RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/veterans-affairs-officials-purged-15-million-unfinished-medical-orders?f=puball

More than 1.5 million medical orders were canceled by the Department of Veterans Affairs without any guarantee the patients received the treatment or tests they needed, the Washington Examiner has found.

Since May 2013, veterans’ medical centers nationwide have been under pressure to clear out 2 million backlogged orders for patient care or services.

They were given wide latitude to cancel unfilled appointments more than 90 days old. By April 2014, the backlog of what the agency calls “unresolved consults” was down to about 450,000.

What happened to other 1.5 million appointments is something that no one, including top officials at the veterans’ agency, can answer.

A review by the Government Accountability Office of the process VA used to close old consult orders found that poor documentation in patient files and the lack of independent verification made it impossible to know whether patients got care they needed before their medical orders were canceled.

“We found they closed consults but there was no evidence as to why it was closed,” Debra Draper, health care director for the GAO, told the Examiner.

“By not having that independent verification or any other controls, there isn’t any way of knowing whether they were appropriately closed out,” Draper said.

“You don’t know whether people received the care or if they received it in a timely manner. There’s no audit trail. There’s no way to know whether they were appropriately closed,” she said.

The Examiner reported in February that the VA did a mass purge of backlogged medical orders that cleared 40,000 unresolved appointments in Los Angeles beginning in 2009 and 13,000 in Dallas during a one-week period in September 2012.

The Nazis invented the Jewish boycott — and went on from there to the Holocaust.

This is the wrong boycott in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As you doubtless know, there has been, and continues to be, an international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state. This BDS campaign against Israel is dishonest — it tells less than half of a complex story, borrowing Palestinian lies and fables to bewitch unthinking Westerners whose only formula for peace lies in the destruction of the only national home for the Jews, possibly as well as the post-Nazi destruction of the Jews themselves.

Most interesting are remarks made in 2012 by Norman Finkelstein, an American academic who has made it his business to pursue hatred for Israel. He has expressed solidarity with Hezbollah and Hamas, and approved their policies of targeting Israeli civilians. In 2012, however, he declared that the BDS movement a “hypocritical, dishonest cult like the Munchkin cult in Oz” that tries to pose as human rights activists while in reality their goal is to destroy Israel. “I’m getting a little bit exasperated,” he said, “with what I think is a whole lot of nonsense. I’m not going to tolerate silliness, childishness and a lot of leftist posturing. I loathe the disingenuousness. We will never hear the solidarity movement [back a] two-state solution.” He also declared that the BDS movement has enjoyed few successes, and that, as in a cult, the leaders pretend they are hugely successful even though the general public rejects their extreme views.

Obamacare: A Famous VictoryObamacare’s supporters are lauding its dramatic turnaround. The facts give them the lie.

In the month since the formal end of Obamacare’s enrollment period (actual enrollment limped on through mid-April), the Obama administration and its supporters have been on something of a victory tour.

“Obamacare has won,” announced Ezra Klein. “The Affordable Care Act is one of the great comeback stories of public policy,” declared Paul Krugman. “It is working,” the president himself told reporters.

Given the debacles of healthcare.gov and the initial rollout of the health-care exchanges, the fact that slightly more than 8 million Americans have signed up for exchange-based plans is a significant accomplishment. In addition, a few million more Americans have enrolled in Medicaid, and some more young people were able to remain on their parents’ insurance policies. Certainly, things could have been worse.

But if this is victory, I’d hate to see defeat.

Let’s start with that 8 million figure.

Republicans were a bit premature last week when they jumped on the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s report stating that more than a third of enrollees had not paid their first month’s premium. That number was skewed by the surge of late enrollees, many of whom had not even received their first bill and so obviously hadn’t paid. However, the administration can’t be let entirely off the hook, since it has steadfastly refused to provide any information on actual payment rates. Its insistence that insurance companies won’t provide it with those data is risible. On the basis of earlier numbers, it seems likely that 15 to 20 percent of those signing up will never pay, and perhaps 3 to 5 percent will ultimately stop paying and drop their coverage.

Moreover, we still don’t know how many of those signing up through the exchanges were previously uninsured, as opposed to people voluntarily or involuntarily switching plans. We do know that as many as 6 million Americans lost their coverage because it was not compliant with Obamacare’s many mandates, and that perhaps 1 million of those remain uninsured. How many of the rest bought new coverage through an exchange remains murky, though some estimates suggest that the majority of these people found new insurance through the exchanges or Medicaid, or from an employer.

Enrollment also varies significantly from state to state. There is no doubt that some states were very successful in getting people to sign up. Nearly 48 percent of Obamacare enrollees come from just five states: Florida, Texas, New York, California, and North Carolina. On the other side of the coin, Massachusetts has reached only 12.7 percent of its initial enrollment goal, Oregon 29 percent, and Maryland 45 percent.

