From YouTube to the Swamp... Welcome!
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that some corporations can hold religious objections that allow them to opt out of the new health law requirement that they cover contraceptives for women.
The justices' 5-4 decision is the first time that the high court has ruled that profit-seeking businesses can hold religious views under federal law. And it means the Obama administration must search for a different way of providing free contraception to women who are covered under objecting companies' health insurance plans.
“I sure made some mistakes along the way, in terms of focusing on some things and not on others,” Sebelius said. “I was terrified, as we looked at the roll-out of the health plan, that we wouldn’t have a market. That was my biggest focus and fear. And I spent a lot of time and energy with insurers, with consumers, with my old colleagues at the insurance commissioners’ offices, trying to make sure we actually had companies who came in to the market.”
At the same time, she said she spent “too little time, clearly, on the technology side, on making sure that what I was hearing was actually accurate and getting enough eyes and ears on that.”Is O-Care a fundamental denial of free-speech? Does supporting it meaning going against the bill-of-rights? The federalist has an answer: (Hint: It's "Yes.")
In McCullen v. Coakley, all nine Supreme Court justices ruled that a Massachusetts law that creates a no-speech zone within 35 feet of an abortion clinic violates the First Amendment.
Though the opinion was unanimous, the justices divided sharply on their reasoning and the majority crafted a fairly narrow ruling. But, again, it was a ruling in favor of free speech rights of pro-lifers and that’s no small potatoes.All of this crap was put in place ostensibly to get health care to people who need it. To make them more "healthy," as it were. Is it? Nope.
People enrolled in new plans under the health law are showing higher rates of serious health conditions than other insurance customers, according to an early analysis of medical claims, putting pressure on insurers around the country as they prepare to propose rates for next year.So again kids, another lesson on how the private sector provides far better quality than the government. Stop looking to them to solve your problems, they only know how to create new ones.
Among those health-law marketplace enrollees who have seen a doctor or other health-care provider in the first quarter of this year, around 27% have significant health issues such as diabetes, psychiatric conditions, asthma, heart problems or cancer, the data show. That is sharply higher than the rate of 16% for last year's individual-consumer market over the same time frame, according to the data, which was supplied by Inovalon Inc., a health-technology firm that receives medical claims directly from nearly 200 insurers that are its clients.
WYMT-TV (http://bit.ly/1iMGAeu) reports that bears roaming in Letcher County have invaded bee hives. Carl Church says a bear broke through a window to get into his building where he keeps bee hives. It's not the first time bears have ditched the garbage cans for something sweeter.
Machaela Lee says bears have gotten to her bee trees as well as berry patches near her house. Lee says bears can slow down honey production, especially if they get to the queen bee. The beekeepers say they've seen multiple bears on their property, including a mom and two cubs.And Alaska:
Wildlife officials in Alaska's capital suspect a black bear might have literally crashed a child's birthday party before he was shot and killed inside a different home. The bear had shimmied onto the roof of Alicia Bishop and Glenn Merrill's home and was walking across a skylight when the bottom fell out Saturday, the Juneau Empire reported (http://is.gd/eUiuGY ). "I heard this cracking," said Merrill, who was preparing for his son's first birthday party. "
And the next thing you know, there's this bear that, I mean, literally, fell right from (the skylight)." He said he and the bear were about 3 feet apart and just stared at each other in disbelief. Merrill, 45, had his parents take his son, Jackson, upstairs, and he went into another room and shut the door. Bishop, 33, was standing in the kitchen behind a glass door and watched the bear help itself to some cupcakes intended for the child's birthday bash.
"The bear walks over and puts its paws up on the table and starts licking his birthday cupcakes, and I'm just like, 'You've got to be kidding me,'" Bishop told the newspaper.
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| I think they went too far |
After pretending to be CIA agents, watching porn at their desks, and building “man caves,” employees at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are now pooping in the hallway, according to Government Executive.
The latest scandal involving EPA employee conduct was revealed in an email obtained by the publication, which detailed how an employee at their headquarters in Denver placed “feces in the hallway.” The EPA declined to comment on the matter.I've had said liberals were babies, but I didn't think they literally needed diapers. These are the kinds of people that end up in government with control over your life. Think about that and weep.
The hearing also included a bit of deja vu for the committee when members grilled McCarthy on lost emails from a hard-drive crash (the same issue that wiped out emails from IRS employee Lois Lerner). In this case, the emails in question were from retired EPA employee Philip North, who was involved in the agency's decision to begin the process of preemptively vetoing the Pebble Mine project in Alaska.
North, who declined an interview request by the committee, is retired, and committee staff say they have been unable to track him down. According to a committee aide, North's hard drive crashed in 2010—which was around the same time that the committee is investigating the agency's discussions of a potential veto—and the emails were not backed up.Maybe it was all the mercury in those curlyQ light bulbs in the server rooms.
