The Republican Establishment"s War on the Tea Party Is Working

Representative Steve Stockman’s antiestablishment quest to topple Senator John Cornyn of Texas is winding toward an abysmal finish: Polls suggest that he’ll not only fall short of knocking out the incumbent during next week’s primary, he’ll be lucky to outperform a handful of Tea Party unknowns. Stockman was never embraced by outside conservative groups, but many grassroots activists were expecting a more vigorous challenge to an establishment denizen than what the quirky congressman provided.

Stockman’s tale isn’t a unique one. The last month has provided numerous examples of Tea Party favorites proving they’re not ready for political prime time. Indeed, of the six Republican senators facing primary opposition this year, only one—Thad Cochran of Mississippi—looks like he’s facing a credible threat.

Take Milton Wolf in Kansas. The radiologist’s campaign was handed a race-altering gift when The New York Times reported that his opponent, Senator Pat Roberts, barely kept his residency in Kansas. But now his effort is faltering under the weight of revelations that he published and joked about graphic images of his patients. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has actively promoted Wolf’s travails to reporters as eagerly as the group has dished oppo against vulnerable Democrats.

Or take Matt Bevin in Kentucky, whose personal fortune was supposed to help fuel a well-funded effort to take down Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Instead, he’s deflecting accusations from his nominal allies that he backed the government’s multibillion-dollar Wall Street bailout during the height of the financial crisis. McConnell’s aggressive campaign and outside allies are playing a pivotal role in preventing Bevin’s campaign from getting any traction.

The trifecta of disappointing returns for conservatives isn’t coincidental. In previous years, insurgent conservative candidates like Christine O’Donnell weren’t taken seriously in the GOP primary, with the problematic parts of their record hidden away until a general election.

But with incumbents now keenly aware of the danger they face in a primary, those same Tea Party-aligned hopefuls are finding themselves under more scrutiny than ever. And oftentimes they’re not holding up well.

“Inevitably, in a statewide race, any issues in any candidate’s background would come to the forefront,” said Brian Walsh, a former NRSC communications director. “And we’re seeing incumbents who aren’t taking anything for granted.”

So far, Stockman’s campaign is the best example of a Tea Party challenger gone wild. His effort has been bizarre, with him disappearing from the campaign trail for weeks without notifying the media, only to reveal later that he had been in Russia. He’s made barely any public appearances in Texas, taking refuge in his increasingly erratic Twitter account instead.

Those strange jaunts alone would come close to disqualifying him from office. But they’ve been accentuated by an aggressive effort from Cornyn to keep the pressure on Stockman and by the senator’s own attempts to remain close to the GOP base.

Cornyn’s press operations have highlighted every misstep in the congressman’s run, while Cornyn himself has spent the better part of a year attending local Republican functions to build grassroots support for his candidacy. And he has built a substantial war chest, raising nearly $ 7.5 million in 2013 alone.

“He was always going to treat this as the toughest race he’s run,” said Cornyn campaign spokesman Drew Brandewie. “And that was always the attitude he’s had.”

Inevitably, establishment Republicans say the failure of candidates like Stockman or Bevin are the fault of outside conservative groups, in particular the Senate Conservatives Fund. The group once aligned with former Senator Jim DeMint—which has endorsed Bevin and Wolf but not Stockman—has been at war with the NRSC for much of this cycle over its support of candidates targeting GOP incumbents.

“The Senate Conservatives Fund has said that the only criteria to possibly get their support is that you’re not the incumbent,” Walsh said. “Other than that, they say anyone is free to apply.”

Officials at SCF fire back that the NRSC, in pushing some of the attacks against Wolf and others, is signaling they won’t back those candidates should they capture the nomination anyway.

“That’s a very big shift and it proves that they’re not interested in winning a majority,” said Matt Hoskins, the SCF’s executive director. “Their goal [is] to protect incumbents and elect more moderate Republicans who won’t rock the boat. They’re not interested in building a new Senate, they want to protect the old one.”