Putting it all together, and including those on Medicaid and those remaining on their parents’ policies, the administration may have succeeded in covering 20 percent of the 48 million uninsured Americans. That’s not much to cheer about.

In addition, the Congressional Budget Office projects that for Obamacare to reach its intended targets, exchange enrollment will have to more than triple by 2016. This seems like a pretty tall order. And even this would cover only about half the uninsured.

It’s not just the raw number of enrollees that is cause for concern, but who is signing up. Since Obamacare depends on overcharging the young and healthy to subsidize the older and sicker, it needs roughly 40 percent of enrollees to be in the 18-to-34 age group. We don’t yet know the health status of those signing up, although evidence from pharmaceutical-purchase patterns analyzed by Express Scripts suggests that enrollees are less healthy than the population at large. Preliminary surveys of self-reported health status seem to corroborate these findings. For example, a Gallup survey found that just 37 percent of exchange enrollees reported they were in excellent or very good health, compared to 50 percent of the population at large.

Last week the state of Oklahoma “botched” an execution.

Botched is the accepted term in the media coverage, despite the fact that Clayton Lockett was executed. He just died badly, suffering for 43 minutes until he eventually had a heart attack.

Oklahoma’s governor has called for an investigation. President Obama asked Attorney General Eric Holder (who is seeking the death penalty in the Boston Marathon bombing case) to review the death penalty.

Obama’s position was a perfectly defensible straddle: “The individual . . . had committed heinous crimes, terrible crimes, and I’ve said in the past that there are certain circumstances where a crime is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate.”

On the other hand, Obama added: “I’ve also said that in the application of the death penalty . . . we have seen significant problems, racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty, situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to be innocent.

“I think we do have to, as a society, ask ourselves some difficult and profound questions.”

Kimberley Strassel has an article in the Wall Street Journal [1] suggesting that an array of conservative groups, including Tea Party organizations, seem headed for a string of defeats in GOP primaries in their attempts to knock off Republican Senate incumbents. Most of those efforts are in states where the Republican nominee, whether the incumbent or a challenger, is likely to win in November (e.g., Mississippi, Texas, South Carolina). Kentucky is the exception: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems headed for a decisive primary victory on May 20 against Matt Bevin; after that, McConnell faces a close fall matchup [2] to retain his seat against Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.

In the election cycles of 2010 and 2012, Republican contests in several Senate primaries produced either hopelessly unelectable nominees such as Christine O’Donnell, or badly flawed candidates such as Sharron Angle, Ken Buck, Todd Akin, and Richard Mourdock. All of these candidates self-destructed in the general election campaign, losing winnable races. In each of these cases, the eventual nominee ran well to the right of more mainstream incumbents (Richard Lugar) or other primary contestants.

The GOP hopes for taking control of the Senate in November (by picking up a net six seats) rely on winning two open seats now held by Democrats in South Dakota and West Virginia, and the seat held by a recently appointed replacement senator in Montana. After these three races, all of which now look very good for the GOP, the task gets harder. They must defeat incumbents in Louisiana (Mary Landrieu), North Carolina (Kay Hagan), Arkansas (Mark Pryor), and Alaska (Mike Begich). Two other open seat races held by Democrats (Iowa and Michigan) and two other incumbents (Jeanne Shaheen in New Hampshire and Jeff Merkley in Oregon) now face bigger challenges than many expected.

In Georgia, the seat of retiring Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss has produced a wide open GOP primary. Five candidates at one time or another have held the lead, and four of the five are still tightly bunched [3] just days out from the May 20 primary (only Congressman Phil Gingrey has faded).

Georgia has become reliably Republican over the last five presidential races and in other statewide races, but is now experiencing rapid demographic shifts [4] that favor Democrats. Mitt Romney won the state by 7%, but the Obama campaign did not actively work the state as they did North Carolina or Virginia. The state’s rapidly expanding economy has attracted hundreds of thousands of Asians and Latinos, and the Atlanta area has always been an attractive location for African Americans, and many are moving to or returning to the area from other states.

The 2013 Walter Duranty Prize for mendacious journalism was awarded in front of an upbeat crowd at a dinner Monday night at New York’s 3 West Club [1].

This prize – in honor (or, more accurately, dishonor) of Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow correspondent during the 1920s and 1930s – was first given in 2011 by PJ Media and The New Criterion. For various reasons of sloth and bureaucracy, it has taken the organizations a year and a half to award a second round, but the prize will now be put on an annual basis.

A second award – The Rather (after Dan Rather) — for lifetime achievement in mendacious journalism was initiated this year.

The redoubtable and witty James “Best of the Web” Taranto [2] of the Wall Street Journal again officiated at the event.

The 2013 prizes will be announced here followed by the opening speech of the evening, “Why a Walter Duranty Prize,” by Roger L. Simon.

