Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Barker's Newsbites: Wednesday, April 17, 2013


Two days after the Boston bombings... we still don't know much.

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7 comments:

William R. Barker said...

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/04/17/world/us-jordan-troops-order/

In a critical indication of growing U.S. military involvement in the civil war in Syria, CNN has learned Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel is ordering the deployment of up to 200 troops to Jordan, according to two Defense Department officials.

(*SHRUG*)

* OBAMA DIDN'T LEARN HIS LESSON FROM LIBYA...? (OR BOSTON...???)

The troops, which will come from the headquarters of the 1st Armored Division at Fort Bliss, Texas, "creates an additional capability" beyond what has been there, one official said.

* A CAPACITY TO DO WHAT...???

* AS TO "CAPACITY," AGAIN, IN ALL SERIOUSNESS... BENGHAZI. WHAT... FUCKING... CAPACITY...???

The group will give the United States the ability to "potentially form a joint task force for military operations, if ordered," he said.

* IF "ORDERED." NOT "IF AUTHORIZED BY CONGRESS." CERTAINLY NOT "IF WAR IS DECLARED."

(*JUST SHAKING MY HEAD*)

The new deployment will include communications and intelligence specialists who will assist the Jordanians and "be ready for military action" if President Barack Obama were to order it, the official said.

* AGAIN... IN ALL SERIOUSNESS... DOESN'T IT SEEM TO YOU THAT JUDGING FROM WHAT OCCURRED IN BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, USA, ON MONDAY, THAT WE NEED TO BE ASSIGNING OUR "INTELLIGENCE SPECIALISTS" TO TASKS CONCERNING HOMELAND DEFENSE?

April 17, 2013 at 5:26 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/04/17/Immigration-bill-contains-free-cell-phone-handouts-dubbed-MarcoPhones

http://shark-tank.net/2013/04/17/move-over-obama-phone-say-hola-to-the-marco-rubio-immigration-phone/

* A COUPLE POINTS: 1) YEAH... I WISH I DIDN'T HAVE TO RELY UPON BREITBART AND THIS "SHARK TANK" BLOG FOR STORIES SUCH AS THIS ONE, BUT THE SAD, PATHETIC TRUTH IS THAT THIS ISN'T THE KIND OF STORY YOU'RE LIKELY TO FIND IN THE MSM ABSENT THEIR REACTING TO THE STORY GOING VIRAL ELSEWHERE.

(*SHRUG*)

* 2) YES... I "GOT" THAT IT IS RANCHERS - AMERICAN RANCHERS - WHO ARE INTENDED TO BE THE KEY RECIPIENTS OF THE NEW "OBAMA/RUBIO SATILLITE PHONES." BUT I ALSO "GET" THAT THE BILL USES THE WORD "INDIVIDUAL," NOT "INDIVIDUAL CITIZEN," AS IS POINTED OUT IN THE SHARK TANK PIECE.

* BOTTOM LINE... WHY WOULD RUBIO WANT TO CREATE YET ANOTHER FRIGGIN' MIDDLE-CLASS... EVEN UPPER-MIDDLE-CLASS... EVEN WEALTHY... FEDERAL ENTITLEMENT WHEN WE'RE BLEEDING RED INK...?!?! LET THE RANCHERS BUY THEIR OWN FRIGGIN' SATILLITE PHONES! LET EVERYONE BUY HIS OR HER OWN PHONES PERIOD...!!!

* LAST BUT NOT LEAST... NOTE: "There is authorized to be appropriated such sums as may be necessary to carry out the grant program established under this subsection." HUH...?!?! NOTICE, FOLKS... NO ACTUAL AMOUNT... NO CEILING... JUST "WHATEVER..."

* DEAR TERRORISTS: 38°53′42″N 77°02′11″W

April 17, 2013 at 5:41 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/345743/obamas-damaging-admission

Buried deep within President Obama’s $3.77 trillion budget is a tiny little proposal to increase Medicaid spending by $360 million.