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| F*** Yeah! |
Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.No, no. The earth is warming. Our synthetic computer models show it. Don't believe those actual temperature readings. That's just history and it's written by the victors or something. No, it's our made-up computer models that are accurate. Now start paying taxes by the mile.
Two unfolding stories offer us a revealing glimpse into the extraordinarily malleable morality of the left.
There is the case of Hillary Clinton’s 1975 defense of a child rapist in Arkansas. As you know, defending your client to the best of your ability is what the law demands. And the law is the law. Then there is the case of governor Wisconsin Scott Walker, someone who, though he has never been close to being found guilty (or even formally charged) of any crime, is guilty of wrongdoing by the mere existence of an accusation. Here, the law is irrelevant.One thing you must keep clear in your head. If you are wondering about the ongoing hypocrisy of left and bashing your head trying to understand how they can be this way, the reason is that they are only principled to their side. In the podcast, I praised Bill Maher for his defense of free speech. This is because I believe in free speech and whoever defends it correctly I will extol regardless if I differ with them. This is not the left.
Thanks, @BarackObama, for causing her to lose her cardiologist. Her name is Norah, not that you care. pic.twitter.com/Yk6DgyFSiC
— Holly Fisher (@HollyRFisher) June 19, 2014
Just got a call saying my 10m/o(born w/2 heart conditions)is covered under NO ped. cardiologists due to our new shit plan. Thx, #Obamacare!😡
— Holly Fisher (@HollyRFisher) June 19, 2014
Hey @BarackObama, thanks to you I got my new insurance plan & it takes away all of my baby's heart doctors. Should I wait for your check?
— Holly Fisher (@HollyRFisher) June 19, 2014
I feel like I'm gonna throw up my heart right now...
My tolerance level for anyone who supports Obamacare is officially at 0.
I despise you.
— Holly Fisher (@HollyRFisher) June 19, 2014
Syria has fallen apart. Major cities in Iraq have fallen to al-Qa’eda. Egypt may have stabilised slightly after a counter-coup. But Lebanon is starting once again to fragment. Beneath all these facts — beneath all the explosions, exhortations and blood — certain themes are emerging.
Some years ago, before the Arab ‘Spring’ ever sprung, I remember asking one top security official about the region. What, I wondered, was their single biggest fear? The answer was striking and precise: ‘That the region will clarify.’ That is a fear which now appears to be coming true.
The Middle East is not simply falling apart. It is taking a different shape, along very clear lines — far older ones than those the western powers rudely imposed on the region nearly a century ago. Across the whole continent those borders are in the process of cracking and breaking. But while that happens the region’s two most ambitious centres of power — the house of Saud and the Ayatollahs in Iran — find themselves fighting each other not just for influence but even, perhaps, for survival.Perhaps it's time, like Glen Beck intoned the other day, to admit that the Iraq war was a mistake. I won't go so far as to say it was wrong to try to get freedom to the middle east. But it was ineffective. It's not like there aren't middle-eastern muslims who don't want to be free, far from it. But Islam has taken hold of people in the middle east like herpes and it fosters a culture of torture, violence, and death. Changing people's minds about their religion is like telling them they are breathing wrong.
The IRS said it cannot locate many of Lerner's emails prior to 2011 because her computer crashed during the summer of that year.
Lerner headed the IRS division that processed applications for tax-exempt status. The IRS acknowledged last year that agents had improperly scrutinized applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party and other conservative groups.
Republican congressional leaders were incensed.
"The fact that I am just learning about this, over a year into the investigation, is completely unacceptable and now calls into question the credibility of the IRS's response to congressional inquiries," said Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. "There needs to be an immediate investigation and forensic audit by Department of Justice as well as the inspector general."Guys, this cannot happen. Not because it's a bad thing to happen but because it's damn near impossible unless they are total and complete incompetents.
Serco’s contract with CMS requires a particular level of staffing regardless of the work coming into the facility. If Serco falls below that — presumably measured in man-hours on duty — they can lose their $1.2 billion contract. The OT may well be in play because Serco has trouble getting people to get stuck for eight hours at a stretch with nothing to do, a situation that sounds pleasant until it’s experienced first-hand. (I have had this experience at two different jobs for relatively brief periods, and can attest to the torturous boredom it generates.)
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It’s telling that this problem with Serco has been exposed for a month, and yet CMS has done nothing to stanch the waste of taxpayer dollars. Whistleblowers are claiming that we’re flushing a billion dollars down the drain, and yet the same administration that claimed that insurers wasted too much money on activities other than patient care hasn’t lifted a finger to fix this problem. How much patient care would the $1.2 billion deliver if it wasn’t being wasted by Serco?A good question. But how many have actually been helped, either by Serco or anyone else? Bob Beckel touted on the Five yesterday that Minnesota has half as many uninsured as it had before Obamacare. The question is, do you even believe that number?