Starting tomorrow for the next four days we will publish the four presentation speeches from committee members. Next week they will appear in video form from Ed Driscoll [3].

The Duranty Prize for 2013:

Second runner-up: John Judis for his absurdly biased and ignorant reporting on Israel and the Middle East in general in The New Republic. Presentation speech by Ron Radosh.

First runner-up: Candy Crowley of CNN for her unprecedented personal intervention in a presidential debate she was moderating on the subject of Benghazi. The committee realized this intervention took place 2012, but the committee noted Crowley continued to justify this unconscionably biased intervention throughout 2013. Presentation speech by Claudia Rosett.

THE DURANTY FOR 2013: David Kirkpatrick of the New York Times for his supposedly thorough unraveling of the Benghazi affair, “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi [4],” which was revealed almost instantly to be a meretricious piece of deception worthy of Walter Duranty himself. Presentation speech by Roger Kimball.

THE RATHER: Seymour Hersh for a lifetime of astonishingly dishonest journalism on subjects ranging from the war in Iraq to JFK and Marilyn Monroe. Presentation speech by Roger L. Simon

The committee wishes to thank the readers of PJ Media and The New Criterion for their nominations. It should be noted that Kirkpatrick and Crowley got the highest number of recommendations.

“But Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) countered by claiming “we can all agree that natural variations in the climate are taking place, but man-made global warming still remains a theory.”“The president’s climate change policies will only cause a greater disparity in our nation’s income gap and prevent our nation from achieving its full economic potential,” he said, by “jumping at opportunities to sideline critical domestic energy opportunities for the United States and instead discuss global warming alarmism.”“Fear tactics and money are powerful tools in politics,” he said.”

WASHINGTON – A White House report assembled by 300 noted scientists found that the nation already is experiencing the effects of global climate change and warned that the situation is likely to worsen.

The National Climate Assessment, reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences and overseen by the Department of Commerce to assess current research on global warming and calculate its implications, found that “climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present.”

The report concludes that “the evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts are increasing across the country.”

“Summers are longer and hotter and extended periods of unusual heat last longer than any living American has ever experienced,” the report said. “Winters are generally shorter and warmer. Rain comes in heavier downpours. People are seeing changes in the length and severity of seasonal allergies, the plant varieties that thrive in their gardens, and the kinds of birds they see in any particular month in their neighborhoods.”

Average temperatures in the U.S. have increased by 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit to 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit since 1895, according to the report, and most of the increase has occurred since 1970. The most recent decade proved to be the nation’s and the world’s hottest on record and 2012 was the hottest year on record in the continental U.S.

All U.S. regions have experienced warming in recent decades, but the extent of warming has not been uniform. In general, temperatures are rising more quickly in the north. Alaskans have experienced some of the largest increases in temperature between 1970 and the present. People living in the Southeast have experienced some of the smallest temperature increases over this period.

A standard liberal talking point about the Tea Party is that its constitutional designs are “extremist.” But you will search in vain for any Tea Party proposal that is anywhere close to as radical as the current drive by mainstream Democrats to rewrite the Bill of Rights.

The Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision allowing unions and corporations to donate to independent political groups has driven liberals to such fits that they now want to amend the First Amendment. At a Senate Rules Committee meeting last week, New York Democrat Chuck Schumer announced a proposal to amend the Constitution to empower government to regulate political speech.

“The Supreme Court is trying to take this country back to the days of the robber barons, allowing dark money to flood our elections,” Mr. Schumer said. The Senate will vote this year on the amendment to “once and for all allow Congress to make laws to regulate our system, without the risk of them being eviscerated by a conservative Supreme Court.” He even rolled out retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to pronounce his unhappiness with freedom’s bedrock document.

According to the text of the proposed revision to James Madison’s 1791 handiwork, sponsored by New Mexico Senator Tom Udall, the states and federal government would have the power to regulate the “raising and spending of money” through a wide range of means “to advance the fundamental principle of political equality for all.”

The real guarantee would be political advantage for all incumbents, since it’s the sitting lawmakers who really benefit from any law limiting contributions to candidates or on their behalf. While Beltway boys like Messrs. Schumer and Udall have the name recognition to raise money in small increments, challengers often need the financial boost from a few individuals to get their message heard.

Mr. Schumer is conjuring the age of robber barons, but there were no general limits on what an individual could donate to a federal candidate in this country until as recently as 1974. Contrary to the outrage that greeted the Supreme Court’s recent decision ending aggregate limits to candidates and political party committees in McCutcheon v. FEC, at the time that ruling was issued 32 states already had no aggregate or similar limits on contributions to candidates. That fact was so uncontroversial that Mr. Udall may not even know that New Mexico was among the 32.

