Because, for years, they've been touting the VA as a model for socialized medicine
President Obama is “madder than hell” about the long-running scandal in the Veterans Affairs healthcare system. He finally addressed the issue publicly on Wednesday. His liberal allies, meanwhile, would also like everyone to know that the scandal is a “serious problem,” but perhaps not as troubling as the fact that REPUBLICANS HATE VETERANS.
The VA scandal looks pretty bad—dozens may have died as a result of excess wait times—so liberals don’t really have a choice but to be outraged, even as they insist that Obama, who has been in office for five years now, is in no way responsible.
Because I love it when liberals write about what’s REALLY motivating Republicans/conservatives, here’s another reason the VA scandal is incredibly inconvenient for liberals: For years, they’ve been touting the VA as a model for socialized medicine. And now, they look pretty foolish for doing so.
American health care is desperately in need of reform. But what form should change take? Are there any useful examples we can turn to for guidance?Here is Krugman again, in 2011:
Well, I know about a health care system that has been highly successful in containing costs, yet provides excellent care. And the story of this system’s success provides a helpful corrective to anti-government ideology. For the government doesn’t just pay the bills in this system — it runs the hospitals and clinics.
No, I’m not talking about some faraway country. The system in question is our very own Veterans Health Administration, whose success story is one of the best-kept secrets in the American policy debate.
What Mr. Romney and everyone else should know is that the [Veterans Health Administration] is a huge policy success story, which offers important lessons for future health reform. …This argument has been fairly popular in liberal circles for years. Phillip Longman has written extensively about how great the VA healthcare system is and why it should serve as a model for broader healthcare reform.
And yes, this is “socialized medicine” — although some private systems, like Kaiser Permanente, share many of the V.H.A.’s virtues. But it works — and suggests what it will take to solve the troubles of U.S. health care more broadly.
In 2009, wonkstar Ezra Klein wrote that expanding the VA healthcare system to non-veterans was “one of my favorite ideas.”
As recently as September 2013, organizations that support government-run healthcare, such as Physicians for a National Health Program, were praising the VA healthcare as an example of a single-payer system that provides “better care for more people at far less cost.”
We are constantly told by liberals that isolated disasters don’t speak to the efficacy of Big Government writ large. As The New Republic’s Brian Beutler writes, devoted liberals shouldn’t allow the VA scandal to “shake their belief in a fallible government’s ability to do big, important things.”
VA claims bonus was result of 'administrative error'
VA Secretary Eric Shinseki is reportedly responsible for signing off on performance ratings and rewards, but the department’s chairman Jeff Miller said the bonus was the result of “an administrative error.”
The Weekly Standard reports:
Sharon Helman, the director of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care System, ”got an $8,500 bonus last month while there was an open [inspector general] investigation into Phoenix,” Chairman Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an interview Wednesday.
It had been previously reported that Helman received more than $9,000 in bonus pay in 2013 on top of her annual salary of $169,900. The VA office of inspector general began investigating the Phoenix VA for wrongdoing in December 2013, months before Helman received the additional $8,500 bonus.
Targets of O'Keefe sting, Hollywood big shots ask FBI to investigate
By Rick Moran
A
video created by conservative media guerilla James O'Keefe, that showed
Hollywood big shots willing to receive funding from Arabs to make an
anti-Fracking movie while hiding the source of the funds, has engendered
a "tremendous amount of fallout" according to actor Ed Begley, one of
the targets in the film.
Now others who were outed as hypocrites want the FBI to investigate whether O'Keefe broke any laws when making the film.
Filmmakers who were targets of an undercover sting operation by James O'Keefe have filed a criminal complaint with police and have asked the FBI to determine whether federal laws were broken when the journalist surreptitiously recorded phone calls and a lunch meeting, a spokesman for movie producers Josh and Rebecca Tickell said Wednesday.....O’Keefe’s video, first released Tuesday, shows actors Ed Begely Jr. and Mariel Hemingway, both known for their environmental activism, and the Tickells, in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. The group seemingly agrees that if a man at the table named Muhammad gives the Tickells as much as $9 million to make their next movie, called Fracked, they’d hide the source of the funding. Muhammad, though, is an actor tricking the four into thinking he represents oil interests in the Middle East that want America to remain dependent on foreign countries for its energy needs.According to sources, the FBI has been asked to look into whether O’Keefe violated Section 2511 of Title 18, which involves the unauthorized interception and disclosure of electronic communications. Separately, authorities in California have been asked to dig into the possibility that O’Keefe violated Section 631 of the Penal Code, which concerns the recording of telephone calls “without the consent of all parties.”It’s unclear, though, whether O’Keefe even appears in the video taken at the Polo Lounge, and his voice doesn't seem to be heard in phone calls between the Tickells and a representative of fake Muhammad.
