s Anthem-Blue Cross unit for a 39% increase in premiums for its individual health plans. Forget about the complexities of health economics. This was meant to be a populist morality play.
The administration and its allies jumped on the story with a blast at insurance company greed and a proposal to slap price controls on premiums. It's a new twist on an old theme — that ObamaCare is needed to shield us from insurers' greed.
It doesn't take much digging to figure out that the premium spikes are driven not by a quest for unreasonable profit, but by an inexorable rise in underlying medical costs. Nonprofit plans, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, have been caught in the same spiral as publicly traded insurers such as Wellpoint, Cigna and Humana.
The impact of this cost push has been amplified by the loss of young, healthy customers who reckon the money they save in dropping costly plans is worth the risk of going uncovered. Risk pools, not all that large and robust to begin with in the individual market, get older, sicker and more expensive to cover. The remaining policyholders have to pay that much more.
Medicare chronically runs a deficit. The government, when all is said and done, mostly adds rising health care costs to the federal deficit. Wellpoint and other insurers seeking outsize premium hikes from state regulators are like canaries in the coal mine. They're sending a signal that, at a fundamental level, the system is unsustainable, a catastrophe in the making. The real problem is insurance itself. It's not that insurers are greedy. They're no more so than doctors and hospitals.
ObamaCare...extend the failed model to far more people and subsidize it heavily on the backs of future generations.
Real reform would sharply reduce the role of insurance so that it protects people from financial ruin but leaves them responsible for paying most medical costs out of their own pocket.
Health savings accounts were a tentative step toward such a model. Fleshing it out with tax credits to fund HSAs and basic insurance coverage would be a smart move for Republicans who want to be seen as constructive players.
* PART 1 of 2
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522147
The linchpin of ObamaCare 2.0 is that 31 million uninsured will be covered at little added cost. But in fact, White House estimates for low costs are based on little more than accounting tricks.
The president's plan "puts our budget and economy on a more stable path by reducing the deficit by $100 billion over the next 10 years — and about $1 trillion over the second decade — by cutting government overspending and reining in waste, fraud and abuse," the White House says on its Web site.
Sound too good to be true? It is.
None of the numbers can be believed. The plan is a result of blatantly dishonest accounting for the real costs of the program, while grossly overstating its benefits. Americans should know the actual 10-year cost is closer to $2 trillion over 10 years, not the $950 billion claimed, when all the actual costs are toted up.
How can there be such a wide gap? Mainly because the president's plan doesn't provide benefits until the second half of the first decade[!] (So it pretends that it will "only" cost $950 billion. But once the program kicks in, the full 10-year cost of benefits will be included — at a real current cost of $2 trillion or more.)
[A]s columnist Charles Krauthammer, himself a trained physician, told Fox News' Bill O'Reilly: "It's a trick. The way the Democrats got under (the spending limit imposed by Obama) was by making 98% of the expenditures, the benefits that you and I would get under the bill, occur in the second half of the decade."
That's not all the numbers trickery. Take the plan's so-called "doctor fix." Under current law, physicians are slated for a 21% cut in Medicare fees this year. Those cuts, if enacted, would lead to many doctors leaving Medicare. A proposed "fix" will cost some $229 billion over 10 years. But that new cost won't be included as part of the health care bill. Only phony Medicare "cuts" will.
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2) --
Then there's the promise to remove new taxes on so-called "Cadillac Care" health plans. Originally, Democrats wanted to exclude only their pet unions from these new taxes. But after a huge outcry, the exclusion has been extended to most taxpayers. Now, only the rich will be hit with these grossly unfair levies. [The problem is], the cost of excluding the others doesn't appear to be accounted for. (Even with all this, estimates say the Obama plan will jack up taxes by $629 billion over the decade. That includes tax hikes on the middle class — something candidate Obama vowed he'd never do.)
Then there's the Nebraska reversal. To get the Cornhusker State to go along with ObamaCare, it was exempted from some new Medicare costs. That created an uproar among the other 49 states. So the new bill treats all the states the same. (But again, it doesn't seem to account for the new cost run-up!)
When you tote it all up, the real cost is in excess of $2 trillion. Not the $950 billion as claimed. And deficits will rise by $600 billion, not fall by $1 trillion.
It couldn't be worse, right? Wrong.
Former Office of Management and Budget official James Capretta, now a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, asserts the real 10-year costs of President Obama's bill are likely $2.5 trillion — "with the strong likelihood of far exceeding this amount."