Mr. Udall’s amendment is careful to specify that nothing “should be construed to grant Congress the power to abridge the freedom of the press.” In case you don’t follow campaign finance, that is supposed to protect newspapers and TV networks, most of which embrace Democratic causes and candidates.

The real target will be the corporations Democrats have railed against since Citizens United. But why should Warren Buffett’s company enjoy free speech rights because he owns a handful of newspapers along with insurance companies, while Jeffrey Immelt’s is muzzled because GE makes jet turbines? For that matter, what’s to stop political groups from incorporating themselves as newspapers?

Once you’ve opened the First Amendment for revision by politicians, and reinterpretation by judges, anything can happen. We know liberal editors tend to lose their bearings when they write about money in politics, but is the problem so great that it’s worth letting, say, Senator Ted Cruz determine whether the New York Times Co. NYT -1.65% qualifies for protection under the First Amendment?

This prospect doesn’t seem to bother even the great totems of the legal left, who also see an amendment as the only way to end-run the Supreme Court. Amending the First Amendment is a “particularly worthy enterprise,” Harvard’s Laurence Tribe wrote on Slate.com in 2012 “given that the composition of the court prefigures little chance of a swift change in direction.” Who would have thought that the legal left considered rights of speech and association to be so easily tradeable for partisan gain?

Israelis on the left continue to flagellate Israeli settlements in biblical Judea and Samaria as the primary obstacle to the peace.
In two articles within the past week, Nahum Barnea, respected columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth and winner of the Israel Prize for his distinguished writing, has lacerated Israel for diplomatic failure in the recent collapse of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. “A radical minority,” he claimed, “is helping turn Israel into an apartheid state.” Repeating the outrageous recent warning from Secretary of State John Kerry that Israel would soon emulate South Africa if it did not follow his advice, Barnea claimed (ynet news, April 29) “to speak on behalf of another population groaning under an occupation — the Israelis.”

Barnea rejected the inescapable conclusion that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas once again fled the diplomatic scene rather than recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. Instead, he focused blame on the favorite target of the Israeli left: Jewish settlers. The major contribution to the diplomatic failure, he asserted, came from the “settler lobby.” Whenever negotiations “showed signs of life,” new settlement construction plans were revealed by Housing Minister Uri Ariel, who “sabotaged, undermined and detonated” the peace process without Prime Minister Netanyahu lifting a finger to stop him.

With the announcement of new construction in Gilo, a community of 40,000 Jews located within the Jerusalem Municipality (and a site of Israelite settlement since 1200 BCE), Abbas abandoned diplomacy. This was another victory for the “radical and reckless” settlement lobby that has the power to “shape the face of Israel.” The Jewish state, Barnea predicted, will become an apartheid state, boycotted and besieged internationally. Then “the world will force Israel to become a binational state, a state of all its citizens,” terminating its existence as a Jewish state. All because authorization was granted for the construction of 1,200 new apartments in a Jerusalem neighborhood.

Barnea’s doomsday scenario turned out to be a warm-up exercise for further castigation of Israel. Three days later, in an article (ynet.news, May 2) that quickly went viral, he revealed the content of his exclusive interview with unnamed “senior American officials” who explained “the real reason” for the collapse of negotiations. Their disclosure “is the closest thing to an official American version of what happened.” Lest the Americans be suspected of hostility to Israel, Barnea pointedly noted, “Israel is very dear to them, but the wounds are deep.”

To be sure, there had been no agreement to freeze settlement construction for the duration of the negotiations. (The Israeli government had learned the lesson of a ten-month settlement freeze during a previous round of talks that went nowhere.) Nonetheless, his American sources asserted, Israeli ministers had used construction plans to “sabotage the success of the talks.”

This David, like his namesake King David, refused to back down. Some days ago in Hevron he was taunted, heckled, pushed and shoved by Arab tormentors.
They kept taking pictures. They win either way. If he fights back, hello The New York Times! That image makes front page over there and all over the Internet as proof of Israeli “aggression.”

If he cuts and runs, the terrorists and their leftist enablers get a good laugh watching yet another Jew so easily made defenseless and helpless.

Just like “the good old days.”

Just like that terrified boy in that famous Holocaust picture who is being shoved along by the Nazis.

Just like that humiliated grandmother who is shown in another famous image trying to deflect fistfuls of blows from the same Nazis…as they smirk and laugh.

But this David fought back, and it wasn’t even a fight. He merely cocked and aimed his weapon when he’d had enough from the bullies.
About a year ago we had pretty much the same story involving Lt. Col. Shalom Eisner. See here as he too refused to be a patsy and what happened? He got himself in trouble with the IDF brass.

This David making headlines is a soldier attached to the Nahal Brigade and we do know his real name, but don’t need it here to compound whatever trouble he faces from his commanders. As we get the story, though he was alone in Hevron when he faced the mob, he allegedly overstepped the IDF’s rules of engagement.