Aug 24, 2012
By David Jackson
USA TODAY - President Obama's Twitter account has 18.8 million followers -- but more than half of them really don't exist, according to reports.
A new Web tool has determined that 70% of Obama's crowd includes "fake followers," The New York Times reports in a story about how Twitter followers can be purchased.
"The practice has become so widespread that StatusPeople, a social media management company in London, released a Web tool last month called the Fake Follower Check that it says can ascertain how many fake followers you and your friends have," the Times reports.
"Fake accounts tend to follow a lot of people but have few followers," said Rob Waller, a founder of StatusPeople. "We then combine that with a few other metrics to confirm the account is fake."
Notes the Times:
If accurate, the number of fake followers out there is surprising. According to the StatusPeople tool, 71 percent of Lady Gaga's nearly 29 million followers are "fake" or "inactive." So are 70 percent of President Obama's nearly 19 million followers.
Republican opponent Mitt Romney has far fewer Twitter followers -- not quite 900,000 -- but it's a good bet that some of them are fake as well.
Both campaigns have denied buying Twitter followers.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
EX-NFL GREAT TO BLACKS: SAY NO TO OBAMA
Former NY Jets and Oakland Raiders star Burgess Owens tells blacks not to vote for Obama. His E book "It's All About Team"
WATCH THE VIDEO>>
WATCH THE VIDEO>>
So much for small favors: Mexico probe why federal cops fired at US gov car
Aug 25, 1:38 AM EDT
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN and E. EDUARDO CASTILLO
Associated Press
An armored U.S. Embassy vehicle is checked by military personal after it was attacked by unknown assailants on the highway leading to the city of Cuernavaca, near Tres Marias, Mexico, Friday, Aug. 24, 2012. Two U.S. government employees were shot and wounded in an attack on their vehicle south of Mexico City on Friday, a law enforcement official said. (AP Photo/Alexandre Meneghini)
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican authorities are trying to sort out why a U.S. Embassy vehicle was shot up by federal police on a rural back road in mountains south of the capital, leaving two U.S. government workers wounded.
Officials from both nations said the federal officers were chasing criminals Friday morning when a hail of bullets was fired at the embassy sport utility vehicle, but the accounts left many questions unanswered.
The two American workers were taken to a hospital in the nearby resort city of Cuernavaca. One had a gunshot wound in his leg and the other was wounded in the stomach and a hand, said a Mexican government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Hospital officials in Cuernavaca said the wounded were later transferred to a hospital in Mexico City in stable condition.
The U.S. Embassy did not release the names of the injured workers, who it said were heading to a military training base south of Mexico City. Its statement said the employees and a Mexican naval captain traveling with them were fired on by a group of men, and were chased when they tried to escape. The naval officer was not seriously injured.
Mexico's federal police agency acknowledged that its own officers fired on the embassy's SUV, which appeared to be armored and has diplomatic plates. It said the officers were in the area hunting for criminals, but it did not explain what happened.
Its statement said at least four vehicles fired at the embassy vehicle on a road south of the capital, but it did not clarify whether any or all of them were federal police units. Federal police spokesmen did not respond to The Associated Press requesting further comment.
A U.S. official who was briefed on the shooting said later that all the shots were fired by federal police.
Mexican prosecutors said in a statement late Friday that 12 officers based in Mexico City were being held for questioning. Officers based in the capital have jurisdiction only in Mexico City and in four suburbs of neighboring Mexico State, not in Cuernavaca.
The embassy employees were on their way to do training or related work at a military base, the U.S. official said.
"Apparently the police were looking for some bad guys and they ran into each other," said the official, who agreed to discuss the incident only if his name was not used. "It looks like it was just a bad mistake ... they just shot and kept shooting."
The shooting broke out in an area that has been used by common criminals, drug gangs and leftist rebels in the past.
Mexican officials said the Americans' vehicle initially was fired on by a carload of gunmen who first displayed their weapons as the embassy SUV drove along a stretch of dirt road off a highway that connects Mexico City to Cuernavaca. The U.S. driver of the Toyota tried to escape, but three other vehicles joined the original one in pursuing them down the dirt road and onto the highway.
Passengers in all four vehicles fired, and the Mexican naval captain called for help, government officials said. Federal police officers and Mexican soldiers then showed up on the road.
The SUV stopped on the highway, but it wasn't clear if the driver was halted by the chasers or stopped because of the wounds.
The vehicle was riddled with bullets, most concentrated around the passenger-side window. The area was cordoned off and guarded by more than 100 heavily armed marines and soldiers, and the highway was closed for hours. Investigators examined what appeared to be shell casings.
The U.S. Embassy said it was helping Mexico's government in its investigation of the incident. It said the wounded were not agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration or the FBI, but officials for neither country identified what agency they work for.
"They are receiving appropriate medical care and are in stable condition. We have no further information to share at this time," said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas who closely follows the affairs with Mexico, said both countries appeared to be working together to find out what went wrong.
"If the Mexicans are cooperating with U.S. officials to find out exactly what happened here then I don't think this will affect the U.S.-Mexico relationship," he said.
Attacks on diplomatic personnel in Mexico were once considered rare, but this was the third shooting incident in two years.
In 2011, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed and another wounded in a drug gang shooting in northern Mexico.
A drug-gang shooting in 2010 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez killed a U.S. consulate employee, her husband and another man.
While Mexico City has largely been spared the drug violence that hits other parts of the country, Cuernavaca has been the scene of drug gang turf battles involving remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
---
Associated Press writers Mark Stevenson and Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
© 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN and E. EDUARDO CASTILLO
Associated Press
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican authorities are trying to sort out why a U.S. Embassy vehicle was shot up by federal police on a rural back road in mountains south of the capital, leaving two U.S. government workers wounded.
Officials from both nations said the federal officers were chasing criminals Friday morning when a hail of bullets was fired at the embassy sport utility vehicle, but the accounts left many questions unanswered.
The two American workers were taken to a hospital in the nearby resort city of Cuernavaca. One had a gunshot wound in his leg and the other was wounded in the stomach and a hand, said a Mexican government official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Hospital officials in Cuernavaca said the wounded were later transferred to a hospital in Mexico City in stable condition.
The U.S. Embassy did not release the names of the injured workers, who it said were heading to a military training base south of Mexico City. Its statement said the employees and a Mexican naval captain traveling with them were fired on by a group of men, and were chased when they tried to escape. The naval officer was not seriously injured.
Mexico's federal police agency acknowledged that its own officers fired on the embassy's SUV, which appeared to be armored and has diplomatic plates. It said the officers were in the area hunting for criminals, but it did not explain what happened.
Its statement said at least four vehicles fired at the embassy vehicle on a road south of the capital, but it did not clarify whether any or all of them were federal police units. Federal police spokesmen did not respond to The Associated Press requesting further comment.
A U.S. official who was briefed on the shooting said later that all the shots were fired by federal police.
Mexican prosecutors said in a statement late Friday that 12 officers based in Mexico City were being held for questioning. Officers based in the capital have jurisdiction only in Mexico City and in four suburbs of neighboring Mexico State, not in Cuernavaca.
The embassy employees were on their way to do training or related work at a military base, the U.S. official said.
"Apparently the police were looking for some bad guys and they ran into each other," said the official, who agreed to discuss the incident only if his name was not used. "It looks like it was just a bad mistake ... they just shot and kept shooting."
The shooting broke out in an area that has been used by common criminals, drug gangs and leftist rebels in the past.
Mexican officials said the Americans' vehicle initially was fired on by a carload of gunmen who first displayed their weapons as the embassy SUV drove along a stretch of dirt road off a highway that connects Mexico City to Cuernavaca. The U.S. driver of the Toyota tried to escape, but three other vehicles joined the original one in pursuing them down the dirt road and onto the highway.
Passengers in all four vehicles fired, and the Mexican naval captain called for help, government officials said. Federal police officers and Mexican soldiers then showed up on the road.
The SUV stopped on the highway, but it wasn't clear if the driver was halted by the chasers or stopped because of the wounds.
The vehicle was riddled with bullets, most concentrated around the passenger-side window. The area was cordoned off and guarded by more than 100 heavily armed marines and soldiers, and the highway was closed for hours. Investigators examined what appeared to be shell casings.
The U.S. Embassy said it was helping Mexico's government in its investigation of the incident. It said the wounded were not agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration or the FBI, but officials for neither country identified what agency they work for.
"They are receiving appropriate medical care and are in stable condition. We have no further information to share at this time," said Victoria Nuland, a State Department spokeswoman in Washington.
U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, a Democrat from Texas who closely follows the affairs with Mexico, said both countries appeared to be working together to find out what went wrong.
"If the Mexicans are cooperating with U.S. officials to find out exactly what happened here then I don't think this will affect the U.S.-Mexico relationship," he said.
Attacks on diplomatic personnel in Mexico were once considered rare, but this was the third shooting incident in two years.
In 2011, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent was killed and another wounded in a drug gang shooting in northern Mexico.
A drug-gang shooting in 2010 in the border city of Ciudad Juarez killed a U.S. consulate employee, her husband and another man.
While Mexico City has largely been spared the drug violence that hits other parts of the country, Cuernavaca has been the scene of drug gang turf battles involving remnants of the Beltran Leyva cartel.
---
Associated Press writers Mark Stevenson and Adriana Gomez Licon contributed to this report.
© 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
UVA Declines Obama Campaign Request
Posted: Aug 24, 2012 1:17 PM
Updated: Aug 24, 2012 10:47 PM
Reported by Whitney Harris
(NBC29.Com) A University of Virginia spokeswoman says President Barack Obama will not be at the university when he comes to Charlottesville on Wednesday. In a statement released Friday, it was confirmed that the university declined the president's request to speak at UVA.
UVA says the Obama campaign requested the use of one of two outdoor venues - the Amphitheater or the Harrison-Small Library plaza. The university declined the request for a number of reasons including class cancellations, which UVA estimates could be more than 186 classes on the second day of school. The other main reason is they would have to take on the full cost of security, and because of university policy and their federal and state tax exempt status, they would have to offer the same opportunity to the other candidate so as not to show favor for either candidate.
Virginia's top Democrat is playing down the snub. While stopping in Albemarle County, Virginia Democratic Party Chairman Brian Moran told NBC29, "We're proud that he's coming. We're very excited that he's coming to Charlottesville, regardless of where in Charlottesville. Charlottesville is known for the University of Virginia, so I don't think that's going to be missed on anyone."
Other than the denied request from the university, questions still remain about the where and when of the event.
The Albemarle County Democratic Party blocked off 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. on their website's calendar for Obama's visit, but there is still a lot of speculation and uncertainty.
UVA spokesperson Carol Wood confirmed President Obama will not be speaking at the university. Meanwhile, other information coming in Friday is narrowing down the details.
According to the UVA Communications Office earlier on Friday, they offered up John Paul Jones Arena, but were told it "was not academic enough" by the Obama for America campaign.
Meanwhile, Albemarle County Police Chief Steve Sellers says they know of a "proposed" location, but can't say where because of Secret Service restrictions. It could be the nTelos Wireless Pavilion.
nTelos Wireless Pavilion General Manager Kirby Hutto tells NBC29 they've been asked to save the date, but nothing's been confirmed. Regardless of where or when it is, the Obama campaign office says it's ready.
Charlottesville Democratic Co-chair Jim Nix said, "Virginia is one of the battleground states and we're quite excited that Charlottesville is considered one of the more important destinations in Virginia, a place that will play a big role in electing the next president, so we're very excited about it and looking forward to it."
Nix says there's no confirmed time or date for selling tickets for the event, but it's possible that the time will be set for Sunday at noon, if everything is in place by then.
The full details about the president's visit are expected to be released no later than this weekend. We will bring you more information as soon as it becomes available.
The NBC29 newsroom has received the following statement from University of Virginia Spokesperson Carol Wood:
Many of you have asked about whether President Obama will be holding an upcoming campaign rally in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia.
I am writing to tell you that the University met with five members of the Obama Presidential Campaign on Wednesday. The campaign requested the use of one of two outdoor University venues — the Amphitheater or the Harrison-Small Library plaza. After reviewing the campaign's request for either of these two sites and the impact on the University, the University declined the request for the following reasons:
As you know, Aug. 29 is the second day of classes overall and the first day of classes on the Monday/Wednesday/Friday academic schedule.
The use of either of the desired sites would require closing buildings adjacent to the sites for the entire day.
The cancellation of 186 classes would occur if the site is the Amphitheater or closing of the libraries and Newcomb dining if the site is the Harrison-Small plaza. This would result in an extraordinary disruption of the second day of the new semester.
In addition to the disruption to classes, the University would have to bear the full cost of security — a substantial and open-ended expenditure of staff time and money.
By University policy, we would also have to offer the same accommodations and bear the same costs for other candidates. Both our federal and state tax-exempt status requires that we not favor any candidate.
The Secret Service will have final approval on the site chosen and will dictate the security requirements, but at a minimum the buildings adjacent to the event venue would need to be closed on Aug. 29. Adjacent buildings will be searched and secured with officers posted in each starting at least 6 hours prior to the event.
Additional details: The use of McIntire Amphitheater would require the closing of the following buildings on Aug. 29: Bryan Hall, Cocke Hall, Garrett Hall, Minor Hall, and possibly Maury Monroe halls. The parking lots behind Bryan and Clark would have to be closed for the day, as well as a portion of McCormick Road.
The use of the Harrison-Small Special Collections Library would require the closing of the Alderman Library, Special Collections Library, the temporary dining facility, Peabody Hall, and possibly Monroe Hall, the rooms along the West Range and a portion of McCormick Road.