Politics : The Atlantic

The Republican Establishment"s War on the Tea Party Is Working

"Why I Admire David Duke" -- Working Class American

 

December 12, 2013

The Illuminati media demonize anyone who defends the white race.

John Stanley is a retired American worker. 
An army veteran, he has been a cabbie,
 an asbestos remover and a salesman.
This is John Stanley’s view of David Duke.

by John Stanley
(henrymakow.com)

I can’t think of any American Political Dissenter that has received more criticism and organized opposition from the mainstream media than David Duke.

This is no accident because it has all been propagated by design.

The defeat of white constitutional America was contingent upon the defeat of its defenders and leaders. David Duke was chosen by the MSM to be that target and “punching bag”.

As a white Southerner, David Duke represented mainstream Southern traditional values that had to be removed from the consciousness of America.
If you agreed with his political platform of “freedom of association” and not “forced immigration” you were immediately identified as a racist or a white nationalist.

Also, if you found “racial quotas” in the workplace and universities to be unfair,  after being ” leapfrogged” by someone with less qualifications or scores, you were dubbed as a “racist”.

David Duke had to be guilty of a crime in order to justifiably demonize him to the public. That crime was being once a member of the KKK.

It was not unusual or really out of the norm for a White Southerner to be a silent card carrier or a KKK sympathizer back in 1965. Senator Robert Byrd was once one himself.

However, David Duke, unlike Senator Byrd, association with the KKK was not “sugarcoated”. He was not cooperating.

The KKK was one of the few organizations left in America at that time that was not controlled by the New World Order.

After the Civil War, Northern carpetbaggers declared the White Southerner fair game for it’s agenda of poverty and cultural degeneration. The KKK was then formed to counter this agenda.

Unlike the Civil Rights Movement, the KKK was neither founded or funded by World Order Marxism.

In his book, “My Awakening”, David Duke recalls how his campaign for Governor of Louisiana was successfully sabotaged by forces outside of Louisiana.

His campaign platform was in direct opposition to the World Order and the World Economy. Illegal immigration, corporate outsourcing of jobs, and tax reform were his targets.

The campaign started out very well and had the support of the majority of Louisiana voters. He even had the support of Civil Right’s Icon James Meredith who was harshly criticized for doing so.

David Duke was an “American Firster” who’s campaign was gaining steam. He had to be stopped.

The New World Order forces them went to work. Media vilification would not be enough and time was running out. It had to be done with threats  to state revenue.

The American Medical Association announced that it would no longer be holding any future conventions in New Orleans if David Duke were elected Governor.

Notices were put into some factory workers envelopes stating that the election of Duke could shut their plant down.

Mammon defeated idealism in the campaign of David Duke. His campaign was successfully sabotaged. Like most Americans, the people of Louisiana were all for idealism as long as the flow of money was not interrupted. The “carrot and the stick” strategy had worked again.
This is the very reason why America is in the mess that it is in now. The “spirit of sacrifice” has been replaced by a “comfort zone” that is slowly slipping away.

White Identity today has been reduced to White Apology. If a man can take responsibility for his own mistakes, that would be rare enough. To take the responsibility for previous generations is asking too much.

The majority of white Americans today are descendants of Europeans who came to America in the early 1900′s. They never killed any Indians or owned any Black slaves.

The negative portrayal of “White America” that has been propagated by Hollywood and the MSM was intended to destroy their pride and identity. And, the last thing in the world the Illuminati want is someone like David Duke trying to give them their identity back, right or wrong.

David Duke has also lived in Europe and has spoken to millions advocating their sovereignty and freedom, and the renewal of their cultural heritage. For his efforts, he has been jailed and expelled from some of these countries.

Unfortunately, David Duke and his political agenda is “dying on the vine” today. World Order Marxism where all are “equal in their poverty and enslavement” has defeated us.

I don’t agree with everything David Duke said or did nor am I saying that he is a saint. But, I do admire his courage and strength. His patriotism that has not been moved to this day.

