source http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmOyaWaEwNk
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Bank of America Forecloses on Home Without a Mortgage
Yet another foreclosure snafu…
Bank of America reportedly foreclosed on a Florida man's home despite him not having a mortgage on the property.
Homeowner Jason Grodensky bought his Ft. Lauderdale home last December, choosing to pay cash instead of taking on a mortgage.
But just seven months later, the Charlotte-based bank had foreclosed on the home and title was transferred to government mortgage financier Fannie Mae.
Despite numerous calls and e-mails to Bank of America and Florida Default Law Group, the law firm that handled the foreclosure, there was no response and the court case went on.
deconstructing idea that not extending tax cuts is bad for "small business" - daily kos #p2
source http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/9/23/904477/-Small-Business?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29
As Keith Olbermann puts it, the Republicans have turned small business into a brand that has little to do with shoestring entrepreneurs or mom-and-pop operations or even the 500-employee companies that the Small Business Administration sets as the upper limit for "small." For the GOP, it's a handy propaganda phrase that helps to conceal the fact that ultra-wealthy Americans are ducking corporate taxes by filing the take from some phenomenally profitable companies with their personal income taxes.
It's a scam. It's a swindle. And Democrats need to press their advantage with the large majority of the population who agree that the richest among us should not continue to receive the lucrative tax cuts delivered to them by the Cheney-Bush administration.
Most Democrats, including the President, favor giving these tax cuts a proper burial. A few of them, again including the President, have been making a decently persuasive case. But, despite the years of accumulated evidence that these tax cuts did not create the jobs and economy-enhancing investment claimed for them, an appalling number of the Blue Dogs in their midst are up to their usual transparent stratagems. Keeping these tax cuts does nothing for the mass of their constituents, but it pays them big dividends from the moneybags of those who support their continued incumbency. It's a fine arrangement unless you're among the 90 percent of Americans who will eventually have to cover the damage it causes with higher future taxes or reduced benefits and services, or both.
Pat Garafalo at the Wonk Room makes the consequences clear:
• As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out, Bechtel Corp., the largest engineering firm in the country, is an S corporation, and thus its owners file their income from the company on their personal tax returns. It is the fifth-largest privately owned company in the U.S. and had gross revenue in 2008 of $31.4 billion.
• The Tribune Company — the country's second largest publisher of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times — is also an S corporation. It actually saved $1.8 billion in taxes by not filing as a corporation.
• The average gross adjusted income of someone who receives more than half of their income from an S corporation and will be affected by the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy will be $1.1 million next year.
"Small business" owners of KKR, Koch Industries, CoorsTek, the Carlyle Group, Harrah's Entertainment and PriceWaterhouseCoopers are among the other wealthy Americans who would benefit from extending the top-level tax cuts.
As if this were not enough, according to their Pledge to America, the Republicans plan to allow "small business owners" to add another tax deduction equal to 20 percent of their business income. Another windfall for the folks who, unleashed by Citizens United, are pouring hundreds of millions into this year's election so they can get into high office more people who will approve the appointments of yet more Supreme Court Justices who gave them Citizens United in the first place. Unlike most of the Pledge, which the Republicans will jettison if they ever manage to return to power, that tax deduction is one item you can be certain they will deliver. Cutting taxes for their sugar-daddies is something they can always be counted on until the day, if nobody stops them, those levies clock in at zero.
Memo to right-wingers: That 'bearded Marxist' line is a JOKE -- one that makes fun of idiots like you #p2
source http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/memo-right-wingers-bearded-marxist-l
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OK, this whole "Chris Coons describes himself as a bearded Marxist" thing that's now the everyday talking point at Fox News -- embodied once again in Christine O'Donnell's interview with Sean Hannity on Tuesday night -- has really gone far enough:
O'Donnell: If the media is going to attack me for statements I made in my 20s, that's fair game. He made some very anti-American statements, apologizing for America and calling himself a bearded Marxist.
People. Fergawdsake.