Did the Obama administration defraud purchasers of GM shares?
By Thomas Lifson
When
a controlling shareholder in a corporation sells shares to the public,
and the corporation subsequently discloses damaging information known to
it at the time of the sale, the SEC normally gets to work investigating
a possible crime. Withholding such data can be a crime, defrauding
investors by withholding material information.
It would appear that something like that happened when the federal government sold GM shares to the public. In the private sector, it would be time to call in the criminal defense lawyers.
Writing at The Federalist, Sean Davis notes, “GM Sure Recalled A Lot Of Cars Right After The Feds Sold Their Shares”:
…at least GM acted as soon as it knew there was a problem. Because it’s not like the company would sit on the information and do nothing about it, right? Right?Not so much.GM knew about serious problems with the ignition switch for years, going back to at least 2007. At that time, GM had hard data from multiple crashes showing that some of its ignition switches had failed to function properly. The U.S. government officially bailed out the automaker in December of 2008. Throughout the five-year period of U.S. government ownership, nothing was done to address the deadly switch. According to one timeline of events, GM’s new CEO, Mary Barra, claims she did not even learn of the problem until December of 2013, which just so happens to be when the federal government sold its final shares of GM stock (at a loss of $10 billion, naturally).Even though the company had data demonstrating a faulty ignition switch for years, it didn’t initiate a full investigation or recall until February of 2014, two months after the government sold its stake in the company. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) didn’t initiate a full investigation of the issue until later that month, even though the U.S. government had owned the company for 5 years. The Justice Dept. also showed up late to the party, confirming that same month that it had initiated a criminal probe into the matter.
The timing of claimed knowledge of the problems is so suspicious
that a full scale criminal probe by the SEC is warranted. That would be
the case if any private shareholder had sold shares under similar
circumstances.
Law professor and Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds sarcastically remarks, “I’m sure the SEC will be right on this.”
But
even if the SEC doesn’t take action, buyers of GM shares have a case to
make in civil court, if they take a loss on the GM shares. In such
cases, the doctrine that a CEO “should have known” the damaging
information applies.
I
can assure you that executives at Toyota and other foreign automobile
manufacturers are noticing that Toyota was fined a record $1.2 billion for failing to disclose safety-related complaints relating to sudden acceleration, while GM was fined a paltry $35 million for filing to disclose safety-related complaints for ignition switch
problems involving 2 million vehicles and fatalities. This looks a lot
like a national government putting its thumb on the butcher’s scale to
favor its own producers.
We
have entered a phase of corporatism in the United States, withy the
government rigging the game for favored companies, it would appear. And
in the world of corporate integrity, appearances are as important as
reality.
DHS headquarters a sink hole for taxpayer money
By Rick Moran
I'll let the Washington Post supply the lead:
The construction of a massive new headquarters for the Department of Homeland Security, billed as critical for national security and the revitalization of Southeast Washington, is running more than $1.5 billion over budget, is 11 years behind schedule and may never be completed, according to planning documents and federal officials.
You
have to actually try to waste that much money. It's not an accident.
It's not even incompetence. This is a perfect example of a bureaucratic
culture - and congressional irresponsibility - that has taken billions
of dollars and simply disappeared it. Nothing to show for it. And no end
in sight:
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the George W. Bush administration called for a new, centralized headquarters to strengthen the department’s ability to coordinate the fight against terrorism and respond to natural disasters. More than 50 historic buildings would be renovated and new ones erected on the grounds of St. Elizabeths, a onetime insane asylum with a panoramic view of the District.
The entire complex was to be finished as early as this year, at a cost of less than $3 billion, according to the initial plan.
Instead, with the exception of a Coast Guard building that opened last year, the grounds remain entirely undeveloped, with the occasional deer grazing amid the vacant Gothic Revival-style structures. The budget has ballooned to $4.5 billion, with completion pushed back to 2026. Even now, as Obama administration officials make the best of their limited funding, they have started design work for a second building that congressional aides and others familiar with the project say may never open.
....The
question isn't so much why it is costing so much as why build such a
monstrosity in the first place. DHS has taken on a life of its own,
assuming more and more power, hiring more bureacrats, and expanding its
reach into the lives of ordinary Americans. Since 9/11, we have spent half a trillion dollars on homeland security and it's debatable how much safer we are today than we were then.