How many of us could have lead his life? Could you handle being treated like the “plague” by the general population for 50 years? And, could you also handle being rejected by the very people you are trying to defend?

Right or wrong David Duke has been called many things. But, a coward and a traitor is not one of them.

—

henrymakow.com

"Why I Admire David Duke" -- Working Class American

Working for Mandela

December 6, 2013, 6:43 PM EST Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is scheduled to fundraise for Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS) next Wednesday. McConnell will reportedly… Read More → December 6, 2013, 5:59 PM EST Radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday marked the passing of South African leader Nelson Mandela by criticizing American civil rights… Read More → December 6, 2013, 5:43 PM EST A web poll on the conservative site WND asked readers on Friday to “assess the life and work of Nelson Mandela” and included… Read More → December 6, 2013, 5:13 PM EST Dr. Maya Angelou penned a poem honoring the life of Nelson Mandela on behalf of the American people, and she… Read More → December 6, 2013, 5:02 PM EST Wahington D.C. Mayor Vince Gray said Friday that residents of his city could empathize with the late South African leader… Read More → December 6, 2013, 5:01 PM EST President Barack Obama and the first family will attend the National Christmas Tree Lighting on the Ellipse of the White… Read More → December 6, 2013, 4:43 PM EST Former President George W. Bush and former First Lady Laura Bush will join the Obamas on their flight to South… Read More → December 6, 2013, 4:31 PM EST Rick Clark, the sheriff of Pickens County, S.C., vowed on Friday to defy President Obama’s order that U.S. flags be… Read More →

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Working for Mandela

Working or Not, HealthCare.gov Has Ruined Everything

(Newser) – HealthCare.gov is working. Sort of. And certainly, some Democrats will take heart in that. But so what? Even if the modest fixes have saved the site and the law—as Dana Milbank argued today in the Washington Post—the problems have already done serious, lasting damage to the progressive cause, writes Matthew Yglesias at Slate. To explain why, he recounts his recent “extremely frustrating” attempt to obtain, not insurance, but a large garbage bin from DC’s Department of Public Works. The system was needlessly inconvenient and confusing, and phone support didn’t help; staffers were clearly weary from “a daily routine of dealing with irate customers.”

“Not every interaction with a government agency is this aggravating,” Yglesias allows, “but many of them are.” These bureaucracies basically work—”the trash (mostly) gets picked up”—but no one loves them. ObamaCare, too, may basically work. But progressives had hoped to restore faith in government, to prove it deserved a bigger role in society. Instead, we have “a system that function about as well as the DC garbage bin operation, Amtrak security theater, or the DMV.” Click for the full post.

Newser

Working or Not, HealthCare.gov Has Ruined Everything

Obama declares health care law is working

President Barack Obama gestures while speaking at a world AIDS Day event, Monday, Dec. 2, 2013, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

President Barack Obama gestures while speaking at a world AIDS Day event, Monday, Dec. 2, 2013, in the South Court Auditorium on the White House complex in Washington. (AP Photo/ Evan Vucci)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama says his signature health care law “is working and will work into the future.”

Obama says the benefits of the law have “gotten lost” in recent months as attention focused on the widespread problems that crippled the website where people can sign up for health insurance.

The president says the website is now working well “for the vast majority of users.” But he says more problems may pop up and the administration will fix them when they do.

Obama was joined at his health care event on Tuesday by people the White House says have benefited from the law. It’s the first in a series of events to try to refocus on positive aspects of the law after the troubled rollout of the insurance exchanges.

Associated Press

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Top Headlines

Obama declares health care law is working

Chill Out, Activists: Working Black Friday Is Fun

(Newser) – People like to hate on Black Friday and its gradual encroachment onto Thanksgiving, often “offering righteous indignation on behalf of retail workers who can’t spend the holiday with their families,” writes Angela Harmon on Salon. But as a former retail employee who volunteered to work the midnight shift at New Jersey’s largest mall, Harmon has to wonder how many people who complain about Black Friday and its impact on workers have ever actually worked in retail. There’s a lot about retail “that just plain sucks,” Harmon writes, but working on Black Friday is not one of those things.

