| Hey, just wanted to make sure you saw this email from President Obama?
Steve Israel
|
Monday, July 28, 2014
We keep emailing
Monday, June 23, 2014
Medicaid gap hurts Wyoming & Wyomingites the most!
By James Chilton | WyomingNews.com | Sunday, Jun 22, 2014 - 10:51:47 pm MDT
CHEYENNE - More than 8 million Americans have enrolled in health-care insurance since the Affordable Care Act went into effect late last year, and another 3 million low-income
But here in Wyoming, one of 23 states that has thus far declined to expand the state's Medicaid eligibility, those low-income adults looking to buy their own insurance are facing an uphill battle steeper than anywhere else in the nation.
A new report published Wednesday by health insurance analysis company HealthPocket found that low-income Wyomingites pay the highest premiums in the country when purchasing plans through the ACA insurance marketplace. The report specifically looks at those adults who fall into the "Medicaid gap" - people who make less than 100 percent of the poverty level, and are thus ineligible for tax credits to help them buy insurance.
Such subsidies are given to those earning between 100 and 400 percent of the federal poverty level, which is defined as $11,490 a year for an individual. For those earning less than that, Medicaid was supposed to cover the gap, but a Supreme Court ruling made the expansion of Medicaid optional for states.
In its report, HealthPocket looked at the cheapest available catastrophic, bronze and silver health insurance plans in each of the 23 states that have chosen not to expand Medicaid. It then determined that if someone were making just under 100 percent of the poverty level, what proportion of their income would go solely to the cost of that coverage.
"The Affordable Care Act defined affordable coverage for an employee in employer-provided coverage to have premium costs at most 9.5 percent of the employee's household income," the report read.
"By this definition of affordability, the only affordable exchange plan for any enrollees with incomes below 100 percent FPL that were ineligible for Medicaid was the cheapest catastrophic health plan in Kansas."
In other words, of the 69 "tiers" of plans being offered among the 23 non-Medicaid expansion states, only one was deemed affordable for low-income earners. Specifically, the cheapest catastrophic insurance plan being offered by Kansas would cost a 30-year-old enrollee $87.71 a
month, or about 9 percent of the total earnings for someone making just under the poverty level.
Every other plan in the non-Medicaid expansion states exceeded that percentage, but nowhere were they higher than in Wyoming. That same type of catastrophic coverage plan in Wyoming runs $265.34 a month for a 30-year-old nonsmoker, totaling 28 percent of a poverty-level income.
And it just gets worse for more inclusive plans and for older people. A 50-year old looking to purchase a silver plan on Wyoming's insurance exchange can expect to pay at least $523.61 a month, or more than half a poverty-level income. Dan Neal, the director of the Casper-based Equality State Policy Center, said such rates make it virtually impossible for Wyoming's poorest to afford health insurance.
"Frankly, if you're below 100 percent of poverty level, you probably couldn't afford the 9 percent you see in Kansas," Neal said. "How can anybody with that little money pay that much of their income on health insurance and still expect to feed themselves, keep a roof over their heads and then pay for transportation to go to work? It's just impossible." The obvious solution, to Neal at least, is for Wyoming to expand Medicaid to the 17,000 uninsured currently living below the poverty level.
But while the state Legislature in March empowered Gov. Matt Mead to negotiate such a plan
with the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, it doesn't appear that much has come of those negotiations. "We've heard that they are talking, but that's all we've heard," Neal said. "It'd be great to find out what they've discussed and what they're proposing."
Gov. Mead's office declined to comment on the progress of Medicaid negotiations, deferring instead to Wyoming Department of Health Deputy Director Lee Clabots, who indicated that little has been discussed so far. "There has been some preliminary touching base with the regional (Medicaid) office here, but beyond that, nothing has really happened," Clabots said. "I don't think we'd expect something more until early fall sometime."
Neal said he's concerned that any Medicaid expansion the governor proposes could come with a work requirement, which is a non-starter with many expansion activists. "There are certain things in these discussions we think are complete deal-breakers, and one of them is a work requirement," Neal said. "Many (uninsured Wyomingites) are already working, and others are at home taking care of a spouse or other family member, and some are simply sick and can't work."