"My friends now joke that something about Kenya, maybe the strange diet, or the tropical sun, changed my personality; Africa to them seems a catalytic converter that takes in clean-shaven, clear-thinking Americans and sends back bearded Marxists," Coons wrote, noting that at one time he had been a "proud founding member of the Amherst College Republicans."
Of course, considering that the joke is predicated on making fun of clueless right-wing buffoons who see a "Marxist" behind every liberal rock, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. You know: People like Christine O'Donnell, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest of the crew at Fox News, as well as the entire wingnutosphere. No wonder they don't get that they're the butt of it.
Man Allegedly Wanted To Start War Between Christians And Muslims, Kill Obama #p2
A 50-year-old Army veteran who was arrested after an eight-hour standoff with federal agents was charged on Wednesday with threatening to kill President Barack Obama. Officials said he planned to ignite a war between Muslims and Christians and "start an apocalypse," and his Facebook page showed that he planned to burn a Koran.
Roman Otto Conaway, 50, was arrested at his home in Fairview Heights, Illinois in the early morning hours Wednesday and was scheduled to appear in federal court on Thursday. During the standoff, Conaway allegedly said a bulky belt he wore and three storage containers on his property were packed with explosives, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
Conaway eventually surrendered after officials promised him a mental health evaluation. He could face up to five years in prison if convicted on charges that he made false threats to detonate an explosive device and threatened the president.
It all apparently began on Tuesday after the St. Clair County Circuit Court barred him from contact with his grandchildren, whom he had raised for several years.
After the decision, Conaway allegedly called a local mosque and said that he wanted to begin a war between Christians and Muslims. "I want to start an apocalypse," he said, according to the FBI.
Conaway allegedly said that he thought that Obama had threatened the Rev. Terry Jones and forced him to cancel his planned Koran burning in Florida on Sept. 11, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
At 2:12 p.m. on Tuesday Conaway wrote this message on his Facebook page:
rest at http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/man_wanted_to_start_war_between_christians_and_mus.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TPMmuckraker+%28TPMmuckraker%29
Sharron Angle, Fox News, and the corrosive influence of money in American politics #p2
This doesn't belong in our "Just how crazy is Sharron Angle?" series. If anything, this shows her to be a rather shrewd political player and media manipulator who even knows how to get the most out of conservatives like Limbaugh, Hannity, and O'Reilly (who may be supportive of her candidacy but who may not like to be taken advantage of like this, not when she evidently sees them primarily as cogs in her money-making machine and doesn't even care if they're "friendly").
At the Las Vegas Sun, Jon Ralston quotes "some audio of Angle at a house party this month, bragging about how profitable FOX can be":
rest at http://the-reaction.blogspot.com/2010/09/sharron-angle-fox-news-and-corrosive.html
Wall Street's greatest heist: the Tarp #p2
Women carrying boxes leave the Lehman Brothers headquarters in New York on 15 September 2008. The day the investment bank choked by the credit crisis and falling real estate values, filed for bankruptcy Photograph: Louis Lanzano/AP Two years ago, the top honchos at the Fed, Treasury and the Wall Street banks were running around like Chicken Little warning that the world was about to end. This fear-mongering, together with a big assist from the elite media (thatis, NPR, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, etc), earned the banks their $700bn Troubled Asset Relief Programme (Tarp) blank cheque bailout. This money, along with even more valuable loans and loan guarantees from the Fed and FDIC, enabled them to survive the crisis they had created. As a result, the big banks are bigger and more profitable than ever.
Now, the same crew that tapped our pockets two years ago is eagerly pitching the line that their bailout was good for us. It may be the case that the history books are written by the winners, but that doesn't prevent the rest of us from telling the truth.
Let's step back to where we were two years ago. The huge investment bank Bear Stearns had collapsed. So had Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants. Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank had also gone down. AIG, the country's largest insurer, had been put on life support by the government.
At this point, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, the three remaining independent investment banks, all faced runs that would quickly sink them without government intervention. Citigroup and Bank of America, two of the three largest commercial banks, were also almost certainly insolvent. Many other banks also faced insolvency, especially if they took big losses on their loans to other institutions that were about to go bankrupt.