First of all, many employers offer double-time pay for Thanksgiving hours or even early hours on Black Friday itself, and many employees want that extra pay. Second of all, the craziness involved makes the shift just plain fun. “Don’t forget that people have long worked on Thanksgiving, at supermarkets and convenience stores and 24-hour diners. I guess I always saw holiday work shifts as a necessary reality of the retail job I had chosen,” Harmon writes. If you really want to be an activist for retail workers, “champion for fair, appropriate wages for those working on Thanksgiving who are not making more than their regular hourly rate.” Click for Harmon’s full column.

Newser

Chill Out, Activists: Working Black Friday Is Fun

Apple working on curved iPhone screens, enhanced sensors: report

Apple working on curved iPhone screens, enhanced sensors: report
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A collection of Apple smart covers are seen at the Apple store after the new iPad Air went on sale in San Francisco, California November 1, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Stephen Lam

Reuters: Business News

Read more about Apple working on curved iPhone screens, enhanced sensors: report and other interesting subjects concerning Business at TheDailyNewsReport.com

Weekly Address: Working to Implement the Affordable Care Act

August 17, 2013 | 3:56 | Public Domain

President Obama says we are on the way to fully implementing the Affordable Care Act and helping millions of Americans.

Download mp4 (143MB) | mp3 (9MB)

President Obama’s Weekly Address

Weekly Address: Working to Implement the Affordable Care Act

Grotesque Plan for Detroit: Fleece Working People to Save the Banks

Municipal workers could be robbed of pension funds to pay big banks for payments due on interest rate swaps.

The Detroit bankruptcy is looking suspiciously like the bail-in template originated by the G20’s Financial Stability Board in 2011, which exploded on the scene in Cyprus in 2013 and is now becoming the model globally. In Cyprus, the depositors were “bailed in” (stripped of a major portion of their deposits) to re-capitalize the banks. In Detroit, it is the municipal workers who are being bailed in, stripped of a major portion of their pensions to save the banks.

Bank of America Corp. and UBS AG have been given priority over other bankruptcy claimants, meaning chiefly the pensioners, for payments due on interest rate swaps they entered into with the city. Interest rate swaps – the exchange of interest rate payments between counterparties – are sold by Wall Street banks as a form of insurance, something municipal governments “should” do to protect their loans from an unanticipated increase in rates. Unlike ordinary insurance, however, swaps are actually just bets; and if the municipality loses the bet, it can owe the house, and owe big. The swap casino is almost entirely unregulated, and it is a rigged game that the house virtually always wins. Interest rate swaps are based on the LIBOR rate, which has now been proven to be manipulated by the rate-setting banks; and they were a major contributor to Detroit’s bankruptcy.

Derivative claims are considered “secured” because the players must post collateral to play. They get not just priority but “super-priority” in bankruptcy, meaning they go first before all others, a deal pushed through by Wall Street in the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 2005. Meanwhile, the municipal workers, whose pensions are theoretically protected under the Michigan Constitution, are classified as “unsecured” claimants who will get the scraps after the secured creditors put in their claims. The banking casino, it seems, trumps even the state constitution. The banks win and the workers lose once again.

Systemically Dangerous Institutions Are Moved to the Head of the Line

The argument for the super-priority of derivative claims is that nonpayment on these bets represents a “systemic risk” to the financial scheme. Derivative bets are cross-collateralized and are so inextricably entwined in a $ 600-plus trillion house of cards that the whole financial scheme could go down if the betting scheme were to collapse. Instead of banning or regulating this very risky casino, Congress has been persuaded by the masterminds of Wall Street that it needs to be preserved at all costs.