This
monumental waste could have happened at any other federal agency. It's
not specific to DHS, although the incomprehensible plan to turn an old
insane asylum into a "campus" of more than 50 buildings might be seen as
a metaphor for the agency itself.
Until
Congress and the government take as much care of the putlic purse as
they do their own money, these kind of boondoggles will continue.
How Democrats Are Covering Up the Illegal Obamacare Bailout
By Conn Carroll
....the regulations issued last Friday are absolutely new and they are
only "routine" in the sense that far too often our federal government
issues new regulations that benefit large corporations at the expense of
taxpayers.
What Russ Britt failed to report is that HHS has flip-flopped on the
budget neutrality of the risk corridor program as the regulation process
has proceeded. Back in March of this year, when HHS first issued the
preliminary rule, HHS said the risk corridor program would be run in a "budget neutral fashion."
In other words, insurance companies claiming losses from Obamacare
could only take as much money out of the program as other companies
claiming profits were putting in.
But the insurance lobby freaked out about this regulation. Their lobbyist in Washington, America's Health Insurance Plans, issued a letter to CMS demanding that, "risk corridors should be operated without the constraint of budget neutrality." In other words, the insurance lobby wanted a guarantee that if Obamacare's losers wanted more money out of the risk corridor program than Obamacare's winners were paying in, that U.S. taxpayers would be forced to pay the difference.
And that is exactly what happened Friday. Shields Britt employer, HHS, issued a new regulation guaranteeing that taxpayers would be on the hook for an insurance industry bailout if insurance companies ended up paying less money into the risk corridor program then they wanted to take from it.
....As the LAT noted in their write up, Obama's commitment to insurance companies that he will illegally use taxpayer funds to bail them out, comes at a key time for Obamacare.
The insurance companies are all busy setting their premiums for next year. Without a guaranteed taxpayer bailout, insurance companies will set their premiums higher to protect themselves from financial loss. But if insurance companies know that taxpayers are on the hook for losses, than insurance companies are free to set their premiums low. Obama is essentially subsidizing health insurance company efforts to gain market share by underpricing their product at taxpayer expense.
Republicans can still stop this illegal bailout, but only if they are willing to cut funding to HHS through the appropriations process this September.
'How dumb does Obama think we are'?
By Rick Moran
A question asked by some right wing nut? Or liberal columnist Ron Fournier?
Fournier has become increasingly harsh in his criticism of the Obama administration. Yesterday, he wrote a column for National Journal that calls out the administration for their lies about the VA scandal.
News quiz: President Obama and his communications team hope that Americans are: 1) Dumb; 2) Distracted; 3) Numb to government inefficiency; 4) All of above.Answer: 4, all of the above.That answer along with utter incompetence are the best explanations for why the White House thought it could get away with claiming that the departure of Veterans Affairs official Robert Petzel was a step toward accountability for its scandalous treatment of war veterans.
Fact is, the department announced in 2013 that Dr. Petzel would retire this year."Well, Secretary Shinseki accepted Dr. Petzel's resignation this afternoon. He was due to retire early next month, and obviously there has been a nomination made for his replacement," White House Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough told CBS's Major Garrett last week. "I leave to Rick the explanation of his decision, but there is no question that this is a termination of his job there before he was planning to go."No. This was neither a termination nor a housecleaning. It was a scapegoating. For all of its 21st-century savvy in the field of campaign technology, the Obama White House has repeatedly proven that its communications philosophy is stuck in the 20th century. Before the Internet gave voters instantaneous access to information, including every public utterance of the president and his team, White House strategists could hope to wear out the truth: If you said a lie enough, people might believe it.
....Making
the determination to lie is carefully planned. Before Carney briefs
reporters, he sits down with top administration officials and his staff
to come up with the company line for the day. The "resignation" lie was
deliberate and calculated.
Why
do they think they can get away with it? Aside from conservative blogs
and a few commentators like Fournier, they already have. These are media
savvy people who know - or have a good idea - how long a particular
story will see the light of day on the cable nets, and news talk radio.
It isn't very long. In a few hours, the resignation story was replaced
by a hero cat or some other flake of news to distract the public.
The
vast majority of Americans may be aware of the VA scandal, but details
like Robert Petzel's retirement/resignation goes over their heads and
into the ether. The administration lies brazenly and often because by
the time they are called to account - if they ever are - the world has
moved on and literally, no one cares anymore.
The Fed has Built a Bomb
By James Longstreet
We have turned the Free Market over to the Federal Reserve and they have replaced it with a bomb.
Meddling
academics floundering in a mutual admiration society cleverly expanding
their impacts and powers over our economic system. As they do, the free market
evaluation of assets is altered. Capital is misappropriated. Decisions
are made by this central planning agency that subjectively helps some
and harms others.