Those concerns are shared by Jan Cartwright, the executive director of the Wyoming Primary Care Association, which provides technical assistance and training to the community health centers across the state that provide care to the uninsured. "A single person at 100 percent of poverty makes less than $1,000 a month, and in many cases, they're already working, so it's sort of a moot point," Cartwright said. "There's a real unfairness in this where people who could be eligible for Medicaid have to buy insurance outright, yet people at 200 percent of poverty level get subsidies. I just don't see the fairness in that."
Cartwright said she's hopeful that, as implementation of the ACA continues, more insurers will express interest in joining Wyoming's insurance exchange. If that were to happen, she said, the increased competition could drive down overall rates, making it easier for lower-income residents to afford coverage. But Tom Hirsig, the state's insurance commissioner, said Wyoming provides some unique challenges to health insurance companies that has so far dissuaded all but two from joining the state's exchange. The key problems, he said, are the state's low population and the lack of any real major population centers.
"When you look at prices of insurance, you can't compare Wyoming to metropolitan areas with millions of people," Hirsig said. "We don't have lots of doctors, and we're so spread out that preventative care is sometimes not accessible to people in Wyoming. Every state except Wyoming has a population center."
He added that the idea that insurance companies are taking advantage of the relative lack of competition in order to "gouge" customers is misguided, given that the ACA mandates how much profit insurers can make off of exchange enrollees. Specifically, insurers can only use 20 percent of subscriber premiums to cover administrative costs and investor profits. The rest must be spent on medical care and related quality improvement activities. "If they don't meet that, they have to refund premiums to their customers," Hirsig said. "So insurance companies aren't the ones getting rich. If insurance companies were getting rich, we'd have lots of insurance companies here."
Hirsig has been encouraging insurance companies to take part in Wyoming's exchange, but most, he said, have their sights on larger markets, and it's unclear whether any will opt to join Wyoming's exchange in the coming year.
"It's probably not going to change anytime soon," he said.
James Chilton - General Assignment Reporter
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Heroic Ukrainian female officer taken hostage by the terrorists “blew up” social media.
TheBadFoodie posted: "Social media users are calling to rescue Ukrainian officer Nadiya Savchenko, who has been taken hostage by Donbas terrorists. For this all those impartial are being asked to post the photograph of the aviator, who has already been dubbed "G.I. Jane," o"
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Friday, June 20, 2014
Neocons' Shocking Iraq Revisionism: How They Are Utterly Divorced from Reality | Alternet
Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz and the band are still delusionally beating the war drums. They just don't get it.
By Eric Alterman
| In a column entitled “Bush’s toxic legacy in Iraq,”
terrorism expert Peter Bergen writes about the origins of ISIS, “the
brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq.”
notes that, “One of George W. Bush’s most toxic legacies is the
introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship. If
this wasn’t so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the
US invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that
there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam
Hussein’s men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of
mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for
the impending war.”
the war; our invasion made it so. We have known this for nearly a
decade, well before the murderous ISIS even appeared.
no al Qaeda-Iraq connection until the war; our invasion made it so. We
have known this for nearly a decade, well before the murderous ISIS even
appeared. In a September 2006 New York Times article headlined “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat,”
reporter Mark Mazetti informed readers of a classified National
Intelligence Estimate representing the consensus view of the 16
disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global
Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ the analysis cited the
Iraq war as a reason for the diffusion of jihad ideology: “The Iraq war
has made the overall terrorism problem worse,’ said one American
intelligence official.”
The Bush Administration fought to quash
its conclusions during the two years that the report was in the works.
Mazetti reported, “Previous drafts described actions by the United
States government that were determined to have stoked the jihad
movement, like the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay
and the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.” Apparently, these were dropped
from the final document, though the reference to jihadists using their
training for the purpose of “exacerbating domestic conflicts or
fomenting radical ideologies” as in say, Syria, remained.
beginning of 2005, Mazetti notes, another official US government body,
the National Intelligence Council, “released a study concluding that
Iraq had become the primary training ground for the next generation of
terrorists, and that veterans of the Iraq war might ultimately overtake
Al Qaeda’s current leadership in the constellation of the global jihad
leadership.”
hand, it is impressive how well our intelligence agencies were able to
predict the likely outcome of the Bush Administration’s foolhardy
obsession with invading Iraq. On the other, it is beyond depressing how
little these assessments have come to matter in the discussion and
debate over US foreign policy.
Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of the war did everything
possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the
intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war.
we know, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the other architects of
the war did everything possible to intimidate, and when necessary, discredit those in the intelligence agencies who warned of the predictable consequences of war. Cheney
and his deputies made repeated trips to Langley to challenge
professional intelligence work and used pliant members of the media —
including Robert Novak of The Washington Post and Judith Miller of The
New York Times, among many, many others — to undermine the integrity of
people like Joseph P. Wilson and Valerie Plame lest the truth about the administration’s lies come out. Rather incredibly, they even went so far as to ignore the incredibly detailed planning documents, created over a period of a year at
a cost of $5 million by the State Department, that had a chance of
providing Iraq with a stable postwar environment. Instead, they insisted
on creating an occupation that generated nothing but chaos, mass murder
and the terrorist victories of today.
One of the many horrific
results was the decision to support Nouri al-Maliki as a potential
leader of the nation. Maliki’s sectarian attacks on Sunni Muslims on
behalf of his Shiite allies are the immediate cause of the current
murderous situation. And his placement in that job, as Fareed Zakaria aptly notes,
“was the product of a series of momentous decisions made by the Bush
administration. Having invaded Iraq with a small force — what the expert
Tom Ricks called ‘the worst war plan in American history’ — the
administration needed to find local allies.”
One could go on and
on (and on and on and on) about the awful judgment — the arrogance, the
corruption, the ideological obsession and the purposeful ignorance — by
the Bush Administration that led to the current catastrophe. As Ezra
Klein recently noted, “All this cost us trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.”
And this is to say nothing of the destruction of our civil liberties
and poisoning of our political discourse at home and the hundreds of
thousands of Iraqis who died, the millions of refugees created, the
hatred inspired in the world toward the United States.
But to
focus exclusively on the administration begs an obvious question. How
did they get away with it? Where were the watchdogs of the press?
Much
has been written on this topic. No one denies that the truth was
available at the time. Not all of it, of course, but enough to know that
certain catastrophe lay down the road the administration chose to
travel at 100 miles per hour. Top journalists, like those who ran
the Times and The Washington Post, chose to ignore the reporting they
read in their own papers.
As the Post itself later reported, its
veteran intelligence reporter Walter Pincus authored a compelling story
that undermined the Bush administration’s claim to have proof that Iraq
was hiding weapons of mass destruction. It only made the paper at all
because Bob Woodward, who was researching a book, talked his editors
into it. And even then, it ran on page A17, where it was immediately
forgotten.
As former Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks later explained, “Administration
assertions were on the front page. Things that challenged the
administration were on A18 on Sunday or A24 on Monday. There was an
attitude among editors: ‘Look, we’re going to war, why do we even worry
about all this contrary stuff?” The New York Times ran similarly
regretful stories and its editors noted to its readers that the paper
had been “perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.” (Bill
Moyers’ documentary special “Buying the War: How Big Media Failed Us tells the story, and in conjunction with that Moyers report, you can find an Interactive Timeline as well as post-March 2003 coverage of Iraq.)
Many
in the mainstream media came clean, relatively speaking, about the
cause of their mistakes when it turned out that they had been conduits
for the Bush administration lies that led to catastrophe. But what they
haven’t done, apparently, is change their ways.
As my “Altercation” colleague Reed Richardson notes,
the very same people who sold us the war are today trying to resell us
the same damaged goods: “On MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ this past Monday,
there was Paul Bremer,
the man who summarily disbanded the Iraqi Army in 2003 in one of the
biggest strategic blunders of the war, happily holding court and
advocating for ‘boots on the ground.’” Not to be outdone, POLITICO had
the temerity to quote Doug Feith blithely lecturing Obama about how to execute foreign policy. Don’t forget the throwback stylings of torture apologist Marc Thiessen either,
who was writing speeches for Rumsfeld during the run-up to the Iraq
War. On Monday, he, too, weighed in with an op-ed in the Washington
Post unironically entitled “Obama’s Iraq Disaster.”
Among
the most egregious examples of this tendency has been rehabilitation of
neoconservative thinker Robert Kagan and his frequent writing partner,
the pundit and policy entrepreneur William Kristol. Back in April 2002,
the two argued that “the road that leads to real security and peace” is “the road that runs through Baghdad.” In an article entitled “What to Do About Iraq,”
they added that not only was it silly to believe that “American ground
forces in significant number are likely to be required for success in
Iraq” but also that they found it “almost impossible to imagine any
outcome for the world both plausible and worse than the disease of
Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. A fractured Iraq? An unsettled
Kurdish situation? A difficult transition in Baghdad? These may be
problems, but they are far preferable to leaving Saddam in power with
his nukes, VX, and anthrax.”