In a budget as large as this one, $360 million is scarcely worth mentioning. It amounts to less than one-hundredth of one percent of total outlays.

But this 0.01 percent is worth mentioning, because it proves the president’s health-care law will not work.

* READ ON... YOU'LL SEE WHAT THE AUTHOR IS GETTING AT IN A MOMENT...

While many uninsured patients pay their medical bills, the Medicaid program offers “disproportionate share hospital” payments to hospitals that treat lots of patients who don’t.

* AND OBAMA DIDN'T LIKE THIS; INDEED, HE BRAGGED THAT OBAMACARE WOULD CHANGE THIS. INDEED... WITHIN OBAMACARE... THE PRESIDENT FOLLOWED THROUGH! (KEEP READING!)

The president’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act cuts Medicaid’s DSH payments, beginning with a $360 million cut in 2014.

The theory went like this: When the PPACA begins reducing the number of uninsured, hospitals won’t need those subsidies.

* SO... YOU'RE STILL WITH US, RIGHT? OBAMA BELIEVED $360 COULD BE CUT FROM MEDICAID'S DSH PAYMENTS BECAUSE HE BELIEVED THE SAVINGS FROM OBAMACARE WOULD MAKE UP FOR THE CUT.

* NOW HERE'S WHERE IT GETS... umm... INTERESTING:

In his [newest] budget, however, President Obama proposes to increase Medicaid DSH payments by $360 million in 2014, effectively rescinding next year’s cut.

(*SMIRK*)

This deceptively small item has far-reaching significance. With this proposal, President Obama has admitted that:

1. The PPACA is not likely to reduce uncompensated care in 2014.

2. The PPACA won’t reduce the deficit.

3. Hospitals can stop crying poverty.

4. States don’t need to expand Medicaid to protect hospitals.

* OOPS...

* TO BE CONTINUED...

April 17, 2013 at 6:29 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

A central argument in favor of the PPACA was that it would end the “hidden tax” that uninsured individuals impose on the insured.

Supporters claimed that hospitals shift the cost of treating the uninsured to private insurers, which increases premiums for a typical family by more than $1,000 — a wild overestimate, but I digress. They argued that the PPACA’s Medicaid expansion and health-insurance “exchanges” would extend coverage to some 30 million previously uninsured people, thereby eliminating that hidden tax and enabling Congress to reduce DSH payments.

The president’s budget shows that not even he buys that argument now. It states: “To better align DSH payments with expected levels of uncompensated care, the Budget proposes to begin the reductions in 2015, instead of 2014.” That is, the president expects that the Medicaid and exchange subsidies won’t eliminate that $360 million of uncompensated care next year. (And it’s not because some states are choosing not to expand Medicaid — he proposes to rescind the cuts even in states that are expanding it.)

Rescinding the DSH cuts demonstrates why the health-care law’s supposed “deficit reduction” is a mirage.

Washington has a bipartisan tradition of overspending in the current year while enacting spending cuts and tax increases that will take effect in later years. Those “out-year” measures make the ten-year budget figures appear more responsible than they would if current-year policies were continued. When the out-year spending cuts and tax hikes are due to take effect, Washington rescinds them, and the cycle begins again.

* AGAIN... DEAR TERRORISTS: 38°53′42″N 77°02′11″W

Congress has postponed planned cuts in Medicare physician payments every year for the past decade.

* ONE... MORE... TIME: 38°53′42″N 77°02′11″W

This year, Obama rescinded cuts the PPACA would make to private Medicare plans, and both parties are lining up to repeal the law’s medical-device tax and the board it would create to reduce Medicare spending.

* 38°53′42″N 77°02′11″W

The president’s latest DSH proposal is a classic “dessert now, spinach later” ruse. To “pay for” this $360 million increase, he proposed cutting DSH payments by that exact amount in 2015 and 2016. He even proposed an additional $3.6 billion cut — in 2023.