How
did this self-expansion of powers proceed unfettered? Politics. Even
though the Federal Reserve is intended to be at arms length with
politics, it is absurd to think that’s actually the case. Fed pumping of
money is arguably the only economic impact from government policy ( or government sponsored agency) that has had a marked impact on the economy,
subdued as it may be. The party in power is all for such actions. Would
they dare challenge the Fed’s powers as it conducts actions that
attempt to buff up the economy and promote higher stock values? Not likely.
...The
Philadelphia Fed president, viewed as one of the bank’s leading hawks,
is worried about some $2.5 trillion in “excess” reserves. That is,
loanable funds available to individual or corporate borrowers through
the nation’s banks.
The
Fed has created these reserves through unprecedented purchases of U.S.
Treasurys and mortgage-backed securities, a strategy known as
“quantitative easing”.
These
reserves are just sitting in the bank system, basically doing nothing.
That’s because demand for loans has been unusually weak amid an economic
recovery that’s the slowest on record since the Great Depression.
“These reserves are not inflationary right now,” Plosser said in a meeting Tuesday with reporters in Washington.
Yet if borrowing begins to surge and those reserves start to pour out of the banking system, Plosser worries, “that’s going to put pressure on inflation.” The result: the Fed could be forced to raise interest rates faster and earlier than it would like and perhaps slam the breaks on the economic recovery.”
...“One
thing I worry about is that if we are late, in this environment, with
all these excess reserves, the consequences might be … more dramatic
than in previous times,” Plosser said. That’s central-bank speak for an
economic fiasco.
Nearly
six years of “emergency” action by the Federal Reserve. The “faucet”
is on, but only the basement fills with water. Out of sight, out of
mind for now.
The Nuclear Option: Why Harry Reid Can Smear the Koch Brothers with Impunity
By Charles Hurt
When the founders included the “Speech or Debate” clause in the U.S.
Constitution, they wanted to protect members of Congress from the whims
of any outside tyrant who might abuse the power of his office to
harass, control or destroy his political enemies.Today, in this putrid era of Senate history, we realize it was a gross oversight that the founders did not extend such protections to ordinary private citizens from members of Congress. Even in their deep cynicism about the human nature of politicians, the founders apparently never dreamed that a man like Majority Leader Harry Reid would one day control the U.S. Senate.
The specific purpose of Article 1, Section 6, of the Constitution was to ensure that lawmakers could carry out their duties in Congress without being delayed, arrested or jailed on trumped-up charges by political enemies.
Further, “for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”
This gave members of Congress the freedom to speak as faithfully and truthfully as they could without concern that their political enemies might later levy retribution against them. Members of Congress, in other words, were protected before, during and after any official business from the unbridled bullying of tyrants outside of Congress.
So what protections are there for the tax-paying American citizen from a tyrannical bully if that bully happens to be a member of Congress using his powerful position to slander, smear and slime that citizen’s character and motives? Nothing, apparently.
Take Charles and David Koch. They employ some 50,000 Americans and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on charitable causes, education and political advocacy. Yet at the end of the day, the wealthy and successful brothers amount to nothing more nor nothing less than the most treasured American assets: private, taxpaying citizens.
What respect does this earn from Harry Reid, the man who once publicly expressed relief at the completion of the $621 million Capitol Visitor Center (that you paid for) because he would no longer have to “literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol?”
It has earned the Kochs more than 100 mentions on the floor of the U.S. Senate in disjointed, confusing tirades by Mr. Reid.
He has called them “power-drunk billionaires,” accused them of lying and questioned their motives. There was a time in this country when Harry Reid would have been shot dead in a duel over less.
“It is too bad that they’re trying to buy America,” Mr. Reid said in one particularly incoherent diatribe.
“It’s time that the American people spoke out against the terrible dishonesty of these two brothers who are about as un-American as anyone I can imagine.”
Mr. Reid has smeared the Kochs with such calumny, it is a wonder the Kochs have not sued him for slander.
Oh yeah. They can’t. Because Harry Reid’s slanderous speech is protected in the well of the Senate.
Not only is Harry Reid protected by the Constitution for slandering private American citizens, he is also protected from the wrath of any other member of Congress who might want to rebuke him for such weaselly behavior. (Forgive me. I don’t mean to insult weasels.)
That is because Senate debate rules specifically prohibit any member from “directly or indirectly” suggesting another senator’s “conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator.”
So Harry Reid is above the law when he slimes the Kochs from the belly of Congress and he is cocooned in protection from being justifiably slimed by others.