The same tortured logic has been used to justify the fact that the federal government deigned to bail out Wall Street but not Detroit. Supposedly, the mega-banks pose a systemic risk and Detroit doesn’t. On July 29th, former Obama administration economist Jared Bernstein pursued this line of reasoning on his blog, writing:

[T]he correct motivation for federal bailouts — meaning some combination of managing a bankruptcy, paying off creditors (though often with a haircut), or providing liquidity in cases where that’s the issue as opposed to insolvency – is systemic risk. The failure of large, major banks, two out of the big three auto companies, the secondary market for housing – all of these pose unacceptably large risks to global financial markets, and thus the global economy, to a major industry, including its upstream and downstream suppliers, and to the national housing sector.

Because a) there’s not much of a case that Detroit is systemically connected in those ways, and b) Chapter 9 of the bankruptcy code appears to provide an adequate way for it to deal with its insolvency, I don’t think anything like a large scale bailout is forthcoming.

Holding Main Street Hostage

Detroit’s bankruptcy poses no systemic risk to Wall Street and global financial markets. Fine. But it does pose a systemic risk to Main Street, local governments, and the contractual rights of pensioners. Credit rating agency Moody’s stated in a recent report that if Detroit manages to cut its pension obligations, other struggling cities could follow suit. The Detroit bankruptcy is establishing a template for wiping out government pensions everywhere. Chicago or New York could be next.

There is also the systemic risk posed to the municipal bond system. Bryce Hoffman, writing in The Detroit News on July 30th, warned:

Detroit’s bankruptcy threatens to change the rules of the municipal bond game and already is making it more expensive for the state’s other struggling towns and school districts to borrow money and fund big infrastructure projects.

In fact, one bond analyst told The Detroit News that he has spoken to major institutional investors who have already decided to stop, for now, buying any Michigan bonds.

The real concern of bond investors, says Hoffman, is not the default of Detroit but the precedent the city is setting. General obligation municipal bonds have always been viewed as a virtually risk-free investment. They are unsecured, but bondholders have considered themselves protected because the bonds are backed by the “unlimited taxing authority” of the government that issued them. Detroit, however, has shown that the city’s taxing authority is far from unlimited.  It already has the highest property taxes of any major city in the country, and it is bumping up against a ceiling imposed by the state constitution. If Detroit is able to cut its bond debt in half or more by defaulting, other distressed cities are liable to look very closely at following suit. Hoffman writes:

The bond market is warning that this will make Michigan a pariah state and raise borrowing costs — not just for Detroit and other troubled municipalities, but also for paragons of fiscal virtue such as Oakland and Livingston counties.

However, writes Hoffman:

Gov. Rick Snyder dismisses that threat and says the bond market is just trying to turn Detroit away from a radical solution that could become a model for other struggling cities across America.

A Safer, Saner, More Equitable Model

Interestingly, Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, Snyder’s Democratic opponent in the last gubernatorial race, proposed a solution that could have avoided either robbing the pensioners or scaring off the bondholders: a state-owned bank. If the state or the city had its own bank, it would not need to borrow from Wall Street, worry about interest rate swaps, or be beholden to the bond vigilantes. It could borrow from its own bank, which would leverage the local government’s capital into credit, back that credit with the deposits created by the government’s own revenues, and return the interest to the government as a dividend, following the ground-breaking model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.

There are other steps that need to be taken, and soon, to prevent a cascade of municipal bankruptcies.  The super-priority of derivatives in bankruptcy needs to be repealed, and the protections of Glass Steagall need to be restored. While we are waiting on a very dilatory Congress, however, state and local governments might consider protecting themselves and their revenues by setting up their own banks.

 

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Grotesque Plan for Detroit: Fleece Working People to Save the Banks

America: Where Hard Working, Productive Members Of Society Pay For The Health Care Of Everyone Else

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse Blog
August 4, 2013

Everybody in America wants health care – but most Americans seem to want someone else to pay for it. In the United States today, the way that our system works is that the hard working, productive members of society pay for the health care of everyone else. At least under socialism everyone gets the same benefits. Our system of health care is a very twisted version of socialism where millions upon millions of very hard working people are forced to pay for the health care of others, but often can’t afford to purchase decent health insurance for themselves. Personally, I don’t have a big employer paying for my health care so I have to buy it myself, and I just got a letter from my health insurance company telling me that I have another massive rate increase coming up. Have you gotten a similar letter? Health insurance premiums are going up all over America, and this is just the beginning. In fact, the CEO of Aetna says that health insurance rates for many Americans will double when the major provisions of Obamacare kick in next year.

