First... a bit of samba to celebrate this first day of August 2012!
Next... a rare bit of "defense" of Mitt Romney:
Mitt was right about the London Olympics. What the media and certain pundits refer to as a "gaff" I find to be a refreshing bit of candor.
Mitt was also right about the cultural component being crucial to a successful society.
As regular readers know, I'm not a big fan of Mitt Romney... except in the sense of him being the lesser of two evils vs. Obama. That said... just as I have applauded Obama on the few occasions he's deserved applause, so too will I defend Romney when he deserves to be defended.
Did you know that the guy walked the streets of London the other day...?!?! Had Obama done so - or even Michelle - it would have been big news. But since it was Romney... chances are this is the first you're hearing of it.
Folks... as I've said all along... for this upcoming election... the mainstream liberal media will be pulling out all the stops in order to hurt Romney and help Obama. All I'm saying is... be aware.
Oh... pet peeve! What is it with even many conservatives who tend to portray Hillary Rodham Clinton as (in the past, a "good" Senator, and now) a "good" Secretary of State?
With Hillary at the helm of the Ship of State (Department) we've LOST EGYPT!
The friggin' communist Chinese have set up military bases and a faux "city" government to administer the Paracel Islands, Spratly Islands, and Macclesfileld bank which don't belong to them!
Libya? A "triumph?" It's a friggin' disaster! (Why do you suppose you never hear about it?!)
Iran...? Things were better under Bush!
Jeezus, people, Wake up and smell the coffee! Hillary Rodham Clinton has proven herself a disaster at State. She only looks "good" in contrast to Obama... who is ultimately responsible for all the international disasters under his watch.
Oh, well... anyway... now that I've got that out of my system...
ON TO NEWSBITES!
(FOUND IN THE COMMENTS SECTION!)
5 comments:
http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/Stories/2012/July/25/medicaid-cuts-sidebar.aspx
Illinois Medicaid recipients have been limited to four prescription drugs as the state becomes the latest to cap how many medicines it will cover in the state-federal health insurance program for the poor.
* ILLINOIS... (AS IN... CHICAGO... AS IN... SPRINGFIELD... AS IN... OBAMA!)
* FOLKS... WE CALL THIS "RATIONING."
(*SMIRK*)
Doctors fear the state's cost-cutting move could backfire on patients, who have to get state permission to go beyond the limit.
* FUNNY HOW ON ABORTION IT'S ALWAYS "A MATTER BETWEEN THE WOMAN AND HER DOCTOR" YET FOR ANYTHING ELSE THE LIBS ARE JUST FINE WITH "STATE PERMISSION."
(*SNICKER*)
"We understand the state is trying to get its Medicaid budget under control," says Dr. William Werner, president of the Illinois State Medical Society. "But our concern is it not be a hardship for patients and a hassle for doctors in the execution."
* FOLKS... NOT ONLY DO YOU NOT NECESSARILY GET TO "KEEP YOUR DOCTORS" OR "KEEP YOUR PLAN"... NOPE... YOU MAY NOT EVEN BE ALLOWED TO "KEEP TAKING YOUR MEDICATIONS!"
Sixteen states impose a monthly limit on the number of drugs Medicaid recipients can receive and seven states have either enacted such caps or tightened them in the past two years, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation (KHN is a program of the foundation).
* FOLKS... ALL I'M TRYING TO DO IS EDUCATE THOSE OF YOU WHO THINK THAT WHEN THE GOVERNMENT IS IN CHARGE THAT DENIAL OF CARE GOES DOWN. FRANKLY, IT'S JUST THE OPPOSITE. THE STATS PROVE THIS!
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-real-crash-is-dead-ahead-as-2008-is-forgotten-2012-07-31
“Facebook will become the poster child for the current social-media bubble,” warns economist Gary Shilling in his latest Forbes column, “just as Pets.com was for the dot-com bubble.”
Yes, another crash is coming soon because we’re back playing the same speculative games as we did for years prior to the 2008 crash. Nothing’s changed. And when we collapse, it will be because America’s leaders never do learn the lessons of history. (And never will, if you get the meaning of economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff who surveyed “800 Years of Financial Folly” and saw nothing but repetitive cycles.)
In a BusinessWeek editorial, Peter Coy and Rouben Farzad described the latest cycle in this eternal drama of the bubbles: “It’s as if 2008 never happened. Once again the worlds investors are pumping up bubbles that will probably explode in their faces. After the popping of a real estate bubble led to the first global recession since the 1930s, world markets are frothing like shaken Champagne. Pundits claim to have spotted price increases that are unsupported by economic fundamentals in assets ranging from U.S. farmland to Israeli biotech to Australian housing to Chinese cemetery sites. Commodities have soared. Global junk-bond issuance hit a record … this is the granddaddy of them all, an almost-encompassing bubble right at the heart of monetary systems.”
But the scariest fact is that America’s warring politicians, CEOs and Super Rich can’t even see the obvious link between the 2012 social-media bubble and the 2008 Wall Street credit bubble that nearly bankrupt our monetary system and forced Congress and the Fed into bailing out our too-big-to-manage banks to an estimated $29.7 trillion in cash, credits, cheap money loans and debt relief.
Yes, for the past four years our great "free-market" system has been blowing many new bubbles, like the Facebook bubble that we saw coming months ago. It will soon halt Chairman Bernanke’s nonstop printing press. This bubble will sink like a mafia stiletto deep into the “heart of the monetary systems” worldwide, proving something Nassim Taleb said about Bernanke when Obama reappointed him in 2009: “He doesn’t even know he doesn’t understand how things work,” that his methods make “homeopath and alternative healers look empirical and scientific.”