This was when the Wall Street boys made their mad rush for the public trough. They enlisted everyone that mattered in the effort, including Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, Federal Reserve Board chairman Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, then the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
The line was that the economy would collapse if congress did not immediately rescue the banks. They were prepared to make up anything to save the banks in their hour of need. Bernanke was probably caught in the biggest fabrication when he told congress that the commercial paper market was shutting down.
If true, this would have been disastrous, since most major companies rely on selling commercial paper to meet their payroll and other routine expenses. If this market shut down, it would mean that even healthy businesses could not pay their workers and suppliers, which would quickly cause the whole economy to grind to a halt.
Bernanke did not bother to inform congress and the public that he had the ability to single-handedly support the commercial paper market. He waited until the weekend after congress approved the Tarp to announce that he would establish a special Fed lending facility to buy commercial paper.
In reality, the Fed almost certainly had the ability to keep the economy going by sustaining the system of payments, even if the chain of bank collapses was allowed to run its course. In the 1980s Latin American debt crisis, the Fed had an emergency plan to seize the money centre banks, and keep them operating, if a default by a major Latin American country pushed them into insolvency.
By the time of the Lehman crisis, the financial markets had been severely stressed for over a year. The first major bank collapse had occurred more than six months earlier. It would have required a degree of unbelievable incompetence and/or irresponsibility for the Fed not to have devised a similar emergency plan to keep the systems of payments operating in a worst-case scenario.
Furthermore, even if the Fed had been as incompetent as many claim, it would not have taken long for it to improvise a system whereby certain payments would be prioritised and the system of payments would again be up-and-running. The notion that we would be sitting in a 21st-century economy and reduced to barter payments was an invention of the bank lobby to get the taxpayers' money.
The first Great Depression was the result of a decade of failed policies, not a single bad mistake at its onset. There was absolutely nothing that we could have done back in September-October of 2008 that would have required that we experience a decade of double-digit unemployment. The spectre of a "second great depression" is a fairy tale invented by the bank lobby to make the rest of us feel good about having given them our money.
We are also supposed to feel good that the vast majority of the Tarp money was repaid. This is another effort to prey on the public's ignorance. Had it not been for the bailout, most of the major centre banks would have been wiped out. This would have destroyed the fortunes of their shareholders, many of their creditors, and their top executives. This would have been a massive redistribution to the rest of society – their loss is our gain.
It is important to remember that the economy would be no less productive following the demise of these Wall Street giants. The only economic fact that would have been different is that the Wall Street crew would have lost claims to hundreds of billions of dollars of the economy's output each year and trillions of dollars of wealth. That money would, instead, be available for the rest of society. The fact that they have lost the claim to wealth from their stock and bond holdings makes all the rest of us richer, once the economy is again operating near normal levels of output.
Instead, we have the same Wall Street crew calling the shots, doing business pretty much as they always did. The rest of us are sitting here dealing with wreckage of their recklessness: 9.6% unemployment and the loss of much of the middle class's savings in their homes and their retirement accounts.
And the lackeys of the Wall Street crew are telling us that we should be thankful that we didn't have a second Great Depression. Maybe we don't have the power to keep the bankers from picking our pockets, but we don't have to believe their lies.
rest at http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/20/tarp-bailout-banks-wall-street
That 'Official' Poverty Rate? It's Much Worse Than You Think
While the shocking new poverty statistics from the Census Bureau indicating that a record 43.6 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009 emphatically demonstrates the severity of the economic crisis, the Census is drastically undercounting this demographic. Apparently the government's poverty statistics are as accurate as its unemployment statistics.
I have read many reports that simply restate what the government has said without questioning the fact that the metrics it uses to calculate poverty are extremely outdated.
News reports say that in 2009 the poverty rate "skyrocketed" to 43.6 million -- up from 39.8 million in 2008, which is the largest year-to-year increase, and the highest number since statistics have been recorded -- putting the poverty rate for 2009 at 14.3 percent. This is obviously a tragedy and horrific news. However, this is also the result of lazy reporting.