It would be bad enough if hard working Americans just had to pay for their own health insurance. But no, they are also expected to pay for the health care of members of Congress, employees of the IRS and other federal agencies, state and local government employees, their adult kids (because they can’t afford health insurance), the elderly, the poor, and now under Obamacare they will also be expected to subsidize the health plans of tens of millions of other Americans that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

When you add it all up, the hard working, productive members of society are at least partially subsidizing the health care of well over half of all Americans while having to pay for their own health care at the same time.

Needless to say, it isn’t too hard to see who is getting the raw end of the deal.

Members of Congress certainly don’t want to pay for their own health care. There was panic in the halls of Congress recently when they started realizing that due to certain provisions in Obamacare they may soon be forced to pay for their own health insurance plans. There was widespread moaning and complaining about how they would be facing “thousands of dollars in additional premium payments” every year.

Things got so bad that Barack Obama got personally involved in the effort to find a solution. Thankfully, members of Congress can relaxbecause a ruling is being issued that will allow the federal government to continue to subsidize 75 percent of the cost of their health plans…

Lawmakers and staff can breathe easy — their health care tab is not going to soar next year.

The Office of Personnel Management, under heavy pressure from Capitol Hill, will issue a ruling that says the government can continue to make a contribution to the health care premiums of members of Congress and their aides, according to several Hill sources.

A White House official confirmed the deal and said the proposed regulations will be issued next week.

And the IRS, which has been put in charge of imposing the rules of Obamacare on all the rest of us, is freaking out about the fact that some members of Congress would like to force them to personally participate in Obamacare…

The union that represents IRS employees is urging its members to write to their congressmen to help get the union out of Obamacare.

The following are some excerpts from a letter that the union that represents IRS employees sent to members of Congress…

“H.R. 1780 would put federal employees in a special class where they would be prohibited from receiving health insurance through their employer. It would treat federal employees differently from state and local government employees and most employees of large private sector companies who receive health insurance benefits through their employer. The primary purpose of the Affordable Care Act was to provide a marketplace for the sale and purchase of health insurance for those who do not have such coverage – not to take coverage away from employees who already receive it through their employers,” the letter reads.

“I work hard and am proud of the services that I provide to your constituents every day. One of the main benefits I receive as a federal employee is the ability to purchase health insurance coverage through the FEHBP with an employer contribution towards those benefits. Please let me know your views on this legislation. I look forward to hearing back from you,” the letter concludes.

This is just shameful. If the IRS is going to impose Obamacare on the rest of America, then it should be good enough for them too.

Just check out acting IRS chief Danny Werfel begging for employees of his agency not to have to go on Obamacare…

But we have always had to at least partially subsidize the health plans of federal, state and local government workers.

The big change under Obamacare is that we will soon be subsidizing the health plans of tens of millions of our fellow Americans.

CNN says that 26 million Americans will be eligible for health insurance subsidies, but others believe that the true number is far, far higher than that.

For example, according to CNBC, a family of three in New York that earns $ 78,120 a year would be eligible for a subsidy of more than five thousand dollars…

In New York, a family of three whose annual income totals $ 78,120, would pay $ 12,784 for the second-lower-priced silver plan on that state’s insurance exchange. After getting a $ 5,363 tax credit, the family’s net cost for the insurance would be $ 7,421.

So who pays for that?

You and I do through our tax dollars.

And if you can believe it, Obamacare actually provides an incentive to not work too hard, because if you make too much money you could lose your health insurance subsidy…

Working more could ultimately mean thousands of dollars less for you under a quirk in the new health-care law going into effect this fall. This could prompt some people to cut back on their hours to avoid losing money.

“Working more can actually leave you worse off,” the price-comparison site ValuePenguin.com notes in anew analysis.

