The latest NSA flapdoodle is not to be taken seriously outside the EU. http://spectator.org/archives/2013/10/31/spy-vs-spy-vs-the-three-stooges The latest flapdoodle over intelligence gathering has bestirred a more than usually energetic reaction. Calls to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and to shackle the NSA are erupting all over the political landscape like acne on a teenager’s face. But […]
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6157 When the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington released a report last week saying that Iran has the ability to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb within weeks, one could almost hear U.S. President Barack Obama’s heart sink. His despair was not due to the findings of the report. Rather, […]
ROGERS AND HART 1940- FROM PAL JOEY-
READ THE NEWS, HEARD THE NEWS, WATCHED THE NEWS AND ALL I CAN SAY IS
BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED AM I….
HAPPY HALLOWEEN
There’s a certain amount of lingo that comes with the provision of health care. In most developed countries, these words are “doctor,” “nurse,” “scalpel,” “appendix,” that sort of thing. But American health care has its own unique vocabulary: “co-pay,” “HMO,” “COBRA,” “doughnut hole” . . . And we’re always adding to it. The latest word is “exchanges.” A mere twelve months ago “exchanges” were something to do with stocks or trying to get a larger size when you’re given a too-tight thong for Christmas. Now, suddenly, it’s the new health-care buzzword. You go to the federal website for the “exchanges,” if you can get through, and they redirect you to the state websites for the “exchanges,” if they’re working. In Oregon, there are some 1,700 different rules that determine eligibility for the new “exchange.” In Maryland, you’re advised that “we may share information provided in your application with the appropriate authorities for law enforcement and audit activities.” But we’re used to all that by now, aren’t we? The point is it’s going to be complicated, time-consuming, and in breach of almost any elementary understanding of privacy. That’s what makes it quintessentially American.
Most developed nations have a public health-care system and a private health-care system — of variable quality, to be sure, but all of them far simpler to navigate than America’s endlessly mutating fusion of the worst of both worlds. Obamacare stitches together the rear ends of two pantomime horses and attempts to ride it to the sunlit uplands. Good luck with that. But we should remember that this disaster has been a long time incubating. The Democrats’ objection to the pre-Obama “private” health system is that Americans wound up spending more than any other country for what they argued were inferior health outcomes. But the more telling number is revealed by Avik Roy elsewhere in this issue: In 2010 (in other words, before Obamacare), U.S. government expenditures on health care were higher than those in all but three other countries in the world. Quick, name a European social democracy full of state-suckled wimpy welfare queens: France? $3,061 per capita in public-health expenditures. Sweden? $3,046 per capita. Belgium? $3,000. In 2010 the United States spent $3,967 in public-health expenditures per person — more than anywhere on the planet except Norway, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. I am confident that, under Obamacare, we’ll be outspending even the Norwegians. But in reality our so-called private system was a public system in all but name.
By 1968, President Lyndon Baines Johnson was finally done in by his “credibility gap” — the growing abyss between what he said about, and what was actually happening inside, Vietnam.
“Modified limited hangout” and “inoperative” were infamous euphemisms that Nixon-administration officials used to mask lies about the Watergate scandal. After a while, few believed any of the initial Reagan-administration disavowals that it was not trading “arms for hostages” in the Iran–Contra scandal.
George H. W. Bush thundered during his campaign that voters should “read my lips: no new taxes,” only to agree later to raise them. Bill Clinton’s infamous assertion that he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” was followed by proof that he did just that with Monica Lewinsky.
The George W. Bush administration warned the nation about stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and never quite recovered its credibility after the WMD were not found. No one believed Bush when he told incompetent FEMA deputy director Michael Brown that in the midst of the Katrina mess he was doing a “heck of a job.”
Yet the distortions and lack of credibility of the Obama administration have matched and now trumped those of its predecessors. The public may have long ago forgotten that Obama did not close down Guantanamo as promised, or cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term, or stop the revolving door of lobbyists coming in and out of the executive branch.
The public may even have forgiven the president when the stimulus bill never lowered unemployment as promised, or when his misleading boasts about vast increases in oil and gas production came to fruition despite, not because, of his efforts.
One Quick Fix to Ease the Coming Doctor Shortage Atul Nakhasi
The White House proposes to cut on-the-job training for new M.D.s just when we need more physicians.
Ryan Scully wanted to be a doctor from the moment he began volunteering as a paramedic and firefighter during his freshman year of college. In medical school at George Washington University, he passed all of his preclinical and clinical requirements, as well as two national licensing exams required of all medical students. Just before graduation in 2012, though, he learned that he had not been accepted into a residency training program necessary for gaining his certification as a practicing physician. He would receive his M.D. degree in May with the rest of his class—but without a hospital training spot, he could not practice medicine.
Last year 1,761 M.D.s shared the same fate. And now the White House wants to set aside even less money for doctor training while reorganizing the nation’s insurance market. At a time when the new health-care law is expected to create a demand for more physicians, a proposed $11 billion budget cut over the next 10 years guarantees there will be fewer doctors. This could have a serious effect on the health of the nation.