* 38°53′42″N 77°02′11″W

* FOLKS... UNDERSTAND... THIS ISN'T SPEAKER BOEHNER WRITING THIS EXPOSE. IT'S NOT MITCH MCCONNELL. IT'S NOT THE CHAIR OF THE RNC. IT'S NOT EVEN PAUL RYAN OR MARCO RUBIO.

* FOLKS... UNDERSTAND... THESE PEOPLE ARE MAINLY SCUM!

The president’s budget shows that the brave state legislators who have been fighting the Medicaid expansion in states like Ohio and Florida were right all along — and it makes expansion supporters, like Governors Rick Scott (R., Fla.) and John Kasich (R., Ohio), look rather silly.

This relatively small spending item is a big admission that the president’s health-care law simply won’t work, and it should provide encouragement to state officials who are still resisting the massive increase in deficit spending, government bureaucracy, and health-care costs the PPACA embodies.

April 17, 2013 at 6:30 PM
William R. Barker said...

* TWO-PARTER... (Part 1 of 2)

http://takimag.com/article/guns_and_whites_steve_sailer/print#ixzz2QlZtsHHq

* DID YOU KNOW THAT...

...the total death toll from all mass shootings in the entire country over the last three decades is only about as bad as 2012’s murder count in Chicago alone?

As I pointed out in “Guns and Race” a couple of weeks ago, an obscure Obama Administration report noted that blacks accounted for 56.9% of all gun-homicide offenders over the years 1980-2008. During that era, blacks comprised about 13%of the American population, so the black rate of gun homicides was far greater than that of the rest of the population.

(*SHRUG*)

Here’s a graph from another federal source, a 2011 Centers for Disease Control study of age-adjusted death rates, Homicides – United States, 1999-2007:

Being a graph of victimization rates, it somewhat understates the racial gaps in murder rates, but it will do.

http://takimag.com/images/uploads/gunswhites.jpg

* LET'S STICK WITH RACE FOR A MOMENT...

[A] seldom mentioned reason why some white gun owners own guns is so, if worse comes to worst, they can shoot themselves.

The white rate of gun suicides is much higher than the black rate. This isn’t widely recognized because so many gun suicides are old men with terminal diseases who decide to take the quick way out, even if it leaves an awful mess for their womenfolk to clean up. White gun suicides tend to be lowest in urban Catholic states and highest in rural, well-armed, and not very religious Protestant states in the West.

Newspapers seldom mention suicides by the hopelessly ill, so the statistics on gun deaths can be startling, even to the worldly. For example, as part of a gun-control campaign back in 1989, TIME Magazine printed the stories of all 464 people killed by firearms in one week. I flipped through TIME’s portfolio on the outbound flight of a business trip I took with one of Chicago’s top lawyers. The attorney, an urbane fellow whose brother later became a U.S. Senator, looked the magazine over on the way back, then articulated the same reaction I had left unsaid: “Wow, I didn’t know so many old guys shot themselves.”

* TO BE CONTINUED...

April 17, 2013 at 7:44 PM
William R. Barker said...

* CONCLUDING... (Part 2 of 2)

In contrast, everybody knows that blacks commit vastly more violent crimes than whites per capita. This seldom aired but widely surmised statistic is central to understanding the confused debates over gun control.

Consider billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City for the last eleven years, who has made himself the leading advocate of stricter gun-control laws across the country. In his own city, Bloomberg has presided over an extraordinary system of police harassment of young black and Latino males (whom NYPD officers refer to as “the right people”). By early 2012, the NYPD was stopping and frisking 2,200 individuals per day, nearly 85% of them African American or Hispanic.

New York City has had strict gun-control laws for about a century. (Celebrities, the rich, and the politically connected, however, can often score an NYC concealed-carry permit.