Promised spending cuts, he argues, will never be made because they would put a number of institutions in financial trouble.
Meanwhile, huge subsidies offered to individuals and businesses to buy their insurance through government-run "exchanges" almost guarantee costs will soar far beyond expectations.
Under the Senate's bill, for instance, the subsidy for a family of four with a $60,000 income covered by an employer-based health plan would be $4,500 less in 2016 than for a similar family buying from the heavily subsidized government exchanges. By forcing all Americans to buy insurance, premiums will rise by at least 10%, and possibly higher.
This will decimate the private insurance market and create a de facto nationalized health care system — at much higher cost than today. Because of the dishonesty about costs, Obama's plan is a nonstarter. And Thursday's health care summit is little more than farce.
* PART 1 of 2 --
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=522149
As a powerful senior Democratic senator in 2005, Vice President Joseph Biden condemned bending Senate rules to prevent the minority from filibustering President Bush's judicial nominations.
"I say to my friends on the Republican side: You may own the field right now," Biden said on the Senate floor in the gravest of tones. "But you won't own it forever, and I pray God when the Democrats take back control we don't make the kind of naked power grab you are doing."
The vice president's prayers have apparently gone unheard. The White House, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are mulling their chances of ramming through a big-government health reform through abuse of the budget reconciliation process.
Thanks to the election last month of Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., Democrats lost their 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the upper house. But using reconciliation would require only a simple majority in the Senate.
The Biden comment is just one of a series of samples of televised statements of leading Democrats, mostly from Senate floor speeches, gathered together by Naked Emperor News and featured on the Breitbart.tv Web site.
Nothing so far in the yearlong debate on health reform has exposed the Democrats' rank hypocrisy as much as the viewing of these past statements condemning as an unconstitutional power grab what they now propose to do:
"This is the way democracy ends," now-Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., warned his colleagues on May 19, 2005, "not with a bomb, but with a gavel."
Then-Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois on April 25, 2005, said that bypassing the filibuster through the nuclear option "really I think would change the character of the Senate forever." Back then, Obama claimed "you would essentially have still two chambers, the House and the Senate, but you have simply majoritarian, absolute power on either side, and that's just not what the Founders intended."
* TO BE CONTINUED...
* CONTINUING... (Part 2 of 2)
Then-Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York on May 23, 2005, from the Senate floor blasted that "this president has come to the majority here in the Senate and basically said, 'Change the rules! Do it the way I want it done!' The Senate, Clinton argued, "is being asked to turn itself inside out, to ignore the precedent, to ignore the way our system has worked, the delicate balance that we have obtained, that has kept this constitutional system going — for immediate gratification of the present president."
On March 18, 2005, from the floor, New York Sen. Charles Schumer declared that the nation was "on the precipice of a crisis, a constitutional crisis." He asserted that "the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option. The checks and balances which say that if you get 51% of the vote, you don't get your way 100% of the time. It is amazing. It's almost a temper tantrum," Schumer said of what he and other Democrats are trying to do now. "They want their way every single time, and they will change the rules, break the rules, misread the Constitution so that they will get their way," he added.
Harry Reid himself on May 18, 2005, from the Senate floor said the "right to extended debate is never more important than when one party controls Congress and the White House" — exactly the situation now in 2010. He added that "in these cases a filibuster serves as a check on power and preserves our limited government."
According to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, taking to the floor on May 18, 2005, "the nuclear option, if successful, will turn the Senate into a body that could have its rules broken at any time by a majority of senators unhappy with any position taken by the minority."
She went on to warn that "it begins with judicial nominations. Next will be executive appointments. And then legislation." It would mean "the Senate becomes ipso facto the House of Representatives, where the majority rules supreme, and the party in power can dominate and control the agenda with absolute power."
Today, it is indeed legislation, in the form of their health care bill, to which Feinstein and other Democrats want to apply the nuclear option.
Then-Sen Biden's floor speech was May 23, 2005, and he called the nuclear option "ultimately an example of the arrogance of power" and "a fundamental power grab."
"I don't know of a single piece of legislation that's ever been adopted here," an angry Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut said on the floor on May 18, 2005, "that didn't have a Republican and a Democrat in the lead. That's because we need to sit down and work with each other. "The rules of this institution have required that. That's why we exist. Why have a bicameral legislative body? Why have two chambers? What were the Framers thinking about 218 years ago?" According to Dodd, the Constitution's authors "understood that there is a tyranny of the majority."
