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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (168242)	5/16/2014 3:51:34 PM
From: lorne	2 Recommendations Recommended By FJB locogringo Respond to of 224755

WOLFEBORO, N.H. —A police commissioner in a predominantly white New Hampshire town said he won't apologize for calling President Barack Obama the N-word, and he sat with his arms crossed while angry residents at a meeting called for his resignation on Thursday. Wolfeboro residents demand commissioner resign over racial slur Robert Copeland had heated exchange with News 9 reporter UPDATED 12:24 AM EDT May 16, 2014 Video... wmur.com WOLFEBORO, N.H. —A police commissioner in a predominantly white New Hampshire town said he won't apologize for calling President Barack Obama the N-word, and he sat with his arms crossed while angry residents at a meeting called for his resignation on Thursday. Wolfeboro Police Commissioner Robert Copeland, who's 82 and white, has acknowledged in an email to his fellow police commissioners he used the racial slur in describing Obama. Town resident Jane O'Toole, who moved to Wolfeboro four months ago, said she overheard Copeland say the slur at a restaurant in March and wrote to the town manager about it. Copeland, in an email to her, acknowledged using the slur in referring to the president and said he will not apologize. "It's not like I was eavesdropping. Mr. Copeland was being very loud," O'Toole said. Copeland was silent during Thursday night's meeting. He was asked to resign and said nothing. He did say plenty in a letter to O'Toole after she wrote to his bosses about his racial slurs. "The letter really took the wind out of my sails, really," O'Toole said. "I believe I did use the 'N' word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse (sic)," Copeland said in the email. "For this, I do not apologize -- he meets and exceeds my criteria for such." Because they didn't get an answer inside, a mob of people demanded answers after the meeting was over. Whitney White and several others confronted Copeland as he went to his car. "I admitted what I did. I made no bone about it," Copeland said to White. He did not want News 9 recording the conversation in the parking lot. "If you want to talk further when this nosy individual leaves," Copeland said to White referring to News 9's Nick Spinetto. "I'm not a nosy individual, I'm a reporter doing my job," Spinetto said to Copeland. "I know what you are. You're a skunk. Goodbye," Copeland said to Spinetto. There was no resolution Thursday evening. Instead, the police commission plans on meeting to discuss what action they should take but they would not tell the audience where that meeting will be held or when. Copeland is one of three members of the police commission, which hires, fires and disciplines officers and sets their salaries. He ran unopposed for re-election and secured another three-year term on March 11. About 20 black people live in Wolfeboro, a town of 6,300 residents in the scenic Lakes Region, in the central part of New Hampshire, a state that's 94 percent white and 1 percent black. None of the town police department's 12 full-time officers is black or a member of another minority; one part-time officer is black. Town Manager David Owen said Thursday that while he finds Copeland's comment "reprehensible," he and the board of selectmen have no authority to remove an elected official.

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (168242)	5/16/2014 4:02:53 PM
From: lorne	4 Recommendations Recommended By chartseer FJB Sedohr Nod TideGlider Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224755

Obama OKs caps on medical procedures Limits on how much insurance plans will pay Read more at wnd.com Health care caps pit quality vs. cost By The Associated Press Published: Thursday, May 15, 2014, triblive.com WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has given the go-ahead for insurers and employers to implement a cost-control strategy that puts a hard dollar limit on how much health plans will pay for some expensive procedures, such as knee and hip replacements. Some experts worry that such a move would surprise patients who choose to use more expensive hospitals. The cost difference would leave them with big medical bills that they'd have to pay themselves. That could undercut key financial protections in President Obama's health care law that apply not just to the health insurance exchanges, but to most job-based coverage as well. Others say it's a valuable tool to reduce costs and help keep premiums in check. There is concern among some federal regulators. A recent administration policy ruling went to unusual lengths, acknowledging that the cost-control strategy “may be a subterfuge” for “otherwise prohibited limitations on coverage.” Nonetheless, the departments of Labor and Health and Human Services said the practice — known as reference pricing — could continue. Plans must use a “reasonable method” to ensure “adequate access to quality providers.” Regulators asked for public comment, saying they may publish more guidance. HHS spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt said in a statement that the administration is monitoring the effects of reference pricing on access to quality services and will work to ensure that financial protections for consumers are not undermined. One way the new approach is different is that it sets a dollar limit on how much the health plan will pay for a given procedure. Most insurance pays a percentage of costs, and those costs can vary from hospital to hospital. The insurance pays the same percentage whether a patient's choice of hospital charges more or less for the procedure. Some experts are concerned. “The problem ... from the patient's perspective is that at the end of the day, that is who gets left holding the bag,” said Karen Pollitz of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, formerly a top consumer protection regulator in the Obama administration. The new pricing approach is not yet on consumers' radar, but it's gaining ground. The Mercer benefits consulting firm said 12 percent of the largest employers were using reference pricing last year, nearly double the 7 percent in 2012. The approach has been pioneered in California by CalPERS, a giant agency that manages health and retirement benefits for public employees and is the nation's second-largest purchaser of health benefits after the federal government. CalPERS started with knee and hip replacements in 2011, steering patients to hospitals that had been vetted for quality and charged $30,000 or less. Ann Boynton, CalPERS' health benefits director, said the program has been a success, with patients able to choose from about 50 hospitals. “People do not feel like we went to bargain-basement hospitals where the quality is not good,” she said. “The quality is the same and, in some instances, better.” Economist James C. Robinson of the University of California at Berkeley studied the CalPERS experiment and found that many patients shifted to lower-cost hospitals, saving money, and that expensive hospitals responded by cutting their prices. Although insurers don't appear to be using reference pricing on the new health exchanges, Robinson said he thinks it's only a matter of time. “The vast majority of people buying on the exchanges are price sensitive,” he said. “People, when they are spending their own money, tend to go for thinner benefits.” However, the strategy appears to be suitable only for a subset of medical care: procedures and tests that are frequently performed, where the prices charged vary widely, but the quality of results generally does not. In addition to knee and hip replacements, that could include such procedures as MRIs and other imaging tests, cataract surgery and colonoscopies. Robert Berenson, a physician and health policy expert at the Urban Institute think tank, said he worries that advocates of reference pricing may be overlooking quality differences. “There are differences in MRIs and in how a hip replacement is done,” he said. “If you are going to say ‘Our judgment is better than your doctor's,' then you've got to meet tests that you are actually assuring quality and safety.”