Let's revisit the 2008 Census total stating that 39.8 million Americans lived in poverty. It turns out that the National Academy of Science did its own study and found that 47.4 million Americans actually lived in poverty in 2008. The Census missed 7.6 million Americans living in poverty that year.
How did that happen? The Census Bureau uses a long outdated method to calculate the poverty rate. The Census is measuring poverty based on costs of living metrics established back in 1955 -- 55 years ago! They ignore many key factors, such as the increased costs of medical care, child care, education, transportation, and many other basic costs of living. They also don't factor geographically based costs of living. For example, try finding a place to live in New York that costs the same as a place in Florida.
So the Census poverty rate increase of 3.8 million people will put the 2009 National Academy of Science (NAS) number at a minimum of 51.2 million Americans. And if the margin of discrepancy is equivalent to the 7.6 million of 2008, we are looking at a NAS number of at least 52 million people for 2009.
Let's also consider the fact that more than 20 million people were on unemployment benefits last year. A Center on Budget and Policy Priorities analysis concluded that unemployment insurance temporarily kept 3.3 million people out of poverty. Food stamp assistance kept another 2.3 million people out of poverty. If we were to include all of these people, we'd be looking at almost 60 million Americans living in poverty. Which means the government number doesn't account for over 14.1 million Americans in poverty.
Now let's look at the poverty line these numbers are based on: $22,050 for a family of four. Let me repeat that: $22,050 for a family of four. That breaks down to $5,513 per person, per year. I don't know about you, but I can't imagine living in the United States on $459 per month. That amount will barely get you a good health insurance policy, never mind food, clothes and a roof over your head. No wonder why a record 50.7 million Americans do not have health insurance. (Beware: 50.7 million Americans without health insurance is a government-based number. If you had health insurance for only one day last year, you are not counted in this total.)
Clearly, the Census is setting the income level for its poverty measurement extremely low. If we were to increase that measure by just a small increment, to $25,000 for a family of four, I estimate that the National Academy of Science would come up with a number of nearly 100 million Americans in poverty.
Let's also consider the staggering amount of Americans -- 52 million, roughly 17 percent of the population -- who are currently enrolled in "anti-poverty" programs. Over 50 million are on Medicaid, 41 million on food stamps, 10 million on unemployment, 4.4 million receive welfare. Not counted in this "anti-poverty" total are 30 million children enrolled in the National School Lunch Program. Another metric: if it wasn't for Social Security -- note to deficit hawks -- 20 million more would be added to the poverty total.
The effect of people moving in with family members instead of living on their own has further masked the severity of the poverty crisis. Foreclosures, unemployment, increased cost of education and health insurance have led the average household to grow in size. As Patrick Martin reports:
The number of multifamily households increased by 11.6 percent from 2008 to 2010, and the proportion of adults 25-34 living with their parents rose from 12.7 percent in 2008 to 13.4 percent in 2010. The poverty rate for these young adults was 8.5 percent when they were considered part of their parents' household, but would have been 43 percent if they had been living on their own.
This trend is currently increasing. Although it is terribly under-reported, foreclosure rates continue to rise. We just experienced the worst month of foreclosures in history; the generation just graduating from college is carrying record levels of student-loan debt, and they are being forced into much lower income levels than anticipated, if they can even find employment.
Another glaring factor clouding our view of poverty in America is that the Census does not calculate a person's assets and liabilities. Considering the massive debts most Americans are carrying, this would make the poverty rate explode. Stephen Crawford and Shawn Fremstad from Reuters concisely summed up this point:
As Nobel laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen, along with economist Jean-Paul Fitoussi, write in their new book Mis-measuring Our Lives, "Income and consumption are crucial for assessing living standards, but in the end they can only be gauged in conjunction with information on wealth." This point is just as relevant to poverty measurement as it is to other measures of living standards.
