Friday, December 20, 2013

Your weekend news

Update on John Payne: Friday morning, the phone rang and it was John--not much over 50 hours since he came out of surgery for his lung transplant. What a blessing. So we spent the morning with Britnye's sick cat at the vet, and the afternoon visiting John. (The Christmas Tree can wait.) He has walked three times already, the last time while we were there, and is on only one LPM of oxygen. (I'm on 7 LPM to sleep, 10 to 15 to walk slowly.) They hope to take him fully off tomorrow. He said he feels good, better than he has in a long time. His color is good (yes, I know he's a black guy, not a "rosy glow," but his skin had been ashen, now shiny and healthy looking). He was alert and chipper. It gave us great encouragement for when my lung comes. I passed on everyone's good wishes and prayers. Still a long road, so don't stop. We are proud of that brother Marine!

Between the vet and the hospital, we hardly had a moment today, tree not decorated, presents not wrapped, so short post for your weekend.

Let's see. Want to bet the White House releases any more bad Obamacare news late Tuesday, Christmas Eve, when few are paying attention? 

BTW, Winter starts Saturday. Due to "global warming" I'm not expecting it to be much worse than the cold, icy, snow fall we've just had.. .~Bob

Settled Law? Administration announces new ObamaCare exemption
Excerpt: The Obama administration, in an 11th-hour change just before the holiday break, announced a major exemption in ObamaCare that will let people who lost coverage and are struggling to get a new plan sign up for bare-bones policies. The move Thursday to allow potentially hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for "catastrophic" coverage plans was blasted by the insurance industry as a shift that would cause "tremendous instability.” (Another week, another imperial decree changing what they called "settled law," without reference to Congress. They are thrashing about trying to make this disaster wok. ~Bob)

Five Thoughts on the Latest Obamacare Bombshells. By Guy Benson
Excerpt: Say hello to your pre-holiday, late-week, kitchen-sink news dump. Kevin wrote about the administration's new batch of staggering last-minute decrees last night, and Avik Roy has additional details here. The brand new regulations will offer two new options for people whose plans have been canceled due to Obamacare: First, this group will now have the opportunity to purchase "catastrophic" coverage that was previously reserved for people under the age of 30. This might sound like a great deal, but it's not. 

Excerpt: This week Obamacare passed an unflattering milestone. As of today, the Obama administration has spent longer botching the implementation of Obamacare than the Roosevelt and Truman administrations spent fighting and winning the Second World War.

America's First Taste Of Nationalized Health Care Is Bitter. By Charles Krauthammer
Excerpt: The lie of the year, according to Politifact, is "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it." But the story of the year is a nation waking up to just how radical ObamaCare is — which is why it required such outright deception to get it passed in the first place. ObamaCare was sold as simply a refinement of the current system, retaining competition among independent insurers but making things more efficient, fair and generous. Free contraceptives for Sandra Fluke. Free mammograms and checkups for you and me. Free (or subsidized) insurance for some 30 million uninsured. And, mirabile dictu, not costing the government a dime. (OK, here we are. In the middle of a mess even worse than I had predicted, which changes day by day as our President (who keeps telling us he is not a dictator) gets up sometimes in the morning and decides to make a pronouncement that changes the "settled law" of ObamaCare. He has done this so many times now that it's hard to keep count, all in response to the horrific mess that this very badly thought out and horribly set up monster program has created. This is not like GM doing minor fixes to the new car design that have inconvenienced a few drivers. This is like trying to turn a monster SUV with the wrong size engine, a too weak transmission, no brakes, a leaky gas tank, a frame meant for a Pinto, and seats that don't adjust into a smoothly functioning race car. The answer is to scrap the design and start over. Maybe with people from the other side of the aisle involved, and actual experts from the various parts of the health care system too. But of course none of the politicians who were in favor of it will recognize that, no matter what. And this will just keep getting worse. --Del)

ObamaCare: A Christmas Gift from the Poor to the Rich. By Matthew Vadum 
Excerpt: Because Obamacare will go into an actuarial death spiral if enough young people refuse to enroll, and because it’s a day ending in a “Y,” it’s time for yet another sleazy, lowbrow attempt to strong-arm young, healthy Americans into buying overpriced Affordable Care Act-compliant insurance that they don’t need and in many cases can’t afford. And why is such health insurance unaffordable to the young and the poor? Because Obamacare imposes ridiculous, expensive mandates, for example, forcing old men to cover women’s birth control while forcing young people to cover geriatric medical care.