Anti-Obama Movie Stuns Hollywood For #3; Other Newcomers & Holdovers Weak Friday; Only ‘The Expendables 2′ Can Break $10M
By NIKKI FINKE
Saturday August 25, 2012 @ 12:52am PDT
Deadline.Com:
1. The Expendables 2 (Millenium/Lionsgate) Week 2 [3,355 Runs] R
Friday $3.6M (-66%), Weekend $11.7M, Cume $50.2M
2. The Bourne Legacy (Universal) Week 3 [3,652 Runs] PG13
Friday $2.5M, Weekend $8.4M, Cume $84.6M
3. 2016 Obama’s America (Rocky Mountain) NEW [1,091 Runs] PG
Friday $2.4M, Weekend $6.0M, Cume $8.9M
4. ParaNorman (Focus Features) Week 2 [3,455 Runs] PG
Friday $2.3M (-50%), Weekend $7.5M, Cume $27.1M
5. The Campaign (Warner Bros) Week 3 [3,302 Runs] R
Friday $2.1, Weekend $6.7M, Cume $62.9M
6. The Dark Knight Rises (Legendary/WB) Week 6 [2,606 Runs] PG13
Friday $2.0M, Weekend $6.8M, Cume $421.7M
7. The Odd Life Of Timothy Green (Disney) Week 2 [2,598 Runs] PG
Friday $2.0M, Weekend $6.5M, Cume $26.5M
8. Premium Rush (Sony) NEW [2,255 Runs] PG13
Friday $2.0M, Weekend $6.1M
9. Hope Springs (Sony) Week 3 [2,402 Runs] PG13
Friday $1.6M, Weekend $5.5M, Cume $44.6M
10. Hit And Run (Open Road) NEW [2,870 Runs] R
Friday $1.3M, Weekend $3.8M, Cume $4.8M
12. The Apparition (Dark Castle/WB) NEW [810 Runs]
Friday $975K, Weekend $2.6M
FRIDAY 2 PM: The anti-Obama movie 2016 Obama’s America went into wider release around America today and is opening right now in first place at the domestic box office. That’s quite a feat since the Rocky Mountain Pictures political documentary is still playing in only 1,090 North American theaters – or about 1/3 as many theaters as actioner The Expendables 2 (3,355 theaters). But these political documentaries like faith-based films are frontloaded. The Stallone pic from Millenium/Lionsgate still will end Friday and the weekend #1.
Exhibitors are reporting busloads arriving at theaters around the country in pre-organized trips. It also employed much of the same marketing techniques used to garner attention and support for faith-based films, understandable since the audience is overlapping. Its campaign included advertising nationally over the past two weeks on talk radio and cable news channels including Fox News Channel, A&E, History and MSNBC.
Both online ticket-sellers Fandango and MovieTickets.com showed advance buying for 2016 Obama’s America were accounting for 35% to 28% respectively before this weekend. The pic is based on conservative author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s New York Times bestselling 2010 book The Roots Of Obama’s Rage and co-directed by D’Souza and John Sullivan and produced by Academy Award winner Gerald R. Molen (co-producer of Schindler’s List). It opened on July 13th in a preview on a single screen in Texas grossing almost $32,000 during its opening weekend, then expanded into 61 theaters including New York and Los Angeles. In August, the film widened to 169 theaters nationwide and expanded again this weekend. “Yes, I also didn’t believe it when I first saw the film taking off in pre-sales on Tuesday,” an exhibition insider tells me. “Because there’s not a lot of new product that’s taking off.”
Distribution experts expect 2016 Obama’s America to fare similarly to that Kirk Cameron faith-based movie Fireproof. It was #1 in Fandango’s advance sales and did remarkably well during its opening Friday – but then ended up somewhere around #4 at the box office for the weekend.
Last weekend, 2016: Obama’s America grossed a strong $1.2M in 169 venues for a cumulative gross as of Thursday of $2.8M. It’s the #2 biggest indie documenatry of the year behind only The Weinstein Company’s Bully ($3.2 million) and already the #12 political documentary of all time. It will rise a lot higher in the rankings after this weekend.
2016 Obama’s America detractors decry it as a slick infomercial heavy with conspiracy theories. But D’Souza says he made the film to motivate moviegoers to question what an Obama second term would look like, and credits liberal documentary maker Michael Moore for the structure of the film: “When he released Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004 ahead of the election, it sparked intense debate. I learned some lessons from Michael Moore, and hopefully he might learn some lessons from me about handling facts.”
Democrats Throw Homosexuals under the Bus
August 22, 2012
by Gary DeMar
Hat tip: Press Patrol
(Godfather Politics) Liberals have been in overdrive over comments made by Missouri Senate candidate Todd Akin about rape. Akin is a pro-life Republican. He was neither condoning nor dismissing the horror of rape. This doesn’t matter to Democrats.
It’s easy to understand, however, how many prominent Republicans wanted Akin to drop out of the race. They saw their chances of gaining a Senate seat go up in flames. Akin decided to stick it out. We’ll see if he made the right decision.
While the press was making mince meat of Todd Akin, there was another under-reported story about a Democrat from Minnesota. His name is Kerry Gauthier. Here’s the story:
“Democratic leaders in Minnesota are demanding a state lawmaker withdraw from his re-election bid after police claim he admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old boy at a rest stop.
“While Rep. Kerry Gauthier, 56, will lose support from fellow Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party members if he continues with his campaign, party leaders stopped short Monday of asking him to immediately resign.
“The first-term legislator wasn’t charged in the alleged July 22 encounter because the legal age of consent in Minnesota is 16 and no money was exchanged, according to the St. Louis County attorney’s office. Police say the two had oral sex behind a rest stop pavilion in Duluth after the teen responded to Gauthier’s Craigslist ad looking for a ‘no strings attached’ sex.”
I haven’t heard a peep from the homosexual community. What did this man do wrong? He was only acting in terms of his genetic predisposition. Isn’t this the Democrat, Liberal, pro-homosexual argument? The 17-year-old of age and what they did was consensual. So what’s the big deal?
The platform of the Democrat Party includes a plank in support of homosexual marriage. If homosexual marriage is OK for Democrats, then certainly pre-marital homosexual activity is OK as well. Maybe the two were just dating. It seems that the Democrats are sending a mixed message to the homosexual community. There seems to be a homosexual double standard in the Democrat Party.
In 1985 Congressman Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, hired Steve Gobie, a male prostitute, for sex. Gobie lived with Frank and worked for him as his aide, housekeeper, and driver. Gobie used Frank’s apartment as a homosexual escort service. Nearly 30 years later, Frank is still in Congress, although this is his last term of office.
Gerry Studds was also a Democrat Congressman from Massachusetts who served from 1983 until 1997. He was the first openly homosexual member of Congress. In 1983 he was censured by the House of Representatives after he admitted to sodomizing a 17-year-old page.
Neither Frank nor Studds was asked to resign by their Democrat colleagues.
Maybe the 17-year-old part of the Kerry Gauthier story is too close to the Jerry Sandusky story. Better to bury this guy now before people start connecting the dots.
by Gary DeMar
Hat tip: Press Patrol
It’s easy to understand, however, how many prominent Republicans wanted Akin to drop out of the race. They saw their chances of gaining a Senate seat go up in flames. Akin decided to stick it out. We’ll see if he made the right decision.
While the press was making mince meat of Todd Akin, there was another under-reported story about a Democrat from Minnesota. His name is Kerry Gauthier. Here’s the story:
“Democratic leaders in Minnesota are demanding a state lawmaker withdraw from his re-election bid after police claim he admitted to having sex with a 17-year-old boy at a rest stop.
“While Rep. Kerry Gauthier, 56, will lose support from fellow Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party members if he continues with his campaign, party leaders stopped short Monday of asking him to immediately resign.
“The first-term legislator wasn’t charged in the alleged July 22 encounter because the legal age of consent in Minnesota is 16 and no money was exchanged, according to the St. Louis County attorney’s office. Police say the two had oral sex behind a rest stop pavilion in Duluth after the teen responded to Gauthier’s Craigslist ad looking for a ‘no strings attached’ sex.”
I haven’t heard a peep from the homosexual community. What did this man do wrong? He was only acting in terms of his genetic predisposition. Isn’t this the Democrat, Liberal, pro-homosexual argument? The 17-year-old of age and what they did was consensual. So what’s the big deal?
The platform of the Democrat Party includes a plank in support of homosexual marriage. If homosexual marriage is OK for Democrats, then certainly pre-marital homosexual activity is OK as well. Maybe the two were just dating. It seems that the Democrats are sending a mixed message to the homosexual community. There seems to be a homosexual double standard in the Democrat Party.
In 1985 Congressman Barney Frank, a Democrat from Massachusetts, hired Steve Gobie, a male prostitute, for sex. Gobie lived with Frank and worked for him as his aide, housekeeper, and driver. Gobie used Frank’s apartment as a homosexual escort service. Nearly 30 years later, Frank is still in Congress, although this is his last term of office.
Gerry Studds was also a Democrat Congressman from Massachusetts who served from 1983 until 1997. He was the first openly homosexual member of Congress. In 1983 he was censured by the House of Representatives after he admitted to sodomizing a 17-year-old page.
Neither Frank nor Studds was asked to resign by their Democrat colleagues.
Maybe the 17-year-old part of the Kerry Gauthier story is too close to the Jerry Sandusky story. Better to bury this guy now before people start connecting the dots.
Congratulation Ted Kennedy! Three years of sobriety, and no more women killed because of drunken stupidity.
August 25, 2012
By Koncerned Citizen
Obama 'cooking the books' to get 'record' deportation numbers
Published: 11:11 AM 08/24/2012
By Caroline May
(Daily Caller) - Internal documents obtained by the House Judiciary Committee show that the Obama administration has been “cooking the books” in order to reach their “record” number of deported illegal immigrants, chairman Rep. Lamar Smith said Friday.
Based on the internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents, the number of removals are actually down, the opposite of what the administration has been claiming.
According to the committee’s review, in 2011 officials at the Department of Homeland Security began including the number of individuals removed through the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) in its annual removal numbers. ATEP is a program which moves apprehended illegal immigrants to another point along the border.
The committee chair claims that counting those individuals as removals is misleading because there are no repercussions for illegal immigrants who are deported through the program, and they can simply try to re-enter.
“It is dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals,” Smith explained in a statement. “And these ‘removals’ from the Border Patrol program do not subject the illegal immigrant to any penalties or bars for returning to the U.S. This means a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year — and counted each time as a removal.”
Given the new information, the committee’s Republican majority subtracted the ATEP removals from ICE’s deportation totals.
With the ATEP subtraction, in 2011 the estimated 397,000 deportations become approximately 360,000, and the 2012 removals to date drop from about 334,000 to an estimated 263,000, according to the committee estimates. Projections for number of people to be deported by end of the year drops from 400,000 to 315,000 removals.
The new estimates mean that this year the Obama administration’s deportation record is 14 percent below 2008 (which was 369,000) and 19 percent below 2009 (which was 389,000).
The chairman blasted the administration after the discovery, charging the president and administration officials with falsifying their record to meet political ends.
“In a campaign season when Administration officials have made a habit of spinning their numbers to ignore their real record, it’s no surprise that they are doing the same to their immigration record,” Smith said. “It seems like President Obama is trying to trick the American people into thinking he is enforcing our immigration laws. But no amount of spin can cover up the facts. It’s bad enough that the President has neglected to enforce our immigration laws but it’s even worse that his Administration would distort statistics to deceive the American people.”
Smith has been critical of the administration’s immigration record, most recently with Obama’s deferred deportation plan announced in June.
By Caroline May
Based on the internal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) documents, the number of removals are actually down, the opposite of what the administration has been claiming.
According to the committee’s review, in 2011 officials at the Department of Homeland Security began including the number of individuals removed through the Alien Transfer Exit Program (ATEP) in its annual removal numbers. ATEP is a program which moves apprehended illegal immigrants to another point along the border.
The committee chair claims that counting those individuals as removals is misleading because there are no repercussions for illegal immigrants who are deported through the program, and they can simply try to re-enter.
“It is dishonest to count illegal immigrants apprehended by the Border Patrol along the border as ICE removals,” Smith explained in a statement. “And these ‘removals’ from the Border Patrol program do not subject the illegal immigrant to any penalties or bars for returning to the U.S. This means a single illegal immigrant can show up at the border and be removed numerous times in a single year — and counted each time as a removal.”
Given the new information, the committee’s Republican majority subtracted the ATEP removals from ICE’s deportation totals.
With the ATEP subtraction, in 2011 the estimated 397,000 deportations become approximately 360,000, and the 2012 removals to date drop from about 334,000 to an estimated 263,000, according to the committee estimates. Projections for number of people to be deported by end of the year drops from 400,000 to 315,000 removals.
The new estimates mean that this year the Obama administration’s deportation record is 14 percent below 2008 (which was 369,000) and 19 percent below 2009 (which was 389,000).
The chairman blasted the administration after the discovery, charging the president and administration officials with falsifying their record to meet political ends.
“In a campaign season when Administration officials have made a habit of spinning their numbers to ignore their real record, it’s no surprise that they are doing the same to their immigration record,” Smith said. “It seems like President Obama is trying to trick the American people into thinking he is enforcing our immigration laws. But no amount of spin can cover up the facts. It’s bad enough that the President has neglected to enforce our immigration laws but it’s even worse that his Administration would distort statistics to deceive the American people.”
Smith has been critical of the administration’s immigration record, most recently with Obama’s deferred deportation plan announced in June.
Norwegian justice: 10 to 21 years for murder of 77?
Norway monster Breivik apologizes to 'militant nationals' for not killing more
Published August 24, 2012
Associated Press
Aug. 24, 2012: Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik gestures as he arrives at the courtroom in Oslo, Norway. Anders Behring Breivik has been declared sane and sentenced to prison for bomb and gun attacks that killed 77 people last year. (AP)
OSLO, Norway – Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik apologized in court to "militant nationalists" for not having killed more than the 77 people he shot to death in a horrific spree last year.
Breivik was found sane at Friday's sentencing, denying prosecutors the insanity ruling they hoped would show that the massacre was the work of a madman, not part of an anti-Muslim crusade. Breivik smiled with apparent satisfaction when Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen read the ruling, declaring him sane enough to be held criminally responsible and sentencing him to "preventive detention," which means it is unlikely he will ever be released.
The sentence brings a form of closure to Norway, which was shaken to its core by the bomb and gun attacks on July 22, 2011, because Breivik's lawyers said before the ruling that he would not appeal any ruling that did not declare him insane.
But it also means Breivik got what he wanted: a ruling that paints him as a political terrorist instead of a psychotic mass murderer. Since his arrest, Breivik has said the attacks were meant to draw attention to his extreme right-wing ideology and to inspire a multi-decade uprising by "militant nationalists" across Europe.
Prosecutors had argued Breivik was insane as he plotted his attacks to draw attention to a rambling "manifesto" that blamed Muslim immigration for the disintegration of European society.