On-the-job training of doctors is a long and complicated business, and since the introduction of Medicare in 1965 the federal government has assumed some of the cost of graduate medical education, particularly at the country’s teaching hospitals. The rationale for funding by Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Veterans Affairs and others—nearly $12 billion a year—has been that the nation’s doctors and medical researchers will contribute to the public good, either by treating patients or contributing to advances in medicine.
In 2001, the year before Ray Kelly began his second tour as New York’s police commissioner, the city suffered 649 murders. In 2012, there were 419—a drop of 35%. The number of reported rapes fell by 27%; robberies 28%; burglaries 41%. The students at Brown University, an Ivy League school in Providence, R.I., think this is worth booing. Mr. Kelly was at Brown Tuesday to discuss “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City.” But nobody got to hear Mr. Kelly’s speech because he was shouted off the stage.
Brown is the school where in 1984 students voted overwhelmingly to insist that the campus health services stockpile suicide pills “in the event of nuclear war.” Campus administrators declined that demand, but the politically trendy, morally nihilistic campus spirit lives on.
Now student rage is aimed at the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies, which account for much of the drop in the crime rate, especially in minority neighborhoods, and of which Mr. Kelly has been a vocal champion. Students also object to “community policing,” especially among Muslims, a tool the NYPD has used to keep the city safe from terror.
We realize that most Brown students have only a faint acquaintance with real life, and none of them know what New York City was like in the 1970s and ’80s. But it is revealing to see where the Constitutional right to free speech stands in the esteem of students at one of the most liberal campuses in America.
Judging by their profuse apology to Mr. Kelly, Brown officials are embarrassed by the episode. Mr. Kelly will certainly get over it, but at a better school the children who acted out at Brown would be expelled.
Do not panic. Everything is under control.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Transmen and Transwomen and people of uncertain gender identities, some of you may be alarmed by recent reports of malfunctioning health care websites and policy cancellations.
Do not be alarmed. We know what we are doing.
Health care plans are not being cancelled. Opportunities are being transitioned. Some people are being moved from bad health care plans to good health care plans with higher deductibles and higher premiums that will provide transmen with maternity care and people of uncertain gender identities with drug counseling and mental health treatment.
This is a good thing. Warning. This is a good thing.
You are being transitioned. Why do you resist?
This week’s Glazov Gang was joined by John Duffy, a Film Producer from the South Bronx, Ann-Marie Murrell, the National Director of PolitiChicks.tv, and Orestes Matacena, a Filmmaker whose latest project is SwastikaTheMovie.com, dedicated to the memory of the Jewish resistance in the streets of Warsaw in WWII.
The Gang gathered this week to discuss Orestes Matacena’s new film project, SwastikaTheMovie.com, which sets out to pay tribute to all those who fought in the resistance against the Nazi occupation in Europe, the Middle East and Africa during WWII. The guests analyzed why the lessons of that resistance are so crucial for our generation to grasp — as the West confronts IslamoFascism and the Obama administration’s destructive agenda. The segment ended with an analysis of Obama’s Broken Website, focusing on the meaning of The ObamaCare Meltdown:
Part I:
Part II focused on Breaking Ranks With The Left, with each guest sharing their brush with the totalitarian inferno. The segment ended with an analysis of What Obama Wants, shedding light on the Radical-in-Chief’s endgame — and what Americans can do best to safeguard their freedoms:
Part II:
Just after midnight on Wednesday, Israel Hayom reports, 26 Palestinian security prisoners were set free by Israel. Twenty-one were sent to the West Bank, five to Gaza.
All of these prisoners were convicted either of murder or attempted murder. They constitute the second of four groups of 26 prisoners who are being released periodically during the current Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. For Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, freeing them was an iron-clad condition for entering the talks at all. Israel acceded to it under heavy U.S. pressure, spearheaded by Secretary of State John Kerry.
“…Palestinians in Ramallah and Gaza,” Israel Hayom informs us,
celebrated the release of the prisoners. The 21 prisoners returning to the West Bank attended an official reception at the Mukataa in Ramallah, where…Abbas greeted them personally.
“We welcome our brothers the heroes coming from behind the bars to a world of freedom and liberty,” Abbas was quoted as saying.
None of the American diplomatic personnel in Israel attended this reception. That may not seem worth pointing out. Wouldn’t it be a diplomatic slap to Israel? And wouldn’t it contradict American values to attend a celebratory reception for terrorist killers?
Indeed, it would. But why, then, did it not unacceptably contradict American values to pressure Israel to free them in the first place?
Indeed, these 26 are a nasty lot. Here are just a few examples from a partial list compiled by Israel National News:
Awad Masalkha took part in the murder of Yigal Vaknin…and also murdered another Jew, David Reuven…, an Iraqi-born father of three who ran a mini-market…. In 1991, Awad and other terrorists entered the mini-market, attacked Reuven, tied him up and beat him to death. He was 59….