New York City’s strict gun-control laws didn’t do law-abiding citizens much good after liberal Republican John Lindsay’s election as mayor in 1965. New York cops reacted to official hostility from on high by retreating to the donut shop for much of their shift. They couldn’t get in trouble for violating anybody’s rights if they weren’t doing anything. Not surprisingly, violent crime rose rapidly, making Central Park notoriously dangerous after dark.

Over the last 20 years, though, the Democrats have lost five straight mayoral elections in New York City, largely due to the legacy of violent crime, which peaked during David Dinkins’s ill-fated 1990-1993 Administration. (New Yorkers salved their liberal consciences by voting 81% for Obama in 2012, but that’s mostly symbolism: The mayor’s race is what matters in New York.) Pro-police political leadership has re-energized the vast and munificently paid NYPD, and the crime rate has dropped.

It appears that from Mayor Bloomberg’s perspective, an armed citizenry — at least below the Bobby De Niro level of A-listness — is an impediment. Who wants do-it-yourself crimefighters blazing away at bad guys but probably plugging random pedestrians instead when the NYPD’s response time to critical incidents is under five minutes?

The way Mayor Bloomberg seems to see it, all that anybody needs to deter crime is a $3.9-billion police-department budget and the heartfelt conviction that civil-rights laws apply only to Southern rednecks, not to New York billionaires.

If your little town can’t afford New York’s 34,500 uniformed officers, well, you should have chosen your level of wealth more wisely.

April 17, 2013 at 7:44 PM
William R. Barker said...

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/17/gang-of-eights-proposal-will-m

The Gang of Eight immigration plan — proposed by four Republican and four Democratic U.S. senators — is expected to double the number of legal immigrants coming into the country with permanent visas over the next decade.

ObamaCare makes legal immigrants eligible for subsidized private health plans on the exchanges, regardless of how recently they arrived.

That would add at least $100 billion to the cost of ObamaCare health plan subsidies, depending on how many new arrivals don’t get covered through an employer.

Two years ago, ObamaCare's authors wanted to avoid the longstanding federal requirement that newcomers wait five years to be eligible for Medicaid. So they made legal immigrants immediately eligible for subsidized private health plans on the insurance exchanges. That provision means that over 6 million legal immigrants who have arrived in the last five years will be eligible for help paying premiums, co=pays and deductibles, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Lucky newcomers[!]

If you’re a citizen with a household income below 138% of poverty ($32,000 for a family of four) and you’re uninsured, the Obama health law will send you to Medicaid as of January 1, 2014.

(Medicaid is generally inferior coverage, because it pays doctors and hospitals so little.)

The better alternative — private coverage — is what legal newcomers will get as of January 1, 2014, affording them higher quality care than low income citizens.

Taxpayers will foot the bill for that special treatment.

The average exchange subsidy for newcomers under $138% of poverty will cost $9,000, according to the Congressional Budget Office. For all eligible newcomers, the tab will likely be $36 billion a year. That’s before immigration "reform."

* THAT'S BEFORE IMMIGRATION "REFORM!"

The Obama administration is making insuring immigrants a top priority. Thousands of translators and “navigators” will be hired to assist immigrants in the language they prefer, according to newly released administration rules.

* YEP... EXPAND THE FEDERAL WORKFORCE... THE HIGHLY PAID, HIGHLY BENEFITED FEDERAL WORKFORCE...

Doubling the number of newcomers admitted with green cards and enrolling the lion’s share of them on the exchanges would increase the cost of ObamaCare by as much as $3 billion in year one, $6 billion in year two, $9 billion in year three, and so on.

On Fox News Sunday, Senator Marco Rubio was grilled about whether the 11 million illegal immigrants given a pathway to future citizenship will become a burden on taxpayers. He said no, because they won’t be eligible for any federal benefits — no food stamps, no ObamaCare, no Medicaid — for the next ten years. “They have to be able to support themselves, so they’ll never become a public charge.” Sounds good.

But Senator Rubio and his fellow reformers need to level with us about the cost of expanding legal immigration.

April 17, 2013 at 10:43 PM

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