Breivik argued that authorities were trying to cast him as sick to cast doubt on his political views, and said during the trial that being sent to an insane asylum would be the worst thing that could happen to him.
"He has always seen himself as sane so he isn't surprised by the ruling," Breivik's defense lawyer Geir Lippestad said.
The five-judge panel in the Oslo district court unanimously convicted Breivik, 33, of terrorism and premeditated murder and ordered him imprisoned for a period between 10 and 21 years, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law. Such sentences can be extended as long as an inmate is considered too dangerous to be released, and legal experts say Breivik will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison.
It was not clear whether prosecutors would appeal the ruling. If not, and if Breivik sticks to his word not to appeal a prison term, the legal process for one of the darkest chapters in Norwegian history will have come to a close.
Survivors of the attacks and relatives of victims welcomed the ruling.
"I am very relieved and happy about the outcome," said Tore Sinding Bekkedal, who survived the Utoya shooting.
"I believe he is mad, but it is political madness and not psychiatric madness," Bekkedal said. "He is a pathetic and sad little person."
Wearing a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smirked as he walked into the courtroom to hear his sentence, and raised a clenched-fist salute.
Breivik confessed to the attacks during the trial, describing in gruesome detail how he detonated a car bomb at the government headquarters in Oslo and then opened fire at the annual summer camp of the governing Labor Party's youth wing. Eight people were killed and more than 200 injured by the explosion. Sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers, were killed in the shooting spree on Utoya island. The youngest victim was 14.
Breivik's lawyers say he is already at work writing sequels to the 1,500-page manifesto he released on the Internet before the attacks. Breivik most likely will be sent back to Ila Prison, where he has been held in pretrial detention. He has access to a computer there but no Internet connection. He can communicate with the outside world through mail, which is checked by prison staff.
The impact of Breivik's violence has been huge. It has forced Norway to accept that terror doesn't come only in the guise of foreign fundamentalists, but can come from one of their own.
The son of a Norwegian diplomat and a nurse who divorced when he was a child, Breivik had been a law-abiding citizen until the attacks, except for a brief spell of spray-painting graffiti during his youth.
The judges noted that Breivik's extreme anti-immigration views are shared by others, but said it found no evidence that the modern-day crusader network that Breivik claims to belong to, exists.
Norwegian police and government ministers have faced severe criticism for their actions before and during the attacks. The police response was marred by poor communication and technical mishaps. It took police more than an hour to reach Utoya, as a boat carrying the SWAT team was overloaded and stalled in the middle of the lake. Norway's only police helicopter wasn't used because its crew was on vacation.
Norway's justice minister and police chief both resigned in the aftermath and some critics have called on the prime minister to step down.
The judges took turns reading sections of the 90-page ruling, starting with the verdict and sentence, and then going over a chronology of the rampage, victim by victim, and describing their injuries.
Judge Arne Lyng noted that the fertilizer bomb that Breivik set off outside the government headquarters could have been even more devastating.
"It was pure luck that not many more were killed," Lyng said.
Since his guilt was not in question, Brevik's sanity was the key issue to be decided by the trial, with two psychiatric teams reaching opposite conclusions. One gave Breivik a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that would preclude imprisonment, while the other found him narcissistic and dissocial -- having a complete disregard for others -- but criminally sane.
Hat tip: MichaelSavage.Com
Published August 24, 2012
Associated Press
OSLO, Norway – Norwegian gunman Anders Behring Breivik apologized in court to "militant nationalists" for not having killed more than the 77 people he shot to death in a horrific spree last year.
Breivik was found sane at Friday's sentencing, denying prosecutors the insanity ruling they hoped would show that the massacre was the work of a madman, not part of an anti-Muslim crusade. Breivik smiled with apparent satisfaction when Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen read the ruling, declaring him sane enough to be held criminally responsible and sentencing him to "preventive detention," which means it is unlikely he will ever be released.
The sentence brings a form of closure to Norway, which was shaken to its core by the bomb and gun attacks on July 22, 2011, because Breivik's lawyers said before the ruling that he would not appeal any ruling that did not declare him insane.
But it also means Breivik got what he wanted: a ruling that paints him as a political terrorist instead of a psychotic mass murderer. Since his arrest, Breivik has said the attacks were meant to draw attention to his extreme right-wing ideology and to inspire a multi-decade uprising by "militant nationalists" across Europe.
Prosecutors had argued Breivik was insane as he plotted his attacks to draw attention to a rambling "manifesto" that blamed Muslim immigration for the disintegration of European society.
Breivik argued that authorities were trying to cast him as sick to cast doubt on his political views, and said during the trial that being sent to an insane asylum would be the worst thing that could happen to him.
"He has always seen himself as sane so he isn't surprised by the ruling," Breivik's defense lawyer Geir Lippestad said.
The five-judge panel in the Oslo district court unanimously convicted Breivik, 33, of terrorism and premeditated murder and ordered him imprisoned for a period between 10 and 21 years, the maximum allowed under Norwegian law. Such sentences can be extended as long as an inmate is considered too dangerous to be released, and legal experts say Breivik will almost certainly spend the rest of his life in prison.
It was not clear whether prosecutors would appeal the ruling. If not, and if Breivik sticks to his word not to appeal a prison term, the legal process for one of the darkest chapters in Norwegian history will have come to a close.
Survivors of the attacks and relatives of victims welcomed the ruling.
"I am very relieved and happy about the outcome," said Tore Sinding Bekkedal, who survived the Utoya shooting.
"I believe he is mad, but it is political madness and not psychiatric madness," Bekkedal said. "He is a pathetic and sad little person."
Wearing a dark suit and sporting a thin beard, Breivik smirked as he walked into the courtroom to hear his sentence, and raised a clenched-fist salute.
Breivik confessed to the attacks during the trial, describing in gruesome detail how he detonated a car bomb at the government headquarters in Oslo and then opened fire at the annual summer camp of the governing Labor Party's youth wing. Eight people were killed and more than 200 injured by the explosion. Sixty-nine people, most of them teenagers, were killed in the shooting spree on Utoya island. The youngest victim was 14.
Breivik's lawyers say he is already at work writing sequels to the 1,500-page manifesto he released on the Internet before the attacks. Breivik most likely will be sent back to Ila Prison, where he has been held in pretrial detention. He has access to a computer there but no Internet connection. He can communicate with the outside world through mail, which is checked by prison staff.
The impact of Breivik's violence has been huge. It has forced Norway to accept that terror doesn't come only in the guise of foreign fundamentalists, but can come from one of their own.
The son of a Norwegian diplomat and a nurse who divorced when he was a child, Breivik had been a law-abiding citizen until the attacks, except for a brief spell of spray-painting graffiti during his youth.
The judges noted that Breivik's extreme anti-immigration views are shared by others, but said it found no evidence that the modern-day crusader network that Breivik claims to belong to, exists.
Norwegian police and government ministers have faced severe criticism for their actions before and during the attacks. The police response was marred by poor communication and technical mishaps. It took police more than an hour to reach Utoya, as a boat carrying the SWAT team was overloaded and stalled in the middle of the lake. Norway's only police helicopter wasn't used because its crew was on vacation.
Norway's justice minister and police chief both resigned in the aftermath and some critics have called on the prime minister to step down.
The judges took turns reading sections of the 90-page ruling, starting with the verdict and sentence, and then going over a chronology of the rampage, victim by victim, and describing their injuries.
Judge Arne Lyng noted that the fertilizer bomb that Breivik set off outside the government headquarters could have been even more devastating.
"It was pure luck that not many more were killed," Lyng said.
Since his guilt was not in question, Brevik's sanity was the key issue to be decided by the trial, with two psychiatric teams reaching opposite conclusions. One gave Breivik a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness that would preclude imprisonment, while the other found him narcissistic and dissocial -- having a complete disregard for others -- but criminally sane.
Hat tip: MichaelSavage.Com
Dr. Michael Savage: Is Obama playing for the opposing team?'
August 25 2012
MichaelSavage.Com:
Welcome to The Michael Savage Newsletter, your daily insider report on all things “Savage.”
Michael Savage offered listeners a history lesson about the similarities (and differences) between Benito Mussolini’s domestic spending policies and those of Barack Obama.
Savage explained that when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini came to power, “the first thing he did was start public works projects along the same lines as Barack Obama: bridges to nowhere and roads to nowhere.”
He added:
They were immensely popular in Italy, because at least they put people back to work.
This model of massive public works projects was then adopted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, and again, the people approved of these projects.
One difference between Mussolini and Obama (and the differences are many) is that while Mussolini was building roads and bridges to nowhere, he was also building up the Italian navy.
In fact, at the outset of World War II, the Italian navy was larger than that of Germany and Great Britain combined.
On the other hand, while Obama is building roads to nowhere, he’s destroying the American military at the same time.
There’s one thing you don’t know about Barack Obama: He is true to his cause. He’s following the script that was clearly laid out for him.
His calling is to weaken America in any way he can and to strengthen America’s enemies in any way he can.
How else do you explain they’re still calling the rise of Islamic regimes “the Arab Spring” when everyone knows the regimes rising there are far worse than those which were just overthrown?
Why is Obama cheering the Islamists everywhere across the Arab landscape?
It leads you to ask yourself what side he’s on and whether he’s not playing for the opposing team.
It leads serious men to stay awake long into the night and ask themselves: Have we been invaded and have the enemies already taken over this country?
MichaelSavage.Com:
Welcome to The Michael Savage Newsletter, your daily insider report on all things “Savage.”
Michael Savage offered listeners a history lesson about the similarities (and differences) between Benito Mussolini’s domestic spending policies and those of Barack Obama.
Savage explained that when Italian dictator Benito Mussolini came to power, “the first thing he did was start public works projects along the same lines as Barack Obama: bridges to nowhere and roads to nowhere.”
He added:
They were immensely popular in Italy, because at least they put people back to work.
This model of massive public works projects was then adopted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, and again, the people approved of these projects.
One difference between Mussolini and Obama (and the differences are many) is that while Mussolini was building roads and bridges to nowhere, he was also building up the Italian navy.
In fact, at the outset of World War II, the Italian navy was larger than that of Germany and Great Britain combined.
On the other hand, while Obama is building roads to nowhere, he’s destroying the American military at the same time.
There’s one thing you don’t know about Barack Obama: He is true to his cause. He’s following the script that was clearly laid out for him.
His calling is to weaken America in any way he can and to strengthen America’s enemies in any way he can.
How else do you explain they’re still calling the rise of Islamic regimes “the Arab Spring” when everyone knows the regimes rising there are far worse than those which were just overthrown?
Why is Obama cheering the Islamists everywhere across the Arab landscape?
It leads you to ask yourself what side he’s on and whether he’s not playing for the opposing team.
It leads serious men to stay awake long into the night and ask themselves: Have we been invaded and have the enemies already taken over this country?
Friday, August 24, 2012
Voter Fraud Helped Pass ObamaCare
August 23, 2012
American Glob:
Voter fraud is real.
Look no further than Al Franken who was the 60th Democrat vote for ObamaCare.
You know Al Franken, he’s the Democrat who likes rape jokes.
In the video below, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit interviews John Fund who has just written a new book about voter fraud in America. Watch the whole thing.
American Glob:
Voter fraud is real.
Look no further than Al Franken who was the 60th Democrat vote for ObamaCare.
You know Al Franken, he’s the Democrat who likes rape jokes.
In the video below, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit interviews John Fund who has just written a new book about voter fraud in America. Watch the whole thing.
Lib Mouthpiece Wasserman Schultz Accused of Supporting Violent Extremists (Video)
Posted by Jim Hoft
Thursday, August 23, 2012, 8:20 PM
Gateway Pundit:
DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a huge supporter of the #Occupy terror movement.
This Democrat-endorsed criminal movement has racked up quite an impressive record:
- 12 deaths, 6 found dead in tents, Two found dead after several days
- 2 murders (Not counting the protester who strangled his parents and stuffed them in a car)
- Tens of millions of dollars in damages, layoffs, vandalism, law breaking
- Multiple Rapes
- Thousands of arrests
- Public masturbation
- Feces
- Child molestation and baby abuse
So it should be no surprise that these Democrat-endorsed goons are making plans to disrupt the RNC Convention in Tampa this fall.
Despite these facts, and the failed radical policies of the Obama-Pelosi regime, Wasserman Schultz likes to throw around the extremist label at Republicans.
But her Republican opponent Karen Harrington is fighting back.
Shark Tank reported:
The word “extremist” is part of Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s everyday vernacular, so it comes to no one’s surprise that she would use it against Karen Harrington.
But now Harrington is firing back with a scathing video depicting Wasserman Schultz as an out of touch ‘extremist’ who supports the criminal Occupy Movement.
You can help Karen Harrington by donating to her campaign here.
Thursday, August 23, 2012, 8:20 PM
Gateway Pundit:
DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a huge supporter of the #Occupy terror movement.
This Democrat-endorsed criminal movement has racked up quite an impressive record:
- 12 deaths, 6 found dead in tents, Two found dead after several days
- 2 murders (Not counting the protester who strangled his parents and stuffed them in a car)
- Tens of millions of dollars in damages, layoffs, vandalism, law breaking
- Multiple Rapes
- Thousands of arrests
- Public masturbation
- Feces
- Child molestation and baby abuse
So it should be no surprise that these Democrat-endorsed goons are making plans to disrupt the RNC Convention in Tampa this fall.
Despite these facts, and the failed radical policies of the Obama-Pelosi regime, Wasserman Schultz likes to throw around the extremist label at Republicans.
But her Republican opponent Karen Harrington is fighting back.
Shark Tank reported:
The word “extremist” is part of Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz’s everyday vernacular, so it comes to no one’s surprise that she would use it against Karen Harrington.
But now Harrington is firing back with a scathing video depicting Wasserman Schultz as an out of touch ‘extremist’ who supports the criminal Occupy Movement.
You can help Karen Harrington by donating to her campaign here.