Strange how now that they are the majority, Democrats no longer see it as tyranny.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/fa1ccd4c-21ae-11df-acf4-00144feab49a.html
Freddie Mac said yesterday it would probably have to take more taxpayer cash this year to offset continued losses in a fragile housing market.
* "PROBABLY...???" (*SNORT*)
The warning by the government-run mortgage financier came as it revealed it lost $7.8bn in the last three months of 2009, compared with a loss of $23.9bn a year earlier. The deficit in the fourth quarter of last year was inflated by a $1.3bn dividend payment to the US Treasury but is still up on the loss of $5.4bn in the previous quarter.
* $7.8bn IN THREE MONTHS. HMM... SO 12 MONTHS IN A YEAR... $7.8BN X 4 = (GET MY POINT FOLKS...???)
* RE-READ THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH. THINK ABOUT IT. WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT IS TENS OF BILLIONS OF ADDITIONAL EXPECTED LOSSES - LOSSES WE AS TAXPAYERS ARE NOW RESPONSIBLE FOR MAKING GOOD THANKS TO OUR "FRIENDS" IN WASHINGTON.
Tim Geithner, Treasury secretary, yesterday put off until next year a final resolution of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae...
(*SMIRK*)
* OF COURSE HE HAS...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-02-24-stim-jobs_N.htm
It cost more than $500,000 in stimulus funds to create a single highway construction job, largely because of building materials, a USA TODAY analysis of stimulus reports shows.
The $862 billion stimulus package of tax cuts and spending programs requires quarterly reports from recipients. States reported funding more than 382,000 jobs with $20 billion in education aid received from the stimulus package during the last three months of 2009. That's about $52,000 per job. Highway construction, by contrast, supported 26,300 jobs with $13.2 billion in funds received, or about $502,000 per job, during that time.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-02-24/how-obama-used-volcker/?cid=hp:mainpromo3
[By Charlie Gasparino]
The president needed the gravitas of the former Fed chairman to sell his bank reform to Wall Street. But when the big banks didn't buy it, Obama sold him out.
Barack Obama owes Paul Volcker a lot, but he apparently owes the fat cats on Wall Street even more. That’s the only reasonable conclusion that can be made from the president’s timely and, in some ways, bizarre about-face on the former Fed chairman’s plans to reform the financial industry and prevent another meltdown.
As first reported by the New York Post, Volcker’s bank-reform idea—the one trotted out by the president with Volcker standing at his side just hours after Republican Scott Brown won Teddy Kennedy’s seat and vowed to help crush Obama’s economic agenda—has been nixed in favor of a watered-down version that bank chiefs like J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon and other Obama supporters on Wall Street are advocating.
[F]or all its drawbacks, at least the Volcker Plan was the start of a conversation about whether taxpayers should be forced to subsidize the risk-taking activities of Wall Street.
Sources tell me a coalition of Wall Street heavyweights from Dimon to people like Larry Fink, the head of money-management powerhouse BlackRock—Obama supporters all—made their opposition to the plan well-known to the administration. The message was clear: Wall Street, which helped elect Barack Obama with an unprecedented support for a Democratic presidential candidate (Goldman Sachs was the second largest contributor to the president’s campaign), was ready to start backing the opposition of the so-called Volcker Rule. The bottom line: Even as Main Street struggles with severe unemployment, Wall Street still wants its billions in bonuses.
And with that, Volcker, one of the nation’s great economists, was thrown under the bus.
[T]here was something particularly smarmy about how the former Fed chairman was used. Volcker’s greatest achievement was defeating an economic calamity known as stagflation—the combination of high unemployment and high inflation—that scorched the American economy in the late 1970s.
http://www.zerohedge.com/article/watch-out-home-listing-agent-hanging-shower-head
The US Department of Housing and Urban Affairs certainly peed on the parade of those blowing horns and banging drums because they thought the real estate market was recovering. Seasonally adjusted new home sales for January came in at a paltry 309,000, the lowest figure on record, and a gut wrenching decline of 11.2% from the previous month, versus an expected gain of 3.8%.
It just doesn’t get any worse than this.
[T]he harsh reality is that, with enormous federal and state tax incentives soon to expire, the life support that kept this industry alive is about to see the plug kicked out.
Once the Fed ends the TALF, mortgage rates are going up, even if overnight rates remain rock bottom, putting another stake through the heart of this market.
Unemployment is going to stay pitilessly high, sending consumer confidence into another death spiral.