Peter Schiff, CEO of Euro Pacific Capital, predicted recently..." “We’ve got a much bigger collapse coming, and not just of the markets, but of the economy … like what you’re seeing in Europe right now, only worse … when we hit our real fiscal cliff and a meltdown more severe than the Crash and Great Recession of 2007-2010."
(Schiff was one-upped during the same NewsmaxWorld report by Robert Wiedemer, author of the 2006 “America’s Bubble Economy” and recent “Aftershock” book about the “Next Global Financial Meltdown.” He warns that “the data is clear, 50% unemployment, a 90% stock market drop, and 100% annual inflation,” starting this year.)
* I DON'T SEE A DISASTER OF THAT MAGNITUDE, HOWEVER... I'M CERTAINLY BEARISH. IF ROMNEY WINS THE PSYCHOLOGICAL "HIGH" WILL CREATE A SHORT-TERM ECONOMIC BOOST... BUT THEN ROMNEY WOULD HAVE TO GO TO WORK AND PUSH UNPOPULAR POLICIES THAT WOULD CREATE SHORT-TERM HURT. THE QUESTION IS... IS HE UP FOR THAT? IF NOT... THEN WE'RE WELL AND TRULY FUCKED.
http://www.wusa9.com/news/article/214978/158/WUSA9-Investigation-Finds-30M-GSA-Bonuses-Not-Reported
[President Obama's Executive branch] won't explain, but a "9 News Now" investigation has found $30 million in unreported bonuses for fiscal year 2011 - making the already troubled General Services Administration's total bonus pool nearly $44 million.
The $44 million in bonuses should have been released in May, when the Office of Personnel Management released GSA payroll and bonus information, but until WUSA9 sorted through the newly obtained 13,000 GSA pay records, the troubled agency had reported less than a third of its bonus pay.
GSA officials did not respond to interview requests, but issued a statement saying Acting Administrator Dan Tangherlini "is reviewing all bonuses and the entire performance award system."
(*SARCASTIC CLAP-CLAP-CLAP*)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-senates-anti-leaking-bill-doesnt-address-the-real-sources-of-information/2012/07/31/gJQAPBElNX_story.html
The first question to ask about the draconian anti-leaking legislation passed by the Senate intelligence committee last week is whether it applies uniformly to all branches of government that may disclose classified information unlawfully.
And the answer is: Of course not.
Members of Congress and their staffs are entirely exempted from the new rules that may require for others more polygraphs, more paperwork and the possible loss of pension benefits.
White House and other executive-branch officials (weren’t they the supposed targets?) are also exempt from most of the new rules.
(*JUST THROWING MY HANDS UP*)
[A]fter 35 years of writing about intelligence matters, I want to confide a journalistic secret: Most damaging leaks don’t come from U.S. intelligence agencies. They come from overseas, or they come from the executive branch, or they come, ahem, from Congress. The bill doesn’t address the real source of the leaks it seeks to halt.
* THE AUTHOR OF THIS PIECE... DAVID IGNATIUS. (AND IF YOU DON'T RECOGNIZE THE NAME...) (*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)
It’s worse than that, actually: This bill may chill the conversations that now take place between journalists and intelligence officials when reporters do receive sensitive classified information (from overseas, let’s say) and want to know what damage its publication might cause. Those exploratory conversations will now have to be logged and reported to Congress, as evidence that a leak may be imminent. Guess what? This will mean fewer such conversations.
* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... READ THE FULL COLUMN. THE FEINSTEIN BILL IS YET ANOTHER GOVERNMENT DISASTER IN THE MAKING.
[T]he Senate bill would create a counterintelligence problem while purporting to solve a leak problem.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/312807/burn-down-suburbs-stanley-kurtz
President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs.
Indeed, he intends to abolish them.
Obama is a longtime supporter of “regionalism,” the idea that the suburbs should be folded into the cities, merging schools, housing, transportation, and above all taxation. To this end, the president has already put programs in place designed to push the country toward a sweeping social transformation in a possible second term.
The goal: income equalization via a massive redistribution of suburban tax money to the cities.
* ANYONE WHO THINKS THIS IS BULLSHIT IS SIMPLY UNINFORMED... DELIBERATELY SO IN TERMS OF HOW THE MAJOR MEDIA FAILS TO HIGHLIGHT AN ACKNOWLEDGED GOAL OF THE LEFT AND THE ACADEMIC ESTABLISHMENT. (WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSED URBAN PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT STUDIES AND SUCH ARE ALL ABOUT...?!?!)
One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations.
Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs.
Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. (Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.)
The Obama administration, stocked with “regionalist” appointees, has been advancing this ambitious plan quietly for the past four years. Efforts to discourage driving and to press development into densely packed cities are justified by reference to fears of global warming. (Leaders of the crusade against “sprawl” very consciously use environmental concerns as a cover for their redistributive schemes.)
The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s anti-suburban plans is a little-known and seemingly modest program called the Sustainable Communities Initiative. The “regional planning grants” funded under this initiative — many of them in battleground states like Florida, Virginia, and Ohio — are set to recommend redistributive policies, as well as transportation and development plans, designed to undercut America’s suburbs. (Few have noticed this because the program’s goals are muffled in the impenetrable jargon of “sustainability,” while its recommendations are to be unveiled only in a possible second Obama term.)
Obama’s former community-organizing mentors and colleagues want the administration to condition future federal aid on state adherence to the recommendations served up by these anti-suburban planning commissions. (That would quickly turn an apparently modest set of regional-planning grants into a lever for sweeping social change.)
* FOLKS... (*SIGH*)... THERE'S A LOT HERE. I URGE YOU TO FOLLOW THE LINK AND READ THE ENTIRE 2-PAGE ARTICLE.
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