To understand why this is the case, consider two families: one had an income that puts them a few thousand dollars below the poverty line, which was $22,050 for a family of four in 2009; the other has an income a few thousand dollars above the line. Looking only at income, the first family is worse off than the second.
Now add what the family owns and owes into the mix. Let's say the first family has substantial net equity in its home and moderate liquid savings for a "rainy day," while the latter has no liquid savings or, as is becoming too common these days, has liabilities that dwarf their assets such as an "underwater" mortgage. Using this more comprehensive method, the latter family, despite a modestly higher income, is actually the poorer one.
In my analysis, a key metric to judge the overall economic security and hardship level of a country is the percentage of the population living paycheck to paycheck. Anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck can tell you about the stress and psychological impact it has on you when you know your family is one sickness, injury or downsizing away from economic ruin. The employment company CareerBuilder, in partnership with Harris Interactive, conducts an annual survey to determine the percentage of Americans currently living paycheck to paycheck. In 2007, 43 percent fell into this category. In 2008, the number increased to 49 percent. In 2009, the number skyrocketed up to 61 percent.
In their most recent survey, this number exploded to a mind-shattering 77 percent. Yes, 77 percent of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. This means in our nation of 310 million citizens, 239 million Americans are one setback away from economic ruin.
So when I hear the government and media tell me that 43.6 million Americans lived in poverty in 2009, while that is horrifying enough, I get extraordinarily frustrated knowing that even that sad statistic is putting a major positive spin on this economic disaster that is still far from over. While the economic top half of 1 percent now fears a "double-dip," the overwhelming majority of Americans are still in the same downward spiral they've been on.
For one last missing piece to this equation, corporate profits are soaring while all this is devastation is occurring. Despite this economic crisis, it's not like our country doesn't have the money. A recent study done by Capgemini and Merrill Lynch Wealth Management found that a mere 1 percent of Americans are hoarding $13 trillion in "investible wealth." Yep, 1 percent of Americans are hoarding $13 TRILLION in "investible wealth," and that doesn't even factor in all the money they have hidden in offshore accounts.
As American philosopher John Dewey once said, "There is no such thing as the liberty or effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or classes."
The United States now has the highest inequality of wealth in our nation's history. Tens of millions of Americans are wondering how they are going to pay their bills, while the people who caused this crisis are rolling around in $13 trillion. The robber barons have been displaced as America's most despotic and depraved ruling class.
© 2010 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/148255/
Colorado GOP House Candidate Says He Won’t Campaign On Republicans’ New ‘Pledge To America’ #p2
Earlier today, House Republicans unveiled their "Pledge to America," a gimmicky pre-election manifesto modeled after Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America" in 1994. The AP notes that the document is filled with "familiar proposals" from the GOP such as broad generalities of reducing the size of government and cutting taxes and spending (although it "does not specify how the spending reductions would be carried out").
The "Pledge" is also "designed to give voters a broad outline of what proposals House Republicans will push if they regain the majority and to give their candidates specifics to cite on the campaign trail." Yet at least one GOP House candidate isn't too excited about it. Republican Ryan Frazier, who is running for Congress in Colorado, said this week on ABC's Top Line stated definitively that he won't campaign on the document:
JONATHAN KARL: So you won't see yourself running on whatever the House Republicans out on Thursday, that's not going to be your campaign…
FRAZIER: No. … I'm sure that, you know, as the old 80-20 rule apply. Eighty percent of the time we agree the other 20 percent perhaps we don't. But I'm going to run a campaign that is important to the people of the 7th congressional district of Colorado and it's going to be jobs it's going to be fiscal responsibility, it's going to be providing them a Congress that is accountable to the people they represent.
rest at http://thinkprogress.org/2010/09/23/frazier-campaign-pledge/
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's Office Charged Luxury Trips To County, Misused Up To $80 Million #p2
source http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/officials_sheriff_joes_office_charged_luxury_trips_misused_up_to_possible_80_million.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TPMmuckraker+%28TPMmuckraker%29
Joe Arpaio, the Arizona sheriff infamous due to his attention-grabbing immigration enforcement related stunts and the accusations his office discriminates against Latinos, allegedly misused millions in funds intended for jail operations, Maricopa County officials said Wednesday.