Recently, Kristol could be heard on
ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse Roundtable” explaining that the
problem in Iraq today was caused not by the lousy decisions for which he
argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from
Iraq in 2011.”
Both men made this argument over and over, and especially in Kristol’s case, often in McCarthyite terms designed to cast aspersions on the motives and patriotism of their opponents and
those in the media. For his spectacular wrongness Kristol has been
punished by being given columns in The Washington Post, The New York
Times, andTime magazine, not to mention a regular slot on ABC’s “This
Week with George Stephanopoulos.” (These appointments came in addition
to a $250,000 award from the right-wing Lynde and Harry Bradley
Foundation; an occasion that inspired this collection of a just a few of his greatest hits.)
Recently,
Kristol could be heard on ABC’s idiotically named “Powerhouse
Roundtable” explaining that the problem in Iraq today was caused not by
the lousy decisions for which he argued so vociferously but “by our ridiculous and total withdrawal from Iraq in 2011.”
(Surprise, surprise, he did not mention that our 2011 withdrawal from
Iraq was the product of the 2008 “Status of Forces” agreement negotiated
by none other than President George W. Bush.)
Similarly, last month, Kagan was given 12,700 words for a cover essay in the (still hawkish) New Republic entitled “Superpowers Don’t Get to Retire,” which
he used to make many of the same sorts of unsupported assertions that
underlay his original misguided advice. As a result, he found himself
not only celebrated in a profile in The New York Times that all but glossed over his past record, but also called in for consultations by the current President of the United States.
One
often reads analyses these days that grant the no-longer ignorable fact
that American conservatives, especially those in control of the
Republican Party, have become so obsessed by right-wing ideology and
beholden to corporate cash that they have entirely lost touch both with
reality and with the views of most Americans. As the famed Brookings
Institution analyst Thomas Mann recently wrote in the Atlantic Monthly,
“Republicans have become a radical insurgency — ideologically extreme,
contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise,
unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and
science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of their political
opposition.”
This tendency was the focus of the coverage of the
shocking defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his local
primary by a man with no political experience and little money, who
attributed his victory to “God act[ing] through people on my behalf,”
and warns that unless more Americans heed the lessons of Jesus — as he
interprets them — a new Hitler could rise again “quite easily.” These
right-wing extremists have repeatedly demonstrated their contempt for
the views of most Americans whether it be on economic issues,
environmental issues, issues of personal, religious and sexual freedom
or immigration, to name just a few, and Americans are moving away from them as a result.
This
is no less true, it turns out, with regard to the proposed adventurism
in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East by those who sold us the first
false bill of goods back in 2003. A
strong majority of Americans now agree that removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq was not worth the trillions of dollars and lives lost. Barely one in six want to go back in. There is also strong opposition to military intervention in neighboring Syria.
And yet not only do the same armchair warriors continue in their
demands for more blood and treasure to be sacrificed on the altar of
their ideological obsession with no regard whatever for Americans’
desire to do the exact opposite, they remain revered by the same
mainstream media that allowed them to get away with it the first time.
The
conservative foreign policy establishment, it needs to be said, is no
less out to touch with reality — and democracy — than the tea party
fanatics who control the Republican domestic agenda (and are fueled by
the cash of the Koch Brothers and other billionaires who stand to profit
from their victories). That so many in the media pretend otherwise,
after all this time, all this death and all this money wasted,
demonstrates not only contempt for their audience but utter disdain for
knowledge itself.
Monday, June 16, 2014
Maine Rep. Lawrence E. Lockman is truly one Ignorant, F'in Village-Idiot!
Republican Maine state Representative Lawrence Lockman is under fire for comments he's made in the media regarding rape, abortion, and homosexuality.
An investigation by Mike Tipping, an activist with Maine People's Alliance, found numerous offensive comments made by the Republican in various newspaper interviews.
Perhaps the most inflammatory was a press statement from 1995 in which Lockman says "If a woman has (the right to an abortion), why shouldn't a man be free to use his superior strength to force himself on a woman? At least the rapist's pursuit of sexual freedom doesn't (in most cases) result in anyone's death."
That wasn't all.
According to the report, Lockman once implied that the HIV virus can be spread through mosquitoes and bed sheets. Lockman also asserted that liberals helped exacerbate the AIDS epidemic by assuring "the public that the practice of sodomy is a legitimate alternative lifestyle, rather than a perverted and depraved crime against humanity."