The Obamacare Chaos Strategy’s Outlines Begin to Emerge: De facto single-payer, by any means necessary.
Excerpt: Now we’re supposed to believe, even when given virtually unlimited resources, a 42-month head start, and another three months to make corrections, that the people in our government and the contractors who serve it are so breathtakingly stupid and incredibly incompetent that they can’t properly set up Obamacare’s bureaucracy, create functioning online and offline consumer interfaces, and build the systems required to communicate and interact with insurance companies participating in its federal exchanges. (Again... they CAN'T be this stupid, so....it has to be deliberate. More and more people are arriving at the conclusion that this has all been a game to push the nation into a totally government controlled health care system. I'm not sure yet myself, but the evidence is convincing. The next year will tell us more, as the system continues to show itself to be a disaster. --Del)

Great news: If you like your cancellation, you can keep your cancellation!
Excerpt: Old and busted: “Those cancellations are exactly what we want, because people can sign up for better plans now!” New hotness: Those catastrophic plans we derided for the last five years will work just fine for all of you who got screwed by the Affordable Care Act. Or, hey, don’t bother getting insurance at all!

Other news and comment

Great Christmas Story: Mrs Norman And The Water Biscuits
Excerpt: Christmas is indeed a time of miracles. Perhaps miracles happen so often at Christmas because our hearts are softened and our empathy and sympathy for others is so acute during this season. Or perhaps, by still another miracle, we are listening to the words of a carpenter born some 2,000 years ago. Several years ago, as part of my annual Christmas writings for my children, I wrote a short story titled "Mrs Norman and The Water Biscuits". The story is true. Though this particular miracle did not occur at Christmas, it was certainly the miracle my family desperately needed at the time.

The Nightmare That’s Coming To America
Excerpt: The massive growth of our government is causing many small business to close their doors forever. As a result government jobs increase and the overall middle class become poorer. Thus making America more controllable because they are owned by the government. Once a majority of the people are employed through them, they can garnish wages at will. After all if most people work for them, there will be no competition, so who’s to say they can’t lower the wages on the masses. (When the government is the only employer, you dance to their tune or starve. ~Bob)

Everything is Just Ducky. By Andy Weddington
Excerpt: Until yesterday I'd never heard of Phil Robertson.

MPAC Peddles Debunked Gaza Dam Story
Excerpt: The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) is promoting a story accusing Israel of opening a dam during a freak winter storm, causing massive flooding in the Gaza Strip. ... The problem is that the dam doesn't seem to exist, and the story, originally pushed by Hamas, was debunked days ago by the Times of Israel.

Excerpt: The revelation that Nelson Mandela was trained by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad in 1962 will no doubt bring rise to cognitive dissonance in the most hard-line, anti-Israel campaigners around the world. But spare a moment to think how hard it will be for them to now urge the boycotting of Israel, and hurl words like “apartheid state” around when indeed it was the Zionists that trained the man who ended apartheid: Mandela.

Cops, Doctors Got to Sexually Molest & Humiliate Woman Because Dog Said So
Excerpt: Nothing about this was right. As we move through the sequence, remember that each step after #3 was taken because no drugs or any other illegal item or substance was found on her person. The woman was pulled stopped at random for additional treatment after coming back into El Paso from Juarez. Unlike our previous story, she didn’t even roll a stop sign, allegedly. The border agent inserted his finger between the woman’s buttocks when there was no reason to search her for contraband. (I have no idea if this was a male or female agent.) (I always want to withhold judgment until know the full story. ~Bob)

Liberal Media Agrees That It's Biased
Excerpt: Recently Politico had a round table with some important figures in the national media. From CNN Jake Tapper, from NBC Norah O’Donnell, and from the New York Times Mark Leibovich and Peter Baker. The Moderator, Politico’s Mike Allen, asked a simple question of the panel, “Does the Media lean left? Now, for conservatives who have been paying attention, this isn’t anything new to us. We’ve known for years that the media was liberal. In fact, we’ve known that they’ve known they were liberal… but this admission by some very respectable members of the journalist class should be a wake-up call to liberals who like to pretend our concerns of a liberal media bias is simple paranoia. It isn’t.