Take a look at the chart of US house prices relative to incomes showing that homes are still expensive...
At least 25% of homeowners are underwater on their mortgages now, and a new wave of foreclosures is imminently going to slam the market. Not only has the negative equity city (Miami, Las Vegas, Stockton) become a feature of the landscape, we have graduated to the negative equity state (Nevada).
There is also the mother of all demographic problems overhanging real estate. Remember the baby boomers? You know, the ones with all the money? As they downsize from McMansions to condos to assisted living facilities, their net shrinkage in demand for housing is going to be in the tens of millions of square feet per year.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100226/ap_on_go_co/us_ethics_rangel
Rep. Charles Rangel, the most powerful tax-writing lawmaker in Congress and a 34-year veteran of Capitol Hill, knowingly accepted Caribbean trips from a corporation in violation of House rules, the House Ethics Committee ruled Thursday, The Associated Press has learned.
Rangel's ethics troubles also present an election-year dilemma for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who led a Democratic takeover of the House in 2006 on a campaign promise to end a "culture of corruption" in the GOP-led Congress.
The committee decided against issuing formal charges against Rangel that could lead to punishment such as a censure.
The ethics committee will issue its findings in a report scheduled to be made public Friday.
Additional ethics investigations of Rangel's finances and fundraising are still under way, but they are not connected to the ruling on the Caribbean travel.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=ahuuwBS8KYq8
The Obama administration may...ban all foreclosures on home loans unless they have been screened and rejected by the government’s Home Affordable Modification Program.
* QUESTION: BY WHAT AUTHORITY...?!?!
“It is one of the many ideas under consideration in the administration’s ongoing housing stabilization efforts,” Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly said in an e-mail. “This proposal has not been approved and there are no immediate planned announcements on the issue.”
She confirmed the authenticity of the document, which hasn’t been made public.
* DIDN'T THERE USED TO BE A WHOLE BRANCH OF LAW KNOWN AS CONTRACT LAW...???
* WE ARE NO LONGER A NATION UNDER THE RULE OF LAW.
The proposed changes would prohibit lenders from initiating new foreclosure actions before loan screening by HAMP and would require lenders to halt existing proceedings for borrowers once they are in a trial repayment plan.
* BUT... BUT... BUT... WHAT OF SANCTITY OF CONTRACT... WHAT OF THE RULE OF LAW... BY WHAT AUTHORITY IS THE CONSTITUTIONAL ROLE OF THE INDEPENDENT JUDICIARY SUBVERTED BY UNILATERAL EXECUTIVE BRANCH DICTATE...?!?!
The Treasury Department will soon release guidance “which will include a set of improved protections for borrowers” in HAMP, Phyllis Caldwell, chief of Treasury’s Homeownership Preservation Office, said today in testimony prepared for a House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee. She didn’t provide details.
Obama’s [original] foreclosure prevention initiative, announced in February 2009 to help as many as 4 million Americans avert foreclosure, has modified 116,297 loans through steps such as lowering interest rates or lengthening repayment terms.
* AND I'M STILL SCRATCHING MY HEAD TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHERE ANY BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT FINDS CONSTITUTIONAL AUTHORITY TO VIOLATE THE CLEAR 5TH AMENDMENT PROTECTION THAT "NOR SHALL PRIVATE PROPERTY BE TAKEN FOR PUBLIC USE WITHOUT JUST COMPENSATION. WELL, FOLKS... DENYING A PRIVATE ENTITY WHAT USED TO BE IN AMERICA LEGALLY BINDING CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS TO COLLECT SPECIFIED INTEREST PAYMENTS SUPPOSEDLY IN FURTHERANCE OF "THE PUBLIC INTEREST" IS CLEARLY AN EXAMPLE OF GOVERNMENT BEHAVING UNCONSTITUTIONALLY. EVEN IF ONE WERE TO CONCEDE THE GOVERNMENT'S AUTHORITY TO ORDER LOW INTEREST, IT WOULD THEN BE UP TO THE GOVERNMENT TO MAKE UP THE DIFFERENCE - PROVIDE "JUST COMPENSATION" - TO THE BANK!
I saw Sarah Palin doing a "spot" on Hannitty's show last night. He was "interviewing" her about the Health Summit. The woman talks and talks and talks and never says a damned thing. She merely strings together a series of conservative-sounding cliches that are so vague that they essentially signify nothing at all.
I continue to be amazed that anybody is taking her seriously, even as a TV personality. There's no there there.
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