Plastic Bag Bans Lead to E-coli Deaths
August 23, 2012
The American Interest:
One green pet cause du jour is the banning or taxing of disposable plastic bags at supermarkets and other grocery stores. These measures, which are designed to encourage shoppers to use their own reusable tote bags, have been spreading widely in recent years, and have already gone into effect in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
This may make the world marginally safer for plants and animals, but a new study by the Property and Environment Research Center (h/t Sullivan) shows there may be a significant downside for human health. Researchers examined these reusable totes and found significant amounts of dangerous bacteria, including, among others, E-coli. And there seems to be a correlation between plastic bag bans and increased illness, as bacteria-related deaths spiked immediately after San Francisco’s bag measure began. The International Association for Food Protection reports:
Reusable bags were collected at random from consumers as they entered grocery stores in California and Arizona. In interviews, it was found that reusable bags are seldom if ever washed and often used for multiple purposes. Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half. Escherichia coli were identified in 8% of the bags, as well as a wide range of enteric bacteria, including several opportunistic pathogens. When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased 10-fold, indicating the potential for bacterial growth in the bags.
This green unicorn looks considerably less enchanting upon closer examination.
The American Interest:
One green pet cause du jour is the banning or taxing of disposable plastic bags at supermarkets and other grocery stores. These measures, which are designed to encourage shoppers to use their own reusable tote bags, have been spreading widely in recent years, and have already gone into effect in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.
This may make the world marginally safer for plants and animals, but a new study by the Property and Environment Research Center (h/t Sullivan) shows there may be a significant downside for human health. Researchers examined these reusable totes and found significant amounts of dangerous bacteria, including, among others, E-coli. And there seems to be a correlation between plastic bag bans and increased illness, as bacteria-related deaths spiked immediately after San Francisco’s bag measure began. The International Association for Food Protection reports:
Reusable bags were collected at random from consumers as they entered grocery stores in California and Arizona. In interviews, it was found that reusable bags are seldom if ever washed and often used for multiple purposes. Large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and coliform bacteria in half. Escherichia coli were identified in 8% of the bags, as well as a wide range of enteric bacteria, including several opportunistic pathogens. When meat juices were added to bags and stored in the trunks of cars for two hours, the number of bacteria increased 10-fold, indicating the potential for bacterial growth in the bags.
This green unicorn looks considerably less enchanting upon closer examination.
Obama Requests Europe Bail Out His Reelection
Submitted by Tyler Durden on 08/24/2012 08:24 -0400
Zero Hedge:
Color us unsurprised; but the UK's Independent is reporting that American officials are worried that if the Troika decides Greece has not done enough to meet its deficit targets, it will withhold the money - triggering Greece's exit from the eurozone weeks before the presidential election. British government sources have suggested the Obama administration is urging eurozone Governments to hold off from taking any drastic action before then - fearing the resulting market destabilization could damage President Obama's re-election prospects. The Troika are expected to report in time for an 8 October meeting of eurozone finance ministers which will decide on whether to disburse Greece's next EUR31bn aid tranche, promised under the terms of the bailout for the country. European leaders are thought to be sympathetic to the Obama lobbying, fearing that, under pressure from his party in Congress, Mitt Romney would be a more isolationist president than Mr Obama. So once again GRExit is assured economically; but it is an entirely political decision.
Zero Hedge:
Color us unsurprised; but the UK's Independent is reporting that American officials are worried that if the Troika decides Greece has not done enough to meet its deficit targets, it will withhold the money - triggering Greece's exit from the eurozone weeks before the presidential election. British government sources have suggested the Obama administration is urging eurozone Governments to hold off from taking any drastic action before then - fearing the resulting market destabilization could damage President Obama's re-election prospects. The Troika are expected to report in time for an 8 October meeting of eurozone finance ministers which will decide on whether to disburse Greece's next EUR31bn aid tranche, promised under the terms of the bailout for the country. European leaders are thought to be sympathetic to the Obama lobbying, fearing that, under pressure from his party in Congress, Mitt Romney would be a more isolationist president than Mr Obama. So once again GRExit is assured economically; but it is an entirely political decision.
Romney: Give Reins to States on Drilling on Federal Lands
By Dan
August 24, 2012
Riehl World News:
Along with entitlement reform, energy is key to turning America around from the disastrous direction Obama has taken her. In that sense, Ryan is a perfect complement to Romney. Ryan is focused on one, Romney’s experience lies in the private sector and growth.
Mr. Romney’s plan, which would turn over decision-making on drilling and mining to the states, echoes the “Drill, baby, drill” strategy that another Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, used to great effect in the 2008 campaign.
The federal government owns vast portions of states like New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Alaska. Under President Obama, officials in Washington have played a bigger role in drilling and mining decisions on federal lands in the states, and such involvement rankles many residents and energy executives, who prefer the usually lighter touch of local officials.
With gasoline prices again approaching $4 a gallon, Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is also trying to merge energy and economic policy in a way that will make voters see increased energy production as a pocketbook issue. He said that his overall energy plan, which includes speedy approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada and new drilling off the coast of Virginia and the Carolinas, would help the country achieve energy independence and create three million drilling and manufacturing jobs.
He’s calling for energy independence by 2020.
August 24, 2012
Riehl World News:
Along with entitlement reform, energy is key to turning America around from the disastrous direction Obama has taken her. In that sense, Ryan is a perfect complement to Romney. Ryan is focused on one, Romney’s experience lies in the private sector and growth.
Mr. Romney’s plan, which would turn over decision-making on drilling and mining to the states, echoes the “Drill, baby, drill” strategy that another Republican presidential candidate, John McCain, used to great effect in the 2008 campaign.
The federal government owns vast portions of states like New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and Alaska. Under President Obama, officials in Washington have played a bigger role in drilling and mining decisions on federal lands in the states, and such involvement rankles many residents and energy executives, who prefer the usually lighter touch of local officials.
With gasoline prices again approaching $4 a gallon, Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, is also trying to merge energy and economic policy in a way that will make voters see increased energy production as a pocketbook issue. He said that his overall energy plan, which includes speedy approval of the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada and new drilling off the coast of Virginia and the Carolinas, would help the country achieve energy independence and create three million drilling and manufacturing jobs.
He’s calling for energy independence by 2020.
Iran incites genocide, Israel 'employs invective'
Clifford D. May
Friday August 24, 2012
Israel Hayom - Iran or Israel: Which is more deserving of censure? On the one hand, as the French news agency Agence France Presse reported last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called Israel “a cancerous tumor” which will “soon be excised.”
“The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists ... With the grace of God and help of the nations, in the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists,” Ahmadinejad said.
On the other hand, the AFP article goes on to say: “Israel has been employing its own invective against Iran and its leaders, invoking the image of Hitler and the Nazis on the eve of World War II and accusing Tehran of being bent on Israeli genocide.”
So let’s place these statements on the scale. Dehumanizing Israelis, likening them to a disease, vowing to exterminate them — well, that does sound a tad extreme. But the Israeli response — well, that is pretty darn insulting.
And, really, what is the basis for the Israeli charge? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Ahmadinejad’s words are identical to those used by Nazi propagandists? In 1941, Hitler ordered the excising of what he called “the Jewish cancer” from Germany. After that came the murder of six million European Jews — genocide.
Ahmadinejad also accused “Zionists” of having started both world wars, just as Hitler blamed the Jews for these conflicts even as his troops were raping Czechoslovakia. Still, does that justify drawing a comparison between Iranian Islamists and German Nazis?
Logically, of course it does, but in AFP’s eyes, no. How to explain this departure from reality and morality? Several possibilities come to mind.
It could be that AFP reporters and editors are simply ignorant, that they have no idea what the Nazis said, believed or did. I’m sure these journalists attended good schools (not everyone uses a word like “invective”) but perhaps they majored in 17th century French literature and know nothing of modern history. The one lesson they have learned: It’s gauche, a faux pas, to call someone a Nazi, or to compare someone with Hitler, even when such a comparison is justified.
A second possibility: Multiculturalism requires moral equivalence, which means no Third World society can ever be described as in any way inferior to any Western society. So if Iranians are to be criticized for threatening to kill Israelis, then Israelis must be criticized for something.
A third explanation: To acknowledge that Iran’s rulers are akin to Nazis and are threatening genocide carries disagreeable policy implications. Among other things, it suggests that Iran’s rulers should, at all costs, be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. But anyone who says that risks being labeled a war-monger, a neoconservative, or something equally unfashionable.
There is this possibility, too: The AFP article expresses anti-Israelism and perhaps, also, the most ancient and durable of biases. Don’t get me wrong: Not everyone who criticizes Israel is a Jew-hater. Not everyone who hates Israel is a Jew-hater. But all Jew-haters do criticize and hate Israel.
Revolutionary Islamists are candid in this regard. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese-based terrorist organization, has said: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.” Nasrallah also has said that if all Jews gathered in Israel, “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
One final point that the good folks at AFP ought to understand: Any serious concept of free speech includes the right to insult and offend — to “employ invective.” But for leaders of a nation to incite genocide is a crime under international law, the same international law so beloved of the major media when they think it applies to Israel (or the U.S.).
Well-known international human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian minister of justice and attorney-general, has been making a strenuous effort to remind Western leaders that there is a Genocide Convention which they have an obligation — legal, moral and strategic — to enforce.
“The Iranian regime’s criminal incitement has been persistent, pervasive and pernicious.” Cotler recently wrote. “In particular, this genocidal incitement has intensified and escalated in 2012, with the website of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declaring that there is religious “justification to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and Iran must take the helm.”
Despite that, Cotler points out, “not one state party to the Genocide Convention has undertaken any of its mandated responsibilities to prevent and punish such incitement — an appalling example of the international community as bystander — reminding us also that genocide occurred not only because of cultures of hate, but because of crimes of indifference.”
Cotler's words have so far fallen on deaf ears. True, the U.S. and some European nations have imposed painful economic sanctions on Iran. But inciting genocide is not among the reasons given. And on Aug. 26, representatives of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement will be welcomed in Tehran. The new president of the NAM: Iran.
Some bold AFP reporter should ask the diplomats from those 120 nations if they are concerned about Iran's genocidal incitement, troubled that the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism may soon possess nuclear weapons, distressed by Iran’s support of the Assad regime’s barbarism in Syria and its bloody repression of peaceful protesters inside Iran. Or are they more upset by Israelis “employing invective” in an attempt to call attention to these realities? These questions answer themselves. In that sense, AFP is simply following the herd.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Friday August 24, 2012
Israel Hayom - Iran or Israel: Which is more deserving of censure? On the one hand, as the French news agency Agence France Presse reported last week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called Israel “a cancerous tumor” which will “soon be excised.”
“The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists ... With the grace of God and help of the nations, in the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists,” Ahmadinejad said.
On the other hand, the AFP article goes on to say: “Israel has been employing its own invective against Iran and its leaders, invoking the image of Hitler and the Nazis on the eve of World War II and accusing Tehran of being bent on Israeli genocide.”
So let’s place these statements on the scale. Dehumanizing Israelis, likening them to a disease, vowing to exterminate them — well, that does sound a tad extreme. But the Israeli response — well, that is pretty darn insulting.
And, really, what is the basis for the Israeli charge? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Ahmadinejad’s words are identical to those used by Nazi propagandists? In 1941, Hitler ordered the excising of what he called “the Jewish cancer” from Germany. After that came the murder of six million European Jews — genocide.
Ahmadinejad also accused “Zionists” of having started both world wars, just as Hitler blamed the Jews for these conflicts even as his troops were raping Czechoslovakia. Still, does that justify drawing a comparison between Iranian Islamists and German Nazis?
Logically, of course it does, but in AFP’s eyes, no. How to explain this departure from reality and morality? Several possibilities come to mind.
It could be that AFP reporters and editors are simply ignorant, that they have no idea what the Nazis said, believed or did. I’m sure these journalists attended good schools (not everyone uses a word like “invective”) but perhaps they majored in 17th century French literature and know nothing of modern history. The one lesson they have learned: It’s gauche, a faux pas, to call someone a Nazi, or to compare someone with Hitler, even when such a comparison is justified.
A second possibility: Multiculturalism requires moral equivalence, which means no Third World society can ever be described as in any way inferior to any Western society. So if Iranians are to be criticized for threatening to kill Israelis, then Israelis must be criticized for something.
A third explanation: To acknowledge that Iran’s rulers are akin to Nazis and are threatening genocide carries disagreeable policy implications. Among other things, it suggests that Iran’s rulers should, at all costs, be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons. But anyone who says that risks being labeled a war-monger, a neoconservative, or something equally unfashionable.
There is this possibility, too: The AFP article expresses anti-Israelism and perhaps, also, the most ancient and durable of biases. Don’t get me wrong: Not everyone who criticizes Israel is a Jew-hater. Not everyone who hates Israel is a Jew-hater. But all Jew-haters do criticize and hate Israel.
Revolutionary Islamists are candid in this regard. Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese-based terrorist organization, has said: “If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli.” Nasrallah also has said that if all Jews gathered in Israel, “it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.”
One final point that the good folks at AFP ought to understand: Any serious concept of free speech includes the right to insult and offend — to “employ invective.” But for leaders of a nation to incite genocide is a crime under international law, the same international law so beloved of the major media when they think it applies to Israel (or the U.S.).
Well-known international human rights lawyer Irwin Cotler, a former Canadian minister of justice and attorney-general, has been making a strenuous effort to remind Western leaders that there is a Genocide Convention which they have an obligation — legal, moral and strategic — to enforce.
“The Iranian regime’s criminal incitement has been persistent, pervasive and pernicious.” Cotler recently wrote. “In particular, this genocidal incitement has intensified and escalated in 2012, with the website of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei declaring that there is religious “justification to kill all the Jews and annihilate Israel, and Iran must take the helm.”
Despite that, Cotler points out, “not one state party to the Genocide Convention has undertaken any of its mandated responsibilities to prevent and punish such incitement — an appalling example of the international community as bystander — reminding us also that genocide occurred not only because of cultures of hate, but because of crimes of indifference.”
Cotler's words have so far fallen on deaf ears. True, the U.S. and some European nations have imposed painful economic sanctions on Iran. But inciting genocide is not among the reasons given. And on Aug. 26, representatives of the so-called Non-Aligned Movement will be welcomed in Tehran. The new president of the NAM: Iran.
Some bold AFP reporter should ask the diplomats from those 120 nations if they are concerned about Iran's genocidal incitement, troubled that the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism may soon possess nuclear weapons, distressed by Iran’s support of the Assad regime’s barbarism in Syria and its bloody repression of peaceful protesters inside Iran. Or are they more upset by Israelis “employing invective” in an attempt to call attention to these realities? These questions answer themselves. In that sense, AFP is simply following the herd.
Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.
Fools' gold rush: Obamacare and the Medicaid "opportunity"
J.D. Kleinke, Forbes
August 23, 2012
A trader points up at a display on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange August 20, 2012. Health insurer Aetna Inc said on Monday that it would buy rival Coventry Health Care Inc for $5.6 billion to increase its share of the fast-growing, U.S. government-backed Medicare and Medicaid programs.
AEI:
You know we’ve gone through the looking glass when the hottest health care money on Wall Street is chasing Medicaid.
No, I didn’t mean Medicare, the $560 billion per year federal program for insuring the elderly that has launched a thousand IPOs. The current darling of health care investors is Medicaid, the hybrid federal-state program for insuring the poor that now dominates, and often overwhelms, state government budgets.
Last month, Wellpoint agreed to pay $4.5 billion for Amerigroup, a Medicaid managed care company, representing a nearly 50% premium over Amerigroup’s market price. Not to be outdone, Aetna this past week purchased Coventry for $5.7 billion, which also services Medicaid populations. These deals and several others like them rumored to be in the pipeline have driven up the share prices of Amerigroup’s competitors – other Medicaid managed care companies like Centene and Molinas – in anticipation of the latest round of monkey-see, monkey-acquire deals by health insurers.
Why the gold rush into Medicaid, the poorest, toughest segment of our health care system? Are there really fortunes to be made squeezing margins out of the pittance – $4,314 per year for adults, $2,717 for children – spent on the most destitute Americans? Wellpoint, Aetna, Independence Blue Cross, and other major insurers rushing in seem to think so, for two reasons. First, those pittances roll up: analysts estimate that the enrollment of an expected 16 million new Medicaid beneficiaries under Obamacare could generate $40 billion in potential revenue. Second, buried in Obamacare is a forced migration of as many as 9 million Americans, currently eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, from richer Medicare plans into threadbare Medicaid programs – a transfer of the most costly and complex patients worth some $300 billion in potential annual revenue.
Big numbers, big money, and big profits, right? An inflow of the uninsured poor into the nation’s most financially distressed insurance program, combined with a systemic downgrading of benefits for the poor and disabled, will surely translate into great, uncontested corporate riches. Why shouldn’t the nation’s now largest insurer spend shareholders’ cash on what amounts to 18.4 times Amerigroup’s forward earnings on forays into the most economically distressed quarters of American medicine?
Because they will fail miserably. Unless they succeed. In which case they will be driven, by a coalition of government budget-minders and populist scolds, into failure, thanks to a political process ever more hostile to profiteering on the sick.
In normal businesses, with willing buyers and sellers and functioning marketplaces, enormous revenue opportunities do not necessarily translate into commensurate opportunities for profit. And Medicaid is about as far from a normal business as one can imagine. It is the emergency room for our worst chronic social problems. Illiteracy, drug addiction, broken families, migrant labor, illegal immigration, teen pregnancy – you name it, and Medicaid gets to deal with it. Medicaid programs attempt, mostly through heroic individual efforts, to serve a desperately needy population of the poor, chronically ill, mentally unstable and recklessly pregnant. They do so by overworking and underpaying the nation’s most aggrieved providers, gouging drug companies, and transferring costs wherever they can to the rest of the system.
This is why states offload these programs to companies like Amerigroup and Coventry, and why many states do not want the programs expanded under Obamacare. Medicaid is a hybrid federal/state program because the fed does not want to manage; the states manage it only because the fed blackmails with just enough money to keep them hooked. Obamacare attempted to double-down on this blackmail by threatening to withhold all Medicaid funding to any state unwilling to accept the expansion – a provision so coercive the Supreme Court struck it down while giving the rest of Obamacare a pass.
Despite the ruling, Obamacare proceeds apace, trying to jam between 8 and 16 million more people into the same system. (The estimate varies by a factor of two because Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Louisiana, emboldened by the court’s decision, are just saying no.) And the horses dragging the 9 million duals into Medicaid, which will entail massive disruptions in their medical care, have also left the barn. But with $340 billion in combined potential annual revenue going into play, it would be hard for companies – starved for growth and squeezed by the profit-regulation rules in Obamacare – not to rush in with their picks and shovels.
Those Pesky Implementation Details
So how might the Medicaid gold rush actually pan out? It is difficult to imagine anything but a disaster, if you know where the miners are actually headed. There is encyclopedic health services literature documenting Medicaid’s chronic economic desperation, yawning unmet medical needs, and horrific outcomes, but a more visceral illustration of the challenge comes with a simple stroll through the waiting room of a typical Medicaid provider. On my last visit to one, I watched a morbidly obese patient die, while slumped over in his wheelchair, among the 30 patients lined up that morning to see the doctor. It took that doctor almost ten minutes to find his way to the waiting room to declare the patient dead, and an hour for the paramedics to show up and haul him away.
Such human misery, multiplied by tens of millions of people, rolls up into a bureaucratic colossus of breathtaking complexity. Running a Medicaid program involves coping with a jungle of paperwork, cacophony of regulations and, worst of all, sanctimony in nearly every conversation with every stakeholder. It requires constant vigilance against scam clinics, crooked providers, rogue labs, pill mills, vaporware vendors, and a scuzfest of health care bottom-feeders. A successful day in the Medicaid “business” is measured not by goals achieved but catastrophes averted. I have been involved in restructuring one of the Medicaid disasters the commercial health plans are suddenly so hellbent on turning into shareholder gold; from under every rock we rolled over, out would crawl something slimy, and its lawyer.
Wellpoint, Aetna, Independence, and the other insurers rushing into this business no doubt believe they have a magic formula for turning this misery into a profitable growth engine. But such growth cannot come from the top-line: the federal and state governments funding Medicaid are already under intense political pressure to reduce deficits and spending, while expanding coverage, meaning total funding available per Medicaid enrollee – and the “duals” switched from Medicare to Medicaid – will inevitably shrink, fast. As a result, the profits needed to justify these acquisitions and the ongoing tie-up of capital needed to support them must come from cost-takeouts, from the squeezing of the Medicaid turnip.
The insurers have obviously convinced themselves there is much in the turnip to squeeze. That may certainly be true for the duals, who could benefit from coordinated case management and the other bells and whistles of “managed care.” But the real money will come in the form of arbitrage margins, as the duals are switched to Medicaid doctors and hospitals, who are paid a pittance compared with Medicare. This will work fine – for a time – if these “duals” happily tow the line and change doctors. But history shows otherwise. People do not like to have their benefits downgraded, and they do not like being forced to switch to cheaper doctors, especially if there are no doctors to switch to – overwhelmingly the case in Medicaid. Their doctors’ lobbyists may also have something to say about it.
As for the general Medicaid population, the single greatest medical demand placed on the program, in terms of volume if not dollars, is pregnancy and childbirth. It is the reason for half of all Medicaid hospitalizations; seven of the ten most common procedures performed during those hospitalizations are related to pregnancy, childbirth, and newborns. If cost-takeouts are the only road to profitability, are the insurers prepared to deal with pesky little matters like the public funding of birth control, abortion, home births and c-sections, i.e., with arguably health care’s ugliest culture wars? My own experience working with insurers on the least incendiary of these issues – the silent epidemic of c-sections – is not encouraging. C-sections account for more than 30 percent of all deliveries in the US, at roughly 1.5 times the average costs of a normal delivery, when the medically indicated rate is easily less than half that.
This would be the first place for an insurer to step in to reduce Medicaid costs, yes? One little technical problem: aside from captive provider systems with electronic medical records like Kaiser, not a single insurer I know of in the US has any ability to affect this scandalously high rate of often unnecessary, always expensive, high-volume surgery. Two major insurers have admitted to me that they have no systematic way of knowing who in their population of millions of covered women are even pregnant, until after they have delivered, the probably unnecessary c-section has been done, and the claims are coming in. This might be an example of why the insurers are acquiring the Medicaid managed care companies – because they may have this expertise. If so, no one is talking about it, because companies cannot even bring up the subject of pregnancy and childbirth among the poor without triggering the worst landmines in the health care policy debates, as we have witnessed since the daylighting of the Obamacare birth control mandate.
No Good Implementation Goes Unpunished
Let’s give the Medicaid gold rushers the benefit of the doubt, and assume they pull off something like this. A few managed care type miracles, they lower costs for Medicaid patients without actually harming them and, in the case of unnecessary surgeries, actually help some of them.
Imagine also they pull off the trick of shuttling the “duals” from Medicare to Medicaid. These highly motivated patients and their doctors somehow don’t scream bloody murder, and the insurers earn arbitrage margins on the switch. How long will financially stressed governments fund these margins, before putting the turnip squeeze on the insurers themselves? For those insurers who find Medicaid gold, what happens next? They will be vilified by the public as corporate, profiteering, care-denying murderers of the poor, and their margins will be mowed down with the stroke of the legislative pen.
Every health care sector has been on the receiving end of this at some point – hospitals, dialysis, home health, the list goes on – usually right after its own gold rush. The government programs that represent an ever larger share of health care purchasing in the US do not overtly regulate profitability – that would be transparent and at least manageable. Instead they regulate profits implicitly, line-item by line-item via reimbursement adjustments, selective and punitive enforcements of providers, a whole gamut of bureaucratic tricks designed to avoid honest political debate about the role of money and medicine.
The health insurers already got a face full of cold water with this under Obamacare: new administrative cost and profit margin regulations set at completely arbitrary numbers. Those numbers will appear generous when the Medicaid gold proves to be nothing more than a very big flash in a very broken pan.
J.D. Kleinke is a Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a former health care executive. His latest book is Catching Babies, a novel about the training of obstetrician/gynecologists.
August 23, 2012
AEI:
You know we’ve gone through the looking glass when the hottest health care money on Wall Street is chasing Medicaid.
No, I didn’t mean Medicare, the $560 billion per year federal program for insuring the elderly that has launched a thousand IPOs. The current darling of health care investors is Medicaid, the hybrid federal-state program for insuring the poor that now dominates, and often overwhelms, state government budgets.
Last month, Wellpoint agreed to pay $4.5 billion for Amerigroup, a Medicaid managed care company, representing a nearly 50% premium over Amerigroup’s market price. Not to be outdone, Aetna this past week purchased Coventry for $5.7 billion, which also services Medicaid populations. These deals and several others like them rumored to be in the pipeline have driven up the share prices of Amerigroup’s competitors – other Medicaid managed care companies like Centene and Molinas – in anticipation of the latest round of monkey-see, monkey-acquire deals by health insurers.
Why the gold rush into Medicaid, the poorest, toughest segment of our health care system? Are there really fortunes to be made squeezing margins out of the pittance – $4,314 per year for adults, $2,717 for children – spent on the most destitute Americans? Wellpoint, Aetna, Independence Blue Cross, and other major insurers rushing in seem to think so, for two reasons. First, those pittances roll up: analysts estimate that the enrollment of an expected 16 million new Medicaid beneficiaries under Obamacare could generate $40 billion in potential revenue. Second, buried in Obamacare is a forced migration of as many as 9 million Americans, currently eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid, from richer Medicare plans into threadbare Medicaid programs – a transfer of the most costly and complex patients worth some $300 billion in potential annual revenue.
Big numbers, big money, and big profits, right? An inflow of the uninsured poor into the nation’s most financially distressed insurance program, combined with a systemic downgrading of benefits for the poor and disabled, will surely translate into great, uncontested corporate riches. Why shouldn’t the nation’s now largest insurer spend shareholders’ cash on what amounts to 18.4 times Amerigroup’s forward earnings on forays into the most economically distressed quarters of American medicine?
Because they will fail miserably. Unless they succeed. In which case they will be driven, by a coalition of government budget-minders and populist scolds, into failure, thanks to a political process ever more hostile to profiteering on the sick.
In normal businesses, with willing buyers and sellers and functioning marketplaces, enormous revenue opportunities do not necessarily translate into commensurate opportunities for profit. And Medicaid is about as far from a normal business as one can imagine. It is the emergency room for our worst chronic social problems. Illiteracy, drug addiction, broken families, migrant labor, illegal immigration, teen pregnancy – you name it, and Medicaid gets to deal with it. Medicaid programs attempt, mostly through heroic individual efforts, to serve a desperately needy population of the poor, chronically ill, mentally unstable and recklessly pregnant. They do so by overworking and underpaying the nation’s most aggrieved providers, gouging drug companies, and transferring costs wherever they can to the rest of the system.
This is why states offload these programs to companies like Amerigroup and Coventry, and why many states do not want the programs expanded under Obamacare. Medicaid is a hybrid federal/state program because the fed does not want to manage; the states manage it only because the fed blackmails with just enough money to keep them hooked. Obamacare attempted to double-down on this blackmail by threatening to withhold all Medicaid funding to any state unwilling to accept the expansion – a provision so coercive the Supreme Court struck it down while giving the rest of Obamacare a pass.
Despite the ruling, Obamacare proceeds apace, trying to jam between 8 and 16 million more people into the same system. (The estimate varies by a factor of two because Florida, Texas, South Carolina and Louisiana, emboldened by the court’s decision, are just saying no.) And the horses dragging the 9 million duals into Medicaid, which will entail massive disruptions in their medical care, have also left the barn. But with $340 billion in combined potential annual revenue going into play, it would be hard for companies – starved for growth and squeezed by the profit-regulation rules in Obamacare – not to rush in with their picks and shovels.
Those Pesky Implementation Details
So how might the Medicaid gold rush actually pan out? It is difficult to imagine anything but a disaster, if you know where the miners are actually headed. There is encyclopedic health services literature documenting Medicaid’s chronic economic desperation, yawning unmet medical needs, and horrific outcomes, but a more visceral illustration of the challenge comes with a simple stroll through the waiting room of a typical Medicaid provider. On my last visit to one, I watched a morbidly obese patient die, while slumped over in his wheelchair, among the 30 patients lined up that morning to see the doctor. It took that doctor almost ten minutes to find his way to the waiting room to declare the patient dead, and an hour for the paramedics to show up and haul him away.