Disability judge Harry Taylor has long been accused of misconduct. The allegations have included repeatedly sexually harassing female colleagues and employees, frequently dozing off and audibly snoring during hearings, and making an inappropriate call to a legal expert representing clients. But even as he avoided significant reprimand, he continued to award disability benefits to thousands of claimants, often without even holding a hearing, at a taxpayer cost of around $2.5 billion. The kicker: Though the Social Security Administration knew of Taylor’s shortcomings, it allows him — to this day — to continue judging its disability cases.And he's not the only one.
Charles Bridges, who served as the chief administrative-law judge in the SSA’s Harrisburg, Pa., hearing office between 2004 and 2010, was so notorious for prodigally awarding benefits that one disability law firm enacted a so-called Bridges Policy: to accept “any individual as a client if their case was assigned to [Bridges], regardless of the evidence.” Between 2005 and 2013, Bridges singlehandedly awarded an estimated $4.5 billion in benefits.
The report also heavily features David Daugherty, a disability judge who awarded benefits in all but roughly 1 percent of the cases he heard. Previous reports, including ones from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, the Wall Street Journal, and National Review, have detailed how Daugherty worked with a greedy disability attorney who was shamelessly gaming the system.How many more before the left realizes that the government.....
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| This will make sense when you listen. |
Former soldiers involved in the operations to find Bergdahl asserted to CNN this week that at least six soldiers were killed because of the search for Bergdahl in 2009. They provided the soldiers' names and their dates of death, with circumstances for some of them.
A day later, Nathan Bradley Bethea, a former member of Bergdahl's battalion who searched for him that summer in 2009, wrote in the Daily Beast that eight soldiers' deaths were tied to the Bergdahl search. Bethea provided the eight soldiers' names -- including six names that CNN earlier reported.And how did the administration get this to go through without informing congress? They straight up lied.
So, what Administration officials need you to know is that the Taliban expressed a strange interest in the internal information flow in the American government, and said something like, "Now youse guys, you make sure you break the law in your own political interests, and you make sure you don't inform Congress, or Serious You Guys, we'll execute Bergdahl, and see if we don't!!!111!!eleventy!!!"
The Administration officials do not explain why, exactly, the Taliban are so interested in denying information to Dianne Feinstein.
The Taliban, AP breathlessly reports, said they'd kill Bergdahl if the deal "leaked."
You know who leaked the details of the deal to the press?
Administration officials. Just six weeks ago. Administration officials leaked the fact that the Taliban were pushing this deal.So the administration trades 5 known, undisputed, terrorists for this deserter. We give freedom to 6 people who are basically human garbage, in total. They get special treatment. The Administration has to lie to make it happen.
A family owned bakery has been ordered to make wedding cakes for gay couples and guarantee that its staff be given comprehensive training on Colorado’s anti-discrimination laws after the state’s Civil Rights Commission determined the Christian baker violated the law by refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple.
Jack Phillips, the owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, in Lakewood, Colorado was directed to change his store policies immediately and force his staff to attend the training sessions. For the next two years, Phillips will also be required to submit quarterly reports to the commission to confirm that he has not turned away customers based on their sexual orientation.My god, this is like re-education camp. Can't we just not shop there if we don't like their policies?
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| Godzilla's Got Nothing on the Red-Tape Monster |
A driver who regularly volunteers as part of an organization to bring patients to New York City hospitals free of charge was fined and his vehicle impounded Monday when a city agent thought he was illegally operating a driving service. The whole incident was later deemed a misunderstanding, but the damage was done.
According to the New York Daily News, 25-year-old Yeshaya Liebowitz was shuttling two people to area hospitals as part of the Jewish charity Chesed when he was stopped by one of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission agents.
“I tried to explain to him we're not a car service,” Liebowitz told the Daily News.Nope. You are outside of government approved activities. Please report to the nearest re-education camp. Of course that's only the tip of the fascist, tyrannical, and totalitarian iceberg:
The content of the responses on Twitter and elsewhere was a useful reminder that the Left, including its sexual-liberationist faction, is inarguably totalitarian. Critics suggested not only that I be fired for my views but that I should be prosecuted for them, and that the government should ensure that such views are not published. Live-and-let-live is not the Left’s way, never has been, and never will be. It is not sufficient that transsexuals should be free to act on their delusions — the rest of us are expected to participate in them with unreserved enthusiasm, and the Left is willing to use the state to compel us to do so.This is the difference between me and them: I want them to continue to speak. I want Matthew Yglesias to continue to out himself as the moron that he is. I want everyone to speak their minds, even if it's terrible speech. Sticks and stones has gone out the window long ago to the left and their oversensitive, pussy reactions to least little slight is always responded with attempts to destroy the person they are ever-so-angry with.
Cause and Effect is hard, especially when you're a good-thinking liberal. Here a clueless homeowner in Austin complains about surging property taxes which somehow 'just happened'.
"I'm at the breaking point," said Gretchin Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8500 this year.
"It's not because I don't like paying taxes," said Gardner, who attended both meetings [of "irate homeowners"]. "I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can't afford to live here anymore."