In a letter to Bangor News, Lockman once wrote "Clearly the practice of sodomy is learned behavior, and those addicted to this form of biologically-insane sex are at high risk for all manner of serious medical problems."
Lockman also spoke out against HIV infected students attending school, saying "It's peculiar that the government is telling health care workers that surfaces contaminated with bodily fluids should be thoroughly disinfected, but at the same time they are telling us that toilet seats have some magical property that they are able to resist viruses."
He also tried to alert people to a "secret gay affirmative action plan," saying "You can bet the rent money they will demand that employers set up goals and timetables to achieve 10 percent homosexual representation in the workforce and in government contracts."
Ben Grant, the chairman of the Maine Democratic Party, called for Lockman to resign in light of these statements, calling them "hateful, vicious, and offensive." Grant also called Lockman "disturbed individual who holds some of the most abhorrent beliefs ever heard from a public official in Maine."
Lockman has refused to respond to direct questions but released a statement, saying "I have always been passionate about my beliefs, and years ago I said things that I regret. I hold no animosity toward anyone by virtue of their gender or sexual orientation, and today I am focused on ensuring freedom and economic prosperity for all Mainers."
By: Igor Derysh | March 4, 2014
Friday, June 6, 2014
Ukrainians Made an Enormous Contribution to Allied Victory in World War II!
Staunton, 4 June – Moscow propagandists have criticized the plans of Ukrainian President-elect Petro Poroshenko to attend the 70th anniversary commemorations of the D-Day landings in Normandy suggesting that Ukraine was not one of the allied countries and that Ukrainians supported the Nazis.
But those implications are untrue, Yury Shapoval, a member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, says, and in fact, "Poroshenko is going to France as the representative of a people which made an enormous contribution to the victory over fascism".
In an article in yesterday's Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the historian cites the words of Saturday Evening Post writer Edgar Snow in January 1945 that the eastern front during World War II was not so much an example of "Russian glory" but rather "in justice should be recognized in the first instance as a Ukrainian war."
"World War II was for many reasons a 'Ukrainian' [conflict]," the Kyiv author says. On March 15, 1939, Hungarian forces invaded Carpathian Ukraine, "which had just proclaimed state independence." The Ukrainians fought back against what was the first military attack by an ally of Hitler, but they lost and were absorbed by Hungary.
And at the other end of the war, on 2 September 1945, the Ukrainian historian continues, "a young general of Ukrainian origin, Kuzma Derevyanko signed the act of capitulation by Japan on the American battleship Missouri."
The war passed across Ukraine twice, once "from west to east" and then "from east to west." On its territory were at one time "up to 60 percent of the divisions of the Wehrmacht and almost half of the military units of the Red Army." In the latter, there were between six and seven million Ukrainians.
Although Moscow has done everything it can to understate the Ukrainian contribution, there were more than 300 generals of Ukrainian origin in the Red Army. The number was in fact larger. Although Shapoval does not mention it here, officers of Ukrainian origin were allowed to change their nationality to Russian upon reaching the rank of colonel.
And the Ukrainians showed they knew how to fight. Nearly one in every five Soviet soldiers named a hero of the Soviet Union was a Ukrainian. Of the 115 who were given the award twice, 32 were Ukrainians, and ne Ukrainian – pilot Ivan Kozhdeub — received it three times.
Ukrainians did not just fight in the Soviet Army or on the territory of their republic, Shapoval points out. Between 35,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians served in the Canadian military during the war, approximately 11 percent of that country's uniformed services. Almost 40,000 Ukrainians took part in the Overlord operation as part of the American military.
Five thousand Ukrainians in France fought in that country's Foreign Legion, and many rose to leadership positions in the Resistance. Every eighth member of General Vladyslav Ander's Polish forces was a Ukrainian, even though in most cases, they called and were called Poles.
"The Ukrainian theme sounded loudly and tragically in the apocalyptic symphony of the Second World War," the Kyiv academic concludes. "One should not forget about that," however much Russian propagandists and those elsewhere who follow their lead try to obscure the facts of the case.
Poroshenko thus has every right to be in Normandy as the representative of a nation which gave so much of its blood and treasure to defeat the common enemy of the United Nations. That is especially the case because unlike the Soviet Union which Vladimir Putin likes to celebrate, Ukraine did not use the end of the war for liberation to enslave others.