Excerpts of the reports, obtained by TPMMuckraker, show officials from Arpaio's office made trips to Orlando, D.C., Honduras, Tempe, Belize, Alaska and Puerto Rico on the county's dime and racked up other questionable expenses, like $741 at Sardella's Pizza and Wings. The county was also charged $350 for a hotel room upgrade for one official's spouse. One employee went on multiple extradition trips without submitting receipts for the $62,750 he or she spent -- including $1,341 on Disney World Yacht Club Resort food and entertainment.
Others expenses charged to the county, according to the report, include $1,684 for a portable generator for parade lights on an army tank; $635 at Buca di Beppo when members of the Honduran National Police were in town; and $500 on a carriage ride.
The Maricopa County Office of Management and Budget unveiled the first evidence of misuse of public funds by Arpaio's office to the county Board of Supervisors on Wednesday, which the Arizona Republic reported were the result of hundreds of hours of staff research.
In a press release, officials said that Arpaio's office was evasive and that he has chosen to fight efforts at transparency in his use of public money. But, based on the limited amount of data provided by the sheriff's office, Maricopa County officials said the office had misspent money since at least March by using jail funds on non-jail related operations.
Jail operations are funded by an exclusive tax levy -- passed in a voter referendum in 1998 -- and are supposed to be distinct from the sheriff's office's funds. County officials charge that Arpaio's office allegedly used the jail operations funds for sheriff's office expenses -- such as salaries for deputies who worked on public-corruption investigations into county supervisors and judges.
A further review found that misspending dated back to at least 2006 at a rate of $16 million per year and that retroactively, Apraio's office may have misspent up to $80 million.
County officials additionally allege that the sheriff's office deliberately misused procurement codes and made capital purchases during spending freezes; used outside bank accounts; had problems handling inmate cash; demonstrated extradition travel irregularities; improperly used county credit cards; and spent public funds unusually.
A PowerPoint presentation issued yesterday also quoted Arpaio's letter of support in favor of the 1998 jail tax that he's now accused of misusing revenues from. "I pledge to you that the new jail will be the most efficient, cost-effective use of the sales tax revenue of any major jail built in the United States," he wrote.
General funds from the county may have to be used to pay as much as $64 million back to the jail operations budget.
Additional reporting by Johanna Barr.
Republicans want to take away your health care #p2
source http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/9/23/904515/-Republicans-want-to-take-away-your-health-care?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+dailykos%2Findex+%28Daily+Kos%29
They really do. From their PLEDGE TO AMERICA:
We offer a plan to repeal and replace the government takeover of health care with common-sense solutions focused on lowering costs and protecting American jobs. We will enact real medical liability reform; allow Americans to purchase health coverage across state lines; empower small businesses with greater purchasing power; and create new incentives to save for future health needs. We will protect the doctor-patient relationship, and ensure that those with pre-existing conditions gain access to the coverage they need. We will permanently end taxpayer funding of abortion and codify the Hyde Amendment.
They will ensure that those with pre-existing conditions gain access to the coverage they need by repealing the law? Mike Huckabee was more explicit about what they meant.
Pleasing the crowd, Huckabee launched into a long attack on the Affordable Care Act, the health care reform bill passed into law earlier this year. In an odd political move, Huckabee came out swinging against the most popular aspect of the bill, outlawing insurance companies from denying health coverage to those with preexisting conditions.
How do Americans feel about that? See the WSJ:
Most popular by a mile: "Requiring that health insurance companies cover people with pre-existing medical conditions." Sixty-three percent of respondents said that proposal "absolutely must" be included as part of any final legislation, and another 26% said they "would prefer" for it to be included.
Kevin Sack, writing in the NY Times today, gives a rel life example of what would be lost.
Bill and Victoria Strong's 3-year-old daughter, who has a degenerative condition, can now be covered by health insurance that does not have a lifetime cap on benefits.