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (168242)	5/17/2014 6:48:17 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 224755

AS THE TIMES TURNS: Jill's High Profile Annoyed Sulzberger... Struggle for power... Has become its own scandal sheet...

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (168242)	5/17/2014 9:55:31 AM
From: lorne	2 Recommendations Recommended By locogringo TideGlider Respond to of 224755

Comrade Kenny Going as planned by your kind...Carry on comrade. Obamacare: Cash for Crony Capitalism Feds spent $5 billion to get state Obamacare exchanges operational Kurt Nimmo Prison Planet.com May 16, 2014 prisonplanet.com Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon and Nevada have gone through nearly a half billion dollars building inoperable Obamacare websites for vastly overpriced state exchanges. For government, though, nothing succeeds like failure, especially if it rewards selected partners in crime, so the feds will continue with little resistance to pour millions of dollars more down these rat holes. Vermont, Minnesota and Hawaii have also squandered millions on websites for exchanges that are either inoperable or fatally flawed. Remarkably, in Hawaii, the cost per enrollee is $23,899, double that of other exchanges. “Taxpayers will have to pay whether their state-based exchange fails or not,” Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Fiscal Times. The feds have spent near $5 billion to get state exchanges for Obamacare operational. A key tenet of crony capitalism is if project fails or does not work, the government will continue to shovel money into it. In Oregon, for instance, technical contractors hired by the state “may have boosted billings by ‘throwing bodies rather than skillset’ at problems.” For unscrupulous website developers, the federal government is viewed as a gravy train the size of a massive Honda Fit mining truck. Malfunctioning and inoperable websites are merely indicative of a larger problem – dysfunctional Obamacare exchanges. In total, as of February, 14 states have received federal money to get Obamacare exchanges up. California alone received a whopping $1 billion to set-up its exchange. Billions of dollars down the rat hole later, the Congressional Government Accountability Office has launched a probe into how well the federal government provided oversight into all of the “troubled” state exchanges. Despite the promise of investigation and transparency, the federal gravy train with its ladle of expropriated cash stolen from producers at gunpoint will continue to parcel out cash for the Obamacare boondoggle. “Cash for Clunkers, for all its faults, was at least a limited-time program,” writes Michael Tennant. “ObamaCare, on the other hand, is intended to continue forever, and it is just beginning. There is no question that it will easily outpace Cash for Clunkers — and perhaps almost all other federal programs — in the contest to see which can squander the most cash.” The entire Obamacare scam sadly reveals how inexplicably entrenched crony capitalism is in America. “This monstrous government scam could never have been enacted into law without the support of crony capitalists who joined Obama and the Democratic Party in selling this socialist scheme to the American people,” writes Tom Tancredo. “What Obamacare illustrates is that the most dangerous and expensive form of crony capitalism is not ‘insider trading’ or sweetheart contracts that give an advantage to one company over others. The most far-reaching damage to our prosperity and our freedom occurs when whole industries join with government to carve out ‘new markets’ and new customers for regulated and government-provided products. Obamacare is crony capitalism on steroids.”

To: Kenneth E. Phillipps who wrote (168242)	5/17/2014 3:11:27 PM
From: lorne	4 Recommendations Recommended By FJB locogringo Sedohr Nod TideGlider Respond to of 224755

Sarah Palin’s ‘AR-15 makes a great gift’ tweet sends social media in tizzy By Cheryl K. Chumley The Washington Times Friday, May 16, 2014 washingtontimes.com In case you’re wondering, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has some gift-giving advice: Give them an AR-15. In a tweet, she wrote: “Innovation found only in the USA! You know, an AR-15 makes a great gift — what more says, “I love you”? Eh, you …” and then she included a link to her new Sportsman Channel show, “Amazing America with Sarah Palin,” airing Thursdays at 8 p.m. Predictably perhaps, social media took to trouncing her tweet. Someone with the handle Monkey Bear Dinosaur wrote: “@SarahPalinUSA You are a terrible person.” Jeff Mandell wrote, The Blaze found: “@SarahPalinUSA you’re a sick, sick woman.” And Sad day 4u wrote: “@SarahPalinUSA Saying I love you says it better than giving someone an assault weapon you [expletive] psycho.” Mrs. Palin’s new show website bills her as “the First Lady of the Outdoors” and promotes that she will tell the “stories of an America you may not know. From risk-takers to legacy-makers, trailblazers to lifesavers, see what makes America amazing!”