Obama Allows Great Lakes Water To Be Sold To China As Half The U.S. Faces Extreme Water Crisis. By Michael Snyder
Excerpt: What in the world is Barack Obama thinking? At a time when the United States is facing the greatest water crisis that it has ever known, Obama is allowing water from the Great Lakes to be drained, bottled and shipped to China and other countries around the globe. Right now, the Great Lakes hold approximately 21 percentof the total supply of fresh water in the entire world. (Americans are used to the availability of fresh water in unlimited amounts, we waste water at a rate that would probably fill the Black Sea in a year or two. But it turns out that fresh water is not a naturally unlimited resource, and crunch time for water is coming at the world fast. And coming at various areas in the USA pretty quickly as well. If southern California doesn't get a hell of a lot of rainfall this year, things are liable to get pretty dicey in both the cities and for some agricultural areas. This is exactly the kind of thing that government is supposed to be looking at and taking measures to avoid a future disaster. The government of California hasn't been doing too well at this, and the feds don't seem to be too focused on it either. I guess we'll wait until one day when people can't get decent flow out of their taps anymore, and farms turn into dust bowls, and then there'll be all the running around and jumping up and down about it. By then, of course it'll be very, very late to start doing anything about it. --Del)

Great Column: Obama Is Too Smart to Fail. By Daniel Greenfield 
Excerpt: Self-esteem is the new intelligence. Obama’s intelligence was manufactured by pandering to the biases and tastes of his supporters. The more he shared their biases and tastes, the smarter he seemed to be and the smarter they felt by having so much in common with such a smart man.

Manila Philippines airport shooting: Gunmen kill four
Excerpt: Gunmen have shot dead four people, including a mayor, at Manila airport in the Philippines, officials have said. Ukol Talumpa, mayor of the southern town Labangan, and three others were hit while waiting outside the airport terminal.

Ugandan MPs pass life in jail anti-homosexual law
Excerpt: Uganda's parliament has passed a bill to toughen the punishment for homosexual acts to include life imprisonment in some cases. The anti-homosexuality bill also makes it a crime punishable by a prison sentence not to report gay people. (This will be a bit tricky for the "all cultures are equally valid" folks--bet they just ignore it. ~Bob)

Is Bitcoin Real Money?
Excerpt: To become a real alternative currency, Bitcoins must be recognized by a majority of businesses and consumers. They must be as safe, or safer, than currency issued by a central bank -- a concern as hackers become more and more sophisticated. And they must be transportable. Currently, the Bitcoin does not meet any of these requirements, and this is why it is trading for much less than its actual convertible U.S. dollar value.

Excerpt: According to the National Retail Federation, Americans spent an average of 4 percent less over the four day Thanksgiving weekend than they did last year. Overall, that means that approximately $1.7 billion less was spent at U.S. retailers compared to last year. It had already been projected that this holiday shopping season would be the worst for retailers since 2009, but if these numbers are any indication it may be even worse than expected. So why is this happening? Well, basically the American consumer is tapped out. 

Turkey Cashes In on the Iran Talks
Excerpt: You may have thought the Geneva deal struck last month between Iran and the P5+1 nations (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany) was a sweet one for Tehran — getting billions in sanctions relief in exchange for mere promises to halt its nuclear program. But Turkey may be an even bigger winner. It just needs to open its doors and wait for Iranian funds to pour in.

Parents unhappy with 'Gangsta Claus' school Christmas play
Excerpt: School officials in Columbia County, Arkansas are doing some damage control, after a school play featured "Gangsta Claus," which included scenes portraying people being killed, including Santa Claus himself and a Walmart clerk.


No comments:

Post a Comment