Two of Joe and Mary Thompson's three children were denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions; that changes under the new health care law.
Georges Benjamin (executive director, APHA and a physician), writing in the Baltimore Sun:
Wednesday, if you had a pre-existing health condition, you could be flatly denied insurance coverage. If you were a young person recently graduated from college — but without a job — your parents could no longer carry you on their insurance until you got on your feet. And if you had an expensive medical condition, your insurance benefits could be cut off at a certain lifetime limit, possibly forcing you into poverty to pay your medical bills.
Starting Thursday, those things are no longer true — thanks to the much-maligned health reform bill passed earlier this year.
Dr. Benjamin elaborates:
The new law will guarantee millions of Americans access to quality, affordable care regardless of health status; decrease rates of the nation's leading chronic diseases; control soaring health spending; and strengthen our battered public health infrastructure.
All health plans after Thursday must allow children to remain on their parents' plans until age 26. Also, a ban on lifetime benefit limits as well as on excluding coverage to young people due to a pre-existing condition will take effect. These provisions join other lifesaving measures already in place, including key investments in prevention and wellness.
Specifically, the Prevention and Public Health Fund invests in proven strategies that prevent people from getting sick in the first place — and that save lives and money down the road. It funds community-based programs that help people who use tobacco (our nation's leading preventable cause of death) to quit and prevent others from starting. It supports initiatives to reduce diabetes and heart disease, strengthen breast and colon cancer screenings, and provide adult vaccine programs.
So the Republicans want to repeal these measures and tell the Strongs their daughter is out of luck? Good luck with that.
Full context of Obama's "absorb a terrorist attack" - conservative criticism is thoroughly bogus #p2
source http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2010/09/full_context_of_obamas_absorb.html?wprss=plum-line
As you know, conservatives spent much of yesterday slamming President Obama over an interview in Bob Woodward's book in which Obama said that "we can absorb a terrorist attack." Right wingers from Liz Cheney on down insisted it proves that Obama isn't fully committed to defending Americans from terror.
But the full context of the quote, from page 363 of Woodward's book, shows very clearly that the criticism is thoroughly bogus. Before the quote, Woodward is discussing how counter-terror officials are preparing for a crude nuclear attack. Woodward then writes:
During my Oval Office inteview with the President, Obama volunteers some extended thoughts about terrorism.
"I said very early on, as a Senator and continue to believe, as a presidential candidate and now as president, that we can absorb a terrorist attack. We will do everything we can to prevent it. but even a 9/11, even the biggest attack ever, that ever took place on our soil, we absorbed it, and we are stronger. This is a strong, powerful country that we live in, and our people are incredibly resilient."
Then he addressed his big concern. "A potential game changer would be a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists, blowing up a major American city. Or a weapon of mass destruction in a major American city. and so when I go down on the list of things I have to worry about all the time, that is at the top, because that's one area where you can't afford any mistakes. And so right away, coming in, we said, how are we going to start ramping up and putting that at the center of a lot of our national security discussion? Making sure that that occurence, even if remote, never happens."
I have been unable to establish that Obama ever said this before, as he claims to have done. But even so, it's obvious from the full context that Obama wasn't being even remotely cavalier about the terror threat. As the additional lines I bolded above show, he was making the obvious point that history has shown us to be "strong" and "resilient" enough to survive a terror attack without American society as we know it being pushed to the point of collapse.
What's more, the fact that Obama then launched into a discussion about nuclear terror suggests the first part of his quote was a reference to a conventional terror attack -- which he contrasted with the far more catastrophic nuclear variety. He was saying that history has already shown that we can absorb a conventional attack -- but by contrast, we may not be able to "absorb" a nuclear one without it being a societal "game changer." And that's why it ranks at the very top of his list of security concerns.
If anything, this amounts to the direct opposite of being cavalier about the terror threat..@glennbeck Beck promoted the work of an anti-Semitic 9-11 truther
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Fox double standard: Obama needs to abide by military's requests, Bush does not @foxnews
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