Such human misery, multiplied by tens of millions of people, rolls up into a bureaucratic colossus of breathtaking complexity. Running a Medicaid program involves coping with a jungle of paperwork, cacophony of regulations and, worst of all, sanctimony in nearly every conversation with every stakeholder. It requires constant vigilance against scam clinics, crooked providers, rogue labs, pill mills, vaporware vendors, and a scuzfest of health care bottom-feeders. A successful day in the Medicaid “business” is measured not by goals achieved but catastrophes averted. I have been involved in restructuring one of the Medicaid disasters the commercial health plans are suddenly so hellbent on turning into shareholder gold; from under every rock we rolled over, out would crawl something slimy, and its lawyer.
Wellpoint, Aetna, Independence, and the other insurers rushing into this business no doubt believe they have a magic formula for turning this misery into a profitable growth engine. But such growth cannot come from the top-line: the federal and state governments funding Medicaid are already under intense political pressure to reduce deficits and spending, while expanding coverage, meaning total funding available per Medicaid enrollee – and the “duals” switched from Medicare to Medicaid – will inevitably shrink, fast. As a result, the profits needed to justify these acquisitions and the ongoing tie-up of capital needed to support them must come from cost-takeouts, from the squeezing of the Medicaid turnip.
The insurers have obviously convinced themselves there is much in the turnip to squeeze. That may certainly be true for the duals, who could benefit from coordinated case management and the other bells and whistles of “managed care.” But the real money will come in the form of arbitrage margins, as the duals are switched to Medicaid doctors and hospitals, who are paid a pittance compared with Medicare. This will work fine – for a time – if these “duals” happily tow the line and change doctors. But history shows otherwise. People do not like to have their benefits downgraded, and they do not like being forced to switch to cheaper doctors, especially if there are no doctors to switch to – overwhelmingly the case in Medicaid. Their doctors’ lobbyists may also have something to say about it.
As for the general Medicaid population, the single greatest medical demand placed on the program, in terms of volume if not dollars, is pregnancy and childbirth. It is the reason for half of all Medicaid hospitalizations; seven of the ten most common procedures performed during those hospitalizations are related to pregnancy, childbirth, and newborns. If cost-takeouts are the only road to profitability, are the insurers prepared to deal with pesky little matters like the public funding of birth control, abortion, home births and c-sections, i.e., with arguably health care’s ugliest culture wars? My own experience working with insurers on the least incendiary of these issues – the silent epidemic of c-sections – is not encouraging. C-sections account for more than 30 percent of all deliveries in the US, at roughly 1.5 times the average costs of a normal delivery, when the medically indicated rate is easily less than half that.
This would be the first place for an insurer to step in to reduce Medicaid costs, yes? One little technical problem: aside from captive provider systems with electronic medical records like Kaiser, not a single insurer I know of in the US has any ability to affect this scandalously high rate of often unnecessary, always expensive, high-volume surgery. Two major insurers have admitted to me that they have no systematic way of knowing who in their population of millions of covered women are even pregnant, until after they have delivered, the probably unnecessary c-section has been done, and the claims are coming in. This might be an example of why the insurers are acquiring the Medicaid managed care companies – because they may have this expertise. If so, no one is talking about it, because companies cannot even bring up the subject of pregnancy and childbirth among the poor without triggering the worst landmines in the health care policy debates, as we have witnessed since the daylighting of the Obamacare birth control mandate.
No Good Implementation Goes Unpunished
Let’s give the Medicaid gold rushers the benefit of the doubt, and assume they pull off something like this. A few managed care type miracles, they lower costs for Medicaid patients without actually harming them and, in the case of unnecessary surgeries, actually help some of them.
Imagine also they pull off the trick of shuttling the “duals” from Medicare to Medicaid. These highly motivated patients and their doctors somehow don’t scream bloody murder, and the insurers earn arbitrage margins on the switch. How long will financially stressed governments fund these margins, before putting the turnip squeeze on the insurers themselves? For those insurers who find Medicaid gold, what happens next? They will be vilified by the public as corporate, profiteering, care-denying murderers of the poor, and their margins will be mowed down with the stroke of the legislative pen.
Every health care sector has been on the receiving end of this at some point – hospitals, dialysis, home health, the list goes on – usually right after its own gold rush. The government programs that represent an ever larger share of health care purchasing in the US do not overtly regulate profitability – that would be transparent and at least manageable. Instead they regulate profits implicitly, line-item by line-item via reimbursement adjustments, selective and punitive enforcements of providers, a whole gamut of bureaucratic tricks designed to avoid honest political debate about the role of money and medicine.
The health insurers already got a face full of cold water with this under Obamacare: new administrative cost and profit margin regulations set at completely arbitrary numbers. Those numbers will appear generous when the Medicaid gold proves to be nothing more than a very big flash in a very broken pan.
J.D. Kleinke is a Resident Fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and a former health care executive. His latest book is Catching Babies, a novel about the training of obstetrician/gynecologists.
Newsbusted Excusive: Obama Campaign Promotes Purse Thefts As Fundraiser
Friday, August 24, 2012
The Lid - Its amazing how far the committee to reelect the president (CREEP) will go. First they tried getting people to give him campaign donations instead of giving wedding presents, and now they have really gone off the edge. In an exclusive investigative report from Newsbusted Anchor Jodi Miller we learn that CREEP will launch a new campaign urging people to steal purses from old ladies and donate the content to the reelection effort.
Other news items covered in the latest installment of Newsbusted the twice-weekly faux news feature from Newsbusters.org (embedded below) Ahmadinejad's latest threats, has Obama really tried to unite the country, voter ID laws and much, much, more
Please make sure you watch the video below because something bad always happens to the people who don't. Last week Rep. Todd Akin forgot to press play and...well you know hat happened.
Oh and if you cannot see the video player below please click here
The Lid - Its amazing how far the committee to reelect the president (CREEP) will go. First they tried getting people to give him campaign donations instead of giving wedding presents, and now they have really gone off the edge. In an exclusive investigative report from Newsbusted Anchor Jodi Miller we learn that CREEP will launch a new campaign urging people to steal purses from old ladies and donate the content to the reelection effort.
Other news items covered in the latest installment of Newsbusted the twice-weekly faux news feature from Newsbusters.org (embedded below) Ahmadinejad's latest threats, has Obama really tried to unite the country, voter ID laws and much, much, more
Please make sure you watch the video below because something bad always happens to the people who don't. Last week Rep. Todd Akin forgot to press play and...well you know hat happened.
Oh and if you cannot see the video player below please click here
Provocation by Media Agitation: Akin, Family, Staff Get Death And Rape Threats
by Steve Gilbert
August 24th, 2012 at 8:12 am
Sweetness-light:
From a conspicuously un-outraged Washington Post:
Todd Akin threats under investigation by Capitol Police, FBI
By Ed O’Keefe | Thurs August 23, 2012
Law enforcement authorities are investigating multiple threats made against Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), his family and staff in the days since his controversial comments about abortion and rape, a spokesman said late Thursday.
”Over the last couple of days, there’s been threats of rape of staff, the congressman’s family, and suggestions that people die,” Akin spokesman Steve Taylor said late Thursday.
He confirmed that the U.S. Capitol Police and FBI are investigating “which threats are accurate or how to contextualize them.”
Yes, we wouldn’t want to take these threats out of context. By the way, these threats are real crimes. Akin committed no crime. Wonder which will get more press coverage?
Taylor would not confirm Akin’s whereabouts, but reports published Thursday said the congressman was in Tampa meeting with conservative leaders to discuss the future of his U.S. Senate bid in Missouri…
It sounds like a man who is running for the Senate has almost had to go into hiding. But this is what we have come to expect from the tolerant left. In this new era of civility that Obama has brought us.
Still, isn’t it funny how there is no suggestion that these threats against Akin could be hate crimes or even terrorism. Why is that, do you think?
A St. Louis television station first reported Thursday that “multiple people have threatened rape and harm against Akin, his staff and family.” …
[R]ecently, Capitol Police and Miami-area officials investigated a threat against Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in April that prompted authorities to provide him extra protection in Washington and outside his West Miami home.
You remember all the news coverage about that, don’t you? We don’t either.
All I remember hearing about from the press is the danger posed by the rise of rightwing hate groups.
August 24th, 2012 at 8:12 am
Sweetness-light:
From a conspicuously un-outraged Washington Post:
Todd Akin threats under investigation by Capitol Police, FBI
By Ed O’Keefe | Thurs August 23, 2012
Law enforcement authorities are investigating multiple threats made against Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), his family and staff in the days since his controversial comments about abortion and rape, a spokesman said late Thursday.
”Over the last couple of days, there’s been threats of rape of staff, the congressman’s family, and suggestions that people die,” Akin spokesman Steve Taylor said late Thursday.
He confirmed that the U.S. Capitol Police and FBI are investigating “which threats are accurate or how to contextualize them.”
Yes, we wouldn’t want to take these threats out of context. By the way, these threats are real crimes. Akin committed no crime. Wonder which will get more press coverage?
Taylor would not confirm Akin’s whereabouts, but reports published Thursday said the congressman was in Tampa meeting with conservative leaders to discuss the future of his U.S. Senate bid in Missouri…
It sounds like a man who is running for the Senate has almost had to go into hiding. But this is what we have come to expect from the tolerant left. In this new era of civility that Obama has brought us.
Still, isn’t it funny how there is no suggestion that these threats against Akin could be hate crimes or even terrorism. Why is that, do you think?
A St. Louis television station first reported Thursday that “multiple people have threatened rape and harm against Akin, his staff and family.” …
[R]ecently, Capitol Police and Miami-area officials investigated a threat against Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) in April that prompted authorities to provide him extra protection in Washington and outside his West Miami home.
You remember all the news coverage about that, don’t you? We don’t either.
All I remember hearing about from the press is the danger posed by the rise of rightwing hate groups.
'The President's Utility' — Chicago Energy Behemoth Exelon Corporation Scored $200 Million in Stimulus Funds, and Holder's Justice Dept. Approved Exelon's $7.9 Billion Utility Merger With Constellation Energy of Maryland
Thursday, August 23, 2012
I'm surprised this piece is even running at the New York Times. It's falling way outside of the approved narrative. See, "Ties to Obama Aided in Access for Big Utility"
(American Power) -
WASHINGTON — Early in the Obama administration, a lobbyist for the Illinois-based energy producer Exelon Corporation proudly called it “the president’s utility.” And it was not just because it delivers power to Barack Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago.
Exelon’s top executives were early and frequent supporters of Mr. Obama as he rose from the Illinois State Senate to the White House. John W. Rogers Jr., a friend of the president’s and one of his top fund-raisers, is an Exelon board member. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime political strategist, once worked as an Exelon consultant, and Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor and Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff, helped create the company through a corporate merger in 2000 while working as an investment banker.
With energy an increasingly pivotal issue for the Obama White House, a review of Exelon’s relationship with the administration shows how familiarity has helped foster access at the upper reaches of government and how, in some cases, the outcome has been favorable for Exelon.
White House records show that Exelon executives were able to secure an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon’s competitors, but curb the high cost of compliance for Exelon and its industry allies.
In addition, Exelon, which provides power to more than 6.6 million customers in at least 16 states and the District of Columbia, was chosen as one of only six electric utilities nationwide for the maximum $200 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department. And when the Treasury Department granted loans for renewable energy projects, Exelon landed a commitment for up to $646 million allowing it, on extremely generous financial terms, to finance one of the world’s largest photovoltaic solar projects.
Exelon’s seemingly easy access to top administration officials has hardly gone unnoticed among competitors.
“I would like to get some treatment in Washington like that,” said Ken Anderson, general manager at Tri-State G&T, a Colorado-based power supplier that has been at odds with Exelon over environmental regulations. “But Exelon seems to get deference that I can’t get.”
Continue reading.
This company is the administration's mother load for green energy crony capitalism.
My gosh. They've got open access to the White House.
My first thought at reading this was how Michelle Malkin could have a field day here, and lo and behold, she already has. See, "Obama’s Green Robber Barons":
Had enough of fat cat Barack Obama, his jet-setting wife and his multi-millionaire Chicago consigliere/real-estate mogul Valerie Jarrett attacking the “rich”? Well, brace yourselves. You’ll be hearing much more from the White House about the “wealthy few” who aren’t paying their “fair share” as Obama’s re-election campaign doubles down on class-war demagoguery.
As usual, there’s always a set of immunity charms for the privileged friends and family of the ruling class. When it comes to all the Green Robber Barons who’ve reaped an obscenely unfair share of billions of tax dollars from the Obama administration, the envy trumpeteers will be quieter than a nest of mute church mice.
Obama’s State of the Union address defiantly pitched a new round of clean energy spending orgies to help the “middle class.” But how have the serial bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies of several federally subsidized solar companies — all under Obama’s watch — helped anyone but an upper-crust elite of eco-crats and their lobbyists and consultants?
*****
My scouring of White House visitor logs shows nine visits from another Green Robber Baron, Illinois-based Exelon’s CEO John Rowe, who met with the president and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel multiple times. As Forbes magazine reported: The clean energy company “has very deep ties to the Obama Administration. Frank M. Clark, who runs ComEd, helped advise Obama before he ran for president and is one of Obama’s largest fundraisers. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, worked as a consultant to Exelon. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, helped create Exelon” — where he raked in more than $16 million over two years.
Right.
"Very deep ties" indeed.
Heading back over to the New York Times' piece, here's this:
... one person who met with Exelon representatives as a federal official, and requested anonymity because the discussions were confidential, said that while the company’s connections did not guide specific decisions, federal officials knew to handle Exelon carefully.
“It is not necessarily unethical or immoral,” he said, “it is just a fact of life that Exelon has more relations with senior administration officials than others, which means Exelon has a direct line to fairly high places in the White House if they need to.”
Even without any political connection, as a nuclear energy producer Exelon was well positioned to take advantage of the administration’s drive to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
The administration’s tightening of clean air rules was a particular boon, since it took aim at Exelon’s main competitors — coal-burning power plants in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions. In 2010, Exelon estimated it would earn an extra $400 million annually because the regulations would force dozens of coal-burning plants to close.
“We were the hyena looking for the dead stuff on the road,” John W. Rowe, Exelon’s recently departed chief executive, told Wall Street analysts this year.