Is there any description for this truly dishonest, un-American, treasonous conduct other than “cowardly bully?”
For some time now, people in the corridors of Congress and outside observers have increasingly wondered whether Harry Reid is going insane. Is he losing his mind? Is he in the grips of dementia?
If so, I hope to be forgiven for my harsh assessments of a sick man.
But you know what is even scarier than a crazed, power-drunk lunatic abusing his high office to torment private American citizens? That there are 54 other duly elected senators who again and again vote to make Harry Reid one of the most powerful men in the world.
Another Week of Government Lawlessness
By Judge Andrew Napolitano
What if the federal government is shameless? What if it personifies
the adage of do as I say and not as I do? What if it does the very
things it prosecutes others for doing? What if it has written laws and
enacted procedures so that it can spy and kill, while it charges others
with doing just that?
What if the feds recently indicted five low-level Chinese military officers for spying on American corporations? What if the feds accused these officers of using their computers in Beijing to hack into computers in Denver that are not owned by the federal government but by well-known and wealthy American corporations? What if these corporations are rich enough to install digital protections and procedures to insulate themselves from hackers? What if when Google and Apple and Facebook were hacked, they protected themselves from their hackers at no expense to the taxpayers?
What if the hackers who hacked into Google and Apple and Facebook -- the hackers that sent them into an expensive self-defense mode -- were agents of the federal government? What if those agents worked for the NSA? What if those NSA agents took oaths to uphold the Constitution? What if they violated their oaths and the Constitution with gusto?
What if the NSA spies on more people in China than the federal government has accused the Chinese military officers of spying on in the United States? What if the NSA used its computers in Maryland to hack into Chinese government computers in Beijing in order to identify the officers it just indicted?
What if the NSA spies on more than one billion persons every minute of every hour of every day? What if the NSA spies on the Pope, the chancellor of Germany, members of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and all persons in the Bahamas, as well as every person in America, all day and every day? What if the NSA's spies gather so much personal data about and from their one billion targets that, if reduced to print, the data collected would fill 27 times the content of the Library of Congress -- every day?
What if the accusations against the Chinese military officers -- who are unlikely to stand trial here -- are just another diversion by the Obama administration to take our eyes off its foreign adventurism, which has caused chaos in Libya, its failures in Benghazi, which may expose political gain at the price of lives, and its incompetence at the Veterans Administration, which the president has known about since before he became president?
What if the president dispatched his wife to champion the cause of 300 innocent, harmless little girls who were kidnapped by madmen in a lawless area of Africa? What if the hearts and tears of millions were so stirred up by this that the federal government could secretly and without public criticism try to rescue and save these little girls? What if the president's drones have killed more little girls than the kidnappers have kidnapped? What if the 3,000 people who were killed by the president's drones, but were not targeted by them, are victims of extra-judicial murder, but the president calls them collateral damage?
What if, when the president decided he wanted to kill people in foreign lands without declaring war on the government of those lands and without indicting and trying the people he wanted to kill, he went to lawyers in the Department of Justice and asked them to find a way to make the killings legal? What if he also asked those lawyers to find a way to make his killings of Americans in foreign lands legal?
What if the Constitution declares that if the government wants to take life, liberty or property from anyone, it must seek what it wants by means of the courts and not by means of drones? What if, in order to advise the president that he can legally kill, the lawyer assigned to the task sent numerous legal memoranda to the president? What if that lawyer persuaded the president that he could legally and constitutionally kill whom he wishes? What if that lawyer who advised the president that he could kill with drones -- even Americans if he wished -- has been nominated to become a federal judge? What if the bench to which the president nominated this lawyer is the second highest court in the land?
What if the Constitution requires Senate confirmation of all of the president's judicial nominees? What if Sen. Rand Paul and others asked this nominee for public copies of his legal memoranda in which he found a way for the president legally to kill Americans? What if this nominee and the president refused to make these memoranda available for public scrutiny until a court ordered them to do so?
What if this lawyer claims that he can be faithful to the Constitution and to presidential extra-judicial killing at the same time? What if such a dual loyalty is metaphysically impossible because the Constitution mandates the rule of law and presidential killing mandates the rule of men? What if Paul and others have talked their hearts out in an effort to stop this lawyer from achieving a lifetime judgeship, but the political bosses of the Senate made sure he became a federal judge? What if this judge judged you?
What if these Alice-in-Wonderland tales are really happening? What if you are reading this on a computer and the NSA is looking right at you? What if the government regularly breaks its own laws? What if the government thinks that wrong is right? What if the government doesn't know the difference?
What do we do about it?
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