While other nuclear and natural-gas-focused energy producers also stood to benefit, Exelon stands out for its size. Last December, the Justice Department approved its $7.9 billion merger with Constellation Energy of Maryland, despite objections from Maryland’s consumer advocate. Although Exelon agreed to sell three Maryland power plants, among other concessions, it still emerged as the nation’s largest unregulated electricity generator, meaning that in many of the states its rates are not set by government officials but by what customers will pay.
Oh brother.
This is frankly just a pay-out racket, since there's not been a single green energy company so far that's created a successful new renewable program.
There's still more at the Times. It's just one big exposé on the Obama administration's pay-to-play cronyism. We'll see how much play this gets among the MSM types today, however, the same people Jake Tapper claimed had tipped the scales for O in 2008.
Who knows? Maybe the Niall Ferguson piece at Newsweek was a bellwether.
PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.
UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. And linked at Jawa Report and iOWNTHEWORLD. Thanks!
More at The Lonely Conservative. Thanks!
I'm surprised this piece is even running at the New York Times. It's falling way outside of the approved narrative. See, "Ties to Obama Aided in Access for Big Utility"
(American Power) -
WASHINGTON — Early in the Obama administration, a lobbyist for the Illinois-based energy producer Exelon Corporation proudly called it “the president’s utility.” And it was not just because it delivers power to Barack Obama’s Hyde Park neighborhood in Chicago.
Exelon’s top executives were early and frequent supporters of Mr. Obama as he rose from the Illinois State Senate to the White House. John W. Rogers Jr., a friend of the president’s and one of his top fund-raisers, is an Exelon board member. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime political strategist, once worked as an Exelon consultant, and Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor and Mr. Obama’s former chief of staff, helped create the company through a corporate merger in 2000 while working as an investment banker.
With energy an increasingly pivotal issue for the Obama White House, a review of Exelon’s relationship with the administration shows how familiarity has helped foster access at the upper reaches of government and how, in some cases, the outcome has been favorable for Exelon.
White House records show that Exelon executives were able to secure an unusually large number of meetings with top administration officials at key moments in the consideration of environmental regulations that have been drafted in a way that hurt Exelon’s competitors, but curb the high cost of compliance for Exelon and its industry allies.
In addition, Exelon, which provides power to more than 6.6 million customers in at least 16 states and the District of Columbia, was chosen as one of only six electric utilities nationwide for the maximum $200 million stimulus grant from the Energy Department. And when the Treasury Department granted loans for renewable energy projects, Exelon landed a commitment for up to $646 million allowing it, on extremely generous financial terms, to finance one of the world’s largest photovoltaic solar projects.
Exelon’s seemingly easy access to top administration officials has hardly gone unnoticed among competitors.
“I would like to get some treatment in Washington like that,” said Ken Anderson, general manager at Tri-State G&T, a Colorado-based power supplier that has been at odds with Exelon over environmental regulations. “But Exelon seems to get deference that I can’t get.”
Continue reading.
This company is the administration's mother load for green energy crony capitalism.
My gosh. They've got open access to the White House.
My first thought at reading this was how Michelle Malkin could have a field day here, and lo and behold, she already has. See, "Obama’s Green Robber Barons":
Had enough of fat cat Barack Obama, his jet-setting wife and his multi-millionaire Chicago consigliere/real-estate mogul Valerie Jarrett attacking the “rich”? Well, brace yourselves. You’ll be hearing much more from the White House about the “wealthy few” who aren’t paying their “fair share” as Obama’s re-election campaign doubles down on class-war demagoguery.
As usual, there’s always a set of immunity charms for the privileged friends and family of the ruling class. When it comes to all the Green Robber Barons who’ve reaped an obscenely unfair share of billions of tax dollars from the Obama administration, the envy trumpeteers will be quieter than a nest of mute church mice.
Obama’s State of the Union address defiantly pitched a new round of clean energy spending orgies to help the “middle class.” But how have the serial bankruptcies and near-bankruptcies of several federally subsidized solar companies — all under Obama’s watch — helped anyone but an upper-crust elite of eco-crats and their lobbyists and consultants?
*****
My scouring of White House visitor logs shows nine visits from another Green Robber Baron, Illinois-based Exelon’s CEO John Rowe, who met with the president and former chief of staff Rahm Emanuel multiple times. As Forbes magazine reported: The clean energy company “has very deep ties to the Obama Administration. Frank M. Clark, who runs ComEd, helped advise Obama before he ran for president and is one of Obama’s largest fundraisers. Obama’s chief political strategist, David Axelrod, worked as a consultant to Exelon. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, helped create Exelon” — where he raked in more than $16 million over two years.
Right.
"Very deep ties" indeed.
Heading back over to the New York Times' piece, here's this:
... one person who met with Exelon representatives as a federal official, and requested anonymity because the discussions were confidential, said that while the company’s connections did not guide specific decisions, federal officials knew to handle Exelon carefully.
“It is not necessarily unethical or immoral,” he said, “it is just a fact of life that Exelon has more relations with senior administration officials than others, which means Exelon has a direct line to fairly high places in the White House if they need to.”
Even without any political connection, as a nuclear energy producer Exelon was well positioned to take advantage of the administration’s drive to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
The administration’s tightening of clean air rules was a particular boon, since it took aim at Exelon’s main competitors — coal-burning power plants in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic regions. In 2010, Exelon estimated it would earn an extra $400 million annually because the regulations would force dozens of coal-burning plants to close.
“We were the hyena looking for the dead stuff on the road,” John W. Rowe, Exelon’s recently departed chief executive, told Wall Street analysts this year.
While other nuclear and natural-gas-focused energy producers also stood to benefit, Exelon stands out for its size. Last December, the Justice Department approved its $7.9 billion merger with Constellation Energy of Maryland, despite objections from Maryland’s consumer advocate. Although Exelon agreed to sell three Maryland power plants, among other concessions, it still emerged as the nation’s largest unregulated electricity generator, meaning that in many of the states its rates are not set by government officials but by what customers will pay.
Oh brother.
This is frankly just a pay-out racket, since there's not been a single green energy company so far that's created a successful new renewable program.
There's still more at the Times. It's just one big exposé on the Obama administration's pay-to-play cronyism. We'll see how much play this gets among the MSM types today, however, the same people Jake Tapper claimed had tipped the scales for O in 2008.
Who knows? Maybe the Niall Ferguson piece at Newsweek was a bellwether.
PHOTO CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons.
UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. And linked at Jawa Report and iOWNTHEWORLD. Thanks!
More at The Lonely Conservative. Thanks!
Report: State Dept. Considers US Nuclear Arsenal
by AWR Hawkins
24 Aug 2012, 2:14 AM PDT
Breitbart News Services - Although President Obama's current defense cuts are so drastic that even Rep. Nancy Pelosi is scared they might cost Democrats more seats in the House, State Dept. advisers are reportedly encouraging further cuts and even the all-out elimination of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
A State Dept. report addressing this issue justifies the suggestion on the grounds that possessing nuclear weapons drives other nations to "acquisition and/or use of nuclear weapons."
In other words, as long as nations like the U.S., Israel, and Russia have nukes but rogue nations like Iran and North Korea don't, Iran and North Korea will continually pursue them with a willingness to use them. Yet if we get rid of ours, they will stop the pursuit of theirs... and everybody can hug and get along, naturally.
Explaining away Iran's nuclear ambitions by saying they only want such weapons because we have them is childish and irrational. It's much like saying burglars only want guns because the owners of the homes they burglarize have them. In truth, burglars want guns so they can operate from a position of strength.
Yet even Obama's State Dept. admits that such "a cooperative world scenario may be unrealistic to achieve in an acceptable timeframe." Thus, the first step would simply be more reductions, beginning with the U.S. and Russia. But even here, those behind the report admit that we will have to find other "weapons of mass destruction" with which to replace nuclear weapons in order to have a viable option for nuclear deterrence.
Now more than ever we need peace through strength. And that kind of peace relies not only on the possession of a nuclear arsenal but also on the assurance that we'd use that arsenal to defend ourselves if need be. The approach proposed by Obama's State Dept. will only lead to an ever more pitiful "mother may I?" foreign policy.
Why Does Obama Have Anti-Israel Activists On His List of Rabbi Supporters?
Thursday, August 23, 2012
yidwithlid:
Note: I received a press release today from the Republican Jewish Coalition informing me that one of the Rabbis on the President's "Rabbis for Obama" list (Gottlieb) was an Anti-Israel activist. Over my lunchtime brisket sandwich from Bens, I decided to see if the President had any others like Rabbi Gottlieb on his list. Before I opened my can of Dr. Browns cream soda, I found eight more.
Earlier this week the Obama campaign announced the formation of “Rabbis For Obama," featuring over 600 rabbis from across the country and across all Jewish denominations dedicated to four more years of big government and anti-Israel policies.
The campaign didn’t bother to check the list, or simply didn’t care who was on it ,because at least eight of the Rabbis on the list are members of the Rabbinical Council of The Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)--an organization named by the Anti-Defamation League as one of the 10 most anti-Israel organizations in America (I am sure their mothers are proud).
The Rabbis include:
Rabbi Chava Bahle, Suttons Bay, MI
Rabbi Rachel Evelyne Barenblat, Lanesboro, MA
Rabbi Haim Beliak, Los Angeles, CA
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Berkeley, CA
Rabbi Linda Holtzman, Philadelphia, PA
Rabbi Rebecca Lillian, Chicago, IL
David Mivasair, State College, PA
Rabbi Brant Rosen, Evanston, IL
According to the ADL analysis JVP, the organization with which these Rabbis are involved:
…calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, accuses Israel of "apartheid" policies, and supports divestment campaigns against Israel. Like other Jewish anti-Zionist groups, JVP uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and provide a greater degree of credibility to the anti-Israel movement. JVP recognizes its role as such, specifically noting that the group's Jewish nature gives it a "particular legitimacy in voicing an alternative view of American and Israeli actions and policies" and the ability to distinguish "between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation of that issue." JVP activists regularly attend anti-Israel events wearing t-shirts and holding signs proudly broadcasting their Jewish identity. In March-April 2010, leaders of JVP unsuccessfully lobbied for the passage of a divestment resolution at the University of California, Berkeley, targeting companies that do business with Israel.
Some of the members of Obama’s anti-Israel Jew-crew can be considered “standouts.”
For example, Rabbi Chava Bahle is also a member of an organization called 14 Friends of Palestine, which advocated condemning Israel for the Gaza flotilla incident, in which a boat from Turkey filled with terrorists and weapons was stopped by Israel 2010, resulting in several deaths. Bahle and the group also advocates the false meme that Israel is preventing food and medical supplies from reaching Gaza.
In his book Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity, Rabbi Brant Rosen wrote this about Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s response to thousands of rockets fired into her civilian areas:
I remember reading this news with utter anguish. At the same time, oddly enough, I realized that I was finally observing this issue with something approaching true clarity: This is not about security at all -- this is about bringing the Palestinian people to their knees.
Once I admitted this to myself, I realized how utterly tired I had become. Tired of trying to excuse the inexcusable. Tired of using torturous, exhausting rationalizations to explain away what I knew in my heart was sheer and simple oppression.
Rosen is also an advocate of the BDS movement that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb’s history includes dining with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and being the first American rabbi to visit Tehran. And through her organization, Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence, Gottlieb (as well as other rabbis on Obama’s list) thanked South African Judge Goldstone for his now discredited report on Operation Cast Lead that accused Israel of war crimes:
Judge Goldstone, we want to offer you our deepest thanks for upholding the principles of justice, compassion and truth that are the heart of Jewish religion and without which our claims to Jewishness are empty of meaning. We regret that your findings have led to controversy and caused you not to feel welcome at your own grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. We believe your report is a clarion call to Israel and the Jewish people to awaken from the slumber of denial and return to the path of peace.
These seven rabbis were easy to find because they were all part of the same anti-Israel organization. If each of the 600+ Rabbis were looked into I am confident there would be similar cases to report.
For example, one name I’ve recognized right off is Arthur Waskow. Waskow is associated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)--also on the ADL’s most anti-Israel group list.
In his description of the Rabbis for Obama group, Ira Forman, Jewish Outreach Director for the Obama campaign said:
Their ringing endorsement of President Obama speaks volumes about the President’s deep commitment to the security of the state of Israel and his dedication to a policy agenda that represents the values of the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish Community.
I wonder if Mr. Forman and President Obama believe these anti-Israel activists represent the values of the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish Community--or, based on his policies since he took office, simply represent the values of Barack Obama.
Posted by Jeff Dunetz at Thursday, August 23, 2012
yidwithlid:
Note: I received a press release today from the Republican Jewish Coalition informing me that one of the Rabbis on the President's "Rabbis for Obama" list (Gottlieb) was an Anti-Israel activist. Over my lunchtime brisket sandwich from Bens, I decided to see if the President had any others like Rabbi Gottlieb on his list. Before I opened my can of Dr. Browns cream soda, I found eight more.
Earlier this week the Obama campaign announced the formation of “Rabbis For Obama," featuring over 600 rabbis from across the country and across all Jewish denominations dedicated to four more years of big government and anti-Israel policies.
The campaign didn’t bother to check the list, or simply didn’t care who was on it ,because at least eight of the Rabbis on the list are members of the Rabbinical Council of The Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP)--an organization named by the Anti-Defamation League as one of the 10 most anti-Israel organizations in America (I am sure their mothers are proud).
The Rabbis include:
Rabbi Chava Bahle, Suttons Bay, MI
Rabbi Rachel Evelyne Barenblat, Lanesboro, MA
Rabbi Haim Beliak, Los Angeles, CA
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Berkeley, CA
Rabbi Linda Holtzman, Philadelphia, PA
Rabbi Rebecca Lillian, Chicago, IL
David Mivasair, State College, PA
Rabbi Brant Rosen, Evanston, IL
According to the ADL analysis JVP, the organization with which these Rabbis are involved:
…calls for an end to U.S. aid to Israel, accuses Israel of "apartheid" policies, and supports divestment campaigns against Israel. Like other Jewish anti-Zionist groups, JVP uses its Jewish identity to shield the anti-Israel movement from allegations of anti-Semitism and provide a greater degree of credibility to the anti-Israel movement. JVP recognizes its role as such, specifically noting that the group's Jewish nature gives it a "particular legitimacy in voicing an alternative view of American and Israeli actions and policies" and the ability to distinguish "between real anti-Semitism and the cynical manipulation of that issue." JVP activists regularly attend anti-Israel events wearing t-shirts and holding signs proudly broadcasting their Jewish identity. In March-April 2010, leaders of JVP unsuccessfully lobbied for the passage of a divestment resolution at the University of California, Berkeley, targeting companies that do business with Israel.
Some of the members of Obama’s anti-Israel Jew-crew can be considered “standouts.”
For example, Rabbi Chava Bahle is also a member of an organization called 14 Friends of Palestine, which advocated condemning Israel for the Gaza flotilla incident, in which a boat from Turkey filled with terrorists and weapons was stopped by Israel 2010, resulting in several deaths. Bahle and the group also advocates the false meme that Israel is preventing food and medical supplies from reaching Gaza.
In his book Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to Palestinian Solidarity, Rabbi Brant Rosen wrote this about Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s response to thousands of rockets fired into her civilian areas:
I remember reading this news with utter anguish. At the same time, oddly enough, I realized that I was finally observing this issue with something approaching true clarity: This is not about security at all -- this is about bringing the Palestinian people to their knees.
Once I admitted this to myself, I realized how utterly tired I had become. Tired of trying to excuse the inexcusable. Tired of using torturous, exhausting rationalizations to explain away what I knew in my heart was sheer and simple oppression.
Rosen is also an advocate of the BDS movement that calls for boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb’s history includes dining with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and being the first American rabbi to visit Tehran. And through her organization, Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence, Gottlieb (as well as other rabbis on Obama’s list) thanked South African Judge Goldstone for his now discredited report on Operation Cast Lead that accused Israel of war crimes:
Judge Goldstone, we want to offer you our deepest thanks for upholding the principles of justice, compassion and truth that are the heart of Jewish religion and without which our claims to Jewishness are empty of meaning. We regret that your findings have led to controversy and caused you not to feel welcome at your own grandson’s Bar Mitzvah. We believe your report is a clarion call to Israel and the Jewish people to awaken from the slumber of denial and return to the path of peace.
These seven rabbis were easy to find because they were all part of the same anti-Israel organization. If each of the 600+ Rabbis were looked into I am confident there would be similar cases to report.
For example, one name I’ve recognized right off is Arthur Waskow. Waskow is associated with the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR)--also on the ADL’s most anti-Israel group list.
In his description of the Rabbis for Obama group, Ira Forman, Jewish Outreach Director for the Obama campaign said:
Their ringing endorsement of President Obama speaks volumes about the President’s deep commitment to the security of the state of Israel and his dedication to a policy agenda that represents the values of the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish Community.
I wonder if Mr. Forman and President Obama believe these anti-Israel activists represent the values of the overwhelming majority of the American Jewish Community--or, based on his policies since he took office, simply represent the values of Barack Obama.
Posted by Jeff Dunetz at Thursday, August 23, 2012
Voters worry about economy. Dems response, focus on abortion
August 23, 2012 8:00 pm
Byron York
Fluke and Fluker in Denver, Co.
"This election, to me, is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment," says former President Bill Clinton in a new ad released by the Obama campaign. Most voters would agree, at least if one believes countless polls that show the economy and jobs are the nation's top concern.
So why are Democrats planning to make their convention a celebration of abortion and gay marriage? The Obama campaign has given a new and prominent surrogate role to Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown law student and full-time lefty activist who achieved notoriety after Rush Limbaugh called her a bad name because of her energetic promotion of taxpayer-financed contraception.
This week, Fluke's role has been to attack Republicans over Rep. Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" statement. "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan tried to distance themselves from the remark," Fluke wrote in an Obama campaign email, "but the fact is they're in lockstep with Akin on the major women's health issues of our time."
Fluke is just one part of the Democrats' plan to target Akin and the GOP on abortion. The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard writes that the Democratic convention is becoming an "anti-Akin affair," with party leaders lining up NARAL Pro-Choice America's Nancy Keenan, Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards, the actress Eva Longoria, Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, in addition to Fluke, to highlight "women's issues" in Charlotte.
There will be a lot of talk about abortion, all of it from one side. But not all Democrats agree with Fluke and her fellow speakers when it comes to abortion; in May of this year, Gallup found 34 percent of Democrats identify themselves as pro-life. And, perhaps more important to President Obama's re-election prospects, 47 percent of independents describe themselves as pro-life.
Why would a party that wants to attract the largest possible number of votes this November make such extravagant pronouncements on abortion, knowing that one-third of its own members and nearly one-half of independents disagree?
And that's just abortion. Democrats have already decided to make support for gay marriage a plank in the party's platform. The party's 15-member platform drafting committee unanimously voted to do so last month after hearing testimony from advocates of gay marriage. They did not invite any opponents of gay marriage to testify, suggesting that when it comes to writing a platform, the Democratic process is not entirely democratic.
According to the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, 65 percent of Democrats believe gay marriage should be legal, while 34 percent believe it shouldn't. A full 40 percent of independents believe gay marriage should not be legal. And the Democrats are holding their convention in a swing state, North Carolina, where voters recently approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
The rational design behind all this is that Barack Obama can't be re-elected without winning big among women. The newest Gallup polling shows equal gender gaps: Mitt Romney leads the president 50 percent to 42 percent among men, while the president leads Romney 50 to 42 percent among women. It's a gap that has been consistent for months now, and Obama hopes to eke out a victory by making a few more women nervous about voting Republican in the last weeks of the campaign. "The Obama campaign believes that college-educated women, and the margin the president could win among them, will decide the election," says a well-informed Democratic strategist not connected to the campaign.
But not all of this is a rational calculation. If you stand on the floor of a Democratic convention when a speaker is discussing abortion, you can feel the depth of the emotion that many Democrats feel on the issue. Conservatives like to say abortion is a liberal sacrament. Maybe that's going too far, but it is very, very important. And when something means so much to a group of people, they can easily convince themselves that it means that much to others, too.
Meanwhile, the voters continue to say, overwhelmingly, that they want their president to focus on the economy and job creation. By choosing to spotlight abortion and gay marriage at their national convention, Democrats could give voters the impression that they've got their priorities all mixed up. Sandra Fluke may draw headlines, but does she really represent what voters think is most important?
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.
Byron York
"This election, to me, is about which candidate is more likely to return us to full employment," says former President Bill Clinton in a new ad released by the Obama campaign. Most voters would agree, at least if one believes countless polls that show the economy and jobs are the nation's top concern.
So why are Democrats planning to make their convention a celebration of abortion and gay marriage? The Obama campaign has given a new and prominent surrogate role to Sandra Fluke, the former Georgetown law student and full-time lefty activist who achieved notoriety after Rush Limbaugh called her a bad name because of her energetic promotion of taxpayer-financed contraception.
This week, Fluke's role has been to attack Republicans over Rep. Todd Akin's "legitimate rape" statement. "Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan tried to distance themselves from the remark," Fluke wrote in an Obama campaign email, "but the fact is they're in lockstep with Akin on the major women's health issues of our time."
Fluke is just one part of the Democrats' plan to target Akin and the GOP on abortion. The Washington Examiner's Paul Bedard writes that the Democratic convention is becoming an "anti-Akin affair," with party leaders lining up NARAL Pro-Choice America's Nancy Keenan, Planned Parenthood's Cecile Richards, the actress Eva Longoria, Sen. Barbara Mikulski and Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, in addition to Fluke, to highlight "women's issues" in Charlotte.
There will be a lot of talk about abortion, all of it from one side. But not all Democrats agree with Fluke and her fellow speakers when it comes to abortion; in May of this year, Gallup found 34 percent of Democrats identify themselves as pro-life. And, perhaps more important to President Obama's re-election prospects, 47 percent of independents describe themselves as pro-life.
Why would a party that wants to attract the largest possible number of votes this November make such extravagant pronouncements on abortion, knowing that one-third of its own members and nearly one-half of independents disagree?
And that's just abortion. Democrats have already decided to make support for gay marriage a plank in the party's platform. The party's 15-member platform drafting committee unanimously voted to do so last month after hearing testimony from advocates of gay marriage. They did not invite any opponents of gay marriage to testify, suggesting that when it comes to writing a platform, the Democratic process is not entirely democratic.
According to the most recent Gallup poll on the matter, 65 percent of Democrats believe gay marriage should be legal, while 34 percent believe it shouldn't. A full 40 percent of independents believe gay marriage should not be legal. And the Democrats are holding their convention in a swing state, North Carolina, where voters recently approved a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.
The rational design behind all this is that Barack Obama can't be re-elected without winning big among women. The newest Gallup polling shows equal gender gaps: Mitt Romney leads the president 50 percent to 42 percent among men, while the president leads Romney 50 to 42 percent among women. It's a gap that has been consistent for months now, and Obama hopes to eke out a victory by making a few more women nervous about voting Republican in the last weeks of the campaign. "The Obama campaign believes that college-educated women, and the margin the president could win among them, will decide the election," says a well-informed Democratic strategist not connected to the campaign.
But not all of this is a rational calculation. If you stand on the floor of a Democratic convention when a speaker is discussing abortion, you can feel the depth of the emotion that many Democrats feel on the issue. Conservatives like to say abortion is a liberal sacrament. Maybe that's going too far, but it is very, very important. And when something means so much to a group of people, they can easily convince themselves that it means that much to others, too.
Meanwhile, the voters continue to say, overwhelmingly, that they want their president to focus on the economy and job creation. By choosing to spotlight abortion and gay marriage at their national convention, Democrats could give voters the impression that they've got their priorities all mixed up. Sandra Fluke may draw headlines, but does she really represent what voters think is most important?
Byron York, The Examiner's chief political correspondent, can be contacted at byork@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears on Tuesday and Friday, and his stories and blog posts appear on washingtonexaminer.com.
McCaskill 2006 on Bill Clinton: “I don’t want my daughter near him”
posted at 9:44 pm on August 23, 2012 by Allahpundit
HotAir.Com:
I forgot all about this but luckily Dana Loesch didn’t. We’ve spent four days pulverizing Akin; let McCaskill and her pal Barack spend a day or two now trying to explain why a convention ostensibly devoted to the dignity of women should feature as a key speaker a guy who’d warrant a comment like this. Free advice for any reporter with the professional integrity to ask her about it: Make sure to have her clarify whether she was alluding specifically to rape, statutory or otherwise, or whether she was “merely” implying that he’d betray our feminist-icon Secretary of State by acting like a lech around a much younger woman. We need much more information on the many fascinating nuances of this “pro-woman” message.
HotAir.Com:
I forgot all about this but luckily Dana Loesch didn’t. We’ve spent four days pulverizing Akin; let McCaskill and her pal Barack spend a day or two now trying to explain why a convention ostensibly devoted to the dignity of women should feature as a key speaker a guy who’d warrant a comment like this. Free advice for any reporter with the professional integrity to ask her about it: Make sure to have her clarify whether she was alluding specifically to rape, statutory or otherwise, or whether she was “merely” implying that he’d betray our feminist-icon Secretary of State by acting like a lech around a much younger woman. We need much more information on the many fascinating nuances of this “pro-woman” message.
TSA's Clever New Security Protocol: Nosy Questions About Your vacation
J.D. Tuccille
Aug. 23, 2012 9:00 pm
(Reason.com) - If you're under the impression that the Transportation Security Administration tweaks its security procedures in order to fine-tune to a humiliating level of intrusiveness while carefully avoiding even accidentally achieving anything in the way of improved security, you're probably only partially correct. In fact, it pursues that goal within the constraints of its other institutional imperative: avoiding embarrassing high-level officials. Being accused of presiding over an agency that lazily engages in racial profiling, as the TSA recently was in the pages of the New York Times, is embarrassing. So those highly trained security professionals are retraining, refocusing, and now they're really, really interested in learning about your summer vacation.
Over at the ACLU's Blog of Rights, Devon Chaffee writes of her most recent experience passing through airport security in Burlington, Vermont:
The agent then turned to me with grin that was a bit perky for even my taste given the early hour. “So where are you folks off to?” he energetically inquired.
I like to think that I’m a friendly person, so I answered him, expecting a brief innocuous exchange about the Washington DC heat and the scourge of Capitol Hill gridlock. Instead, the agent responded to my answer with a barrage of questions about where in Vermont we had stayed, how long we had traveled, and why we had traveled there. I could feel a suspicious expression involuntarily creep across my face. The New Englander inside me was screaming “you don’t know this person from a hole in the wall and you certainly don’t want to divulge to him the details of your family vacation!” And yet it seemed that the more discomfort I expressed, the more persistent the agent’s questioning became, following us down the line, grilling me unrelentingly about our vacation plans and baggage status.
Chafffee's experience, as she notes, was almost certainly a re-geared version of the "behavior detection" that resulted in charges of racial profiling at Logan Airport in Boston. People clumsy enough to interpret "behavior detection" as "tackle the brown folks" are guaranteed, once redirected, to think that behaving like a sweaty stalker in a corner bar is a cleverly subtle approach to ferreting out evil-doers.
Yeah. Traveling is just becoming more fun every day.
Aug. 23, 2012 9:00 pm
Over at the ACLU's Blog of Rights, Devon Chaffee writes of her most recent experience passing through airport security in Burlington, Vermont:
The agent then turned to me with grin that was a bit perky for even my taste given the early hour. “So where are you folks off to?” he energetically inquired.
I like to think that I’m a friendly person, so I answered him, expecting a brief innocuous exchange about the Washington DC heat and the scourge of Capitol Hill gridlock. Instead, the agent responded to my answer with a barrage of questions about where in Vermont we had stayed, how long we had traveled, and why we had traveled there. I could feel a suspicious expression involuntarily creep across my face. The New Englander inside me was screaming “you don’t know this person from a hole in the wall and you certainly don’t want to divulge to him the details of your family vacation!” And yet it seemed that the more discomfort I expressed, the more persistent the agent’s questioning became, following us down the line, grilling me unrelentingly about our vacation plans and baggage status.
Chafffee's experience, as she notes, was almost certainly a re-geared version of the "behavior detection" that resulted in charges of racial profiling at Logan Airport in Boston. People clumsy enough to interpret "behavior detection" as "tackle the brown folks" are guaranteed, once redirected, to think that behaving like a sweaty stalker in a corner bar is a cleverly subtle approach to ferreting out evil-doers.
Yeah. Traveling is just becoming more fun every day.