“It’s sort of an absurd scenario,” said Jonathan Wu, ValuePenguin.com’s co-founder. “It’s something for people to be aware of.”

In that scenario, an individual or family whose annual income surpasses maximums set by the federal government—if only by $ 1—will totally lose subsidies available to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act.

What a perverse system.

And of course Obamacare will allow young adults to stay on the health insurance policies of their parents until they reach 26 years of age. As I mentioned the other day, 36 percent of all young adults in the 18 to 31 age bracket are currently living with their folks. In most of those cases, the parents have to end up footing the bill for health care because the kids simply cannot afford it.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t


• 
  

Medicaid continues to expand as well. Certainly helping the poor is a very good thing, but unfortunately the number of poor just continues to explode.

Back in 1965, only one out of every 50 Americans was on Medicaid. Today, one out of every 6 Americans is on Medicaid, and things are about to get a whole lot worse.

Right now, there are more than 56 million Americans on Medicaid, and it is being projected that Obamacare will add 16 million more Americansto the Medicaid rolls.

It is going to take a whole lot of money to support 72 million Medicaid patients.

And then of course there is Medicare.

When Medicare was first established, we were told that it would cost about $ 12 billion a year by the time 1990 rolled around.

Instead, it actually cost the federal government $ 110 billion in 1990, and it will cost the federal government close to $ 600 billion this year.

But if you think this is bad, just wait until all of the Baby Boomers retire. It is being projected that the number of Americans on Medicare will grow from a little bit more than 50 million today to 73.2 million in 2025. By then, we would be spending well over a trillion dollars a year on Medicare.

As you can see, under Obamacare the vast majority of all Americans will have their health care at least partially subsidized.

And it expected that our tax dollars will somehow be enough to pay for all of this.

The truth is that we have a deeply broken system. Costs are spiraling out of control and nobody is quite sure how to fix things. The following statistics come from one of my previous articles entitled “50 Signs That The U.S. Health Care System Is A Gigantic Money Making Scam“…

-This year the American people will spend approximately 2.8 trillion dollars on health care, and it is being projected that Americans will spend 4.5 trillion dollars on health care in 2019.

-The United States spends more on health care than Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia combined.

-If the U.S. health care system was a country, it would be the 6th largest economy on the entire planet.

-Back in 1960, an average of $ 147 was spent per person on health care in the United States. By 2009, that number had skyrocketed to $ 8,086.

The sad thing is that many hard working Americans in the private sector are being forced to subsidize the health care of others, but they can’t even afford decent health care for themselves.

For example, I know of one hard working couple that has a health plan that has a $ 1,000 deductible. Even with that deductible, their health insurance premiums are absolutely ridiculous. Their health care strategy is simply to avoid going to the hospital or visiting a doctor as much as possible.

And of course health insurance companies make money by providing as little health care as possible. Many Americans have discovered that when you need them the most, some health insurance companies will try to get out of covering you any way that they possibly can.

The reality is that just because you have health insurance that does not mean that you are “covered”.

According to a study that was published in The American Journal of Medicine, medical bills are a major factor in more than 60 percent of all personal bankruptcies in the United States. Of those bankruptcies that were caused by medical bills, approximately 75 percent of them involved people that actually did have health insurance.

So what is the bottom line?

The bottom line is the system stinks, and Obamacare is going to make things a whole lot worse.

This article was posted: Sunday, August 4, 2013 at 4:31 am

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America: Where Hard Working, Productive Members Of Society Pay For The Health Care Of Everyone Else

O"Reilly Interviews Attkisson: Working On Stories That "Might Hurt The Obama Administration"

CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson joined FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly on Tuesday to give us some insights into the hacking of her home and work computers.

RealClearPolitics Video Log

O"Reilly Interviews Attkisson: Working On Stories That "Might Hurt The Obama Administration"

Calif Transit Official Made $330K Without Working

Bay Area Rapid Transit’s highest-paid employee last year earned more than $ 330,000 — even though she didn’t work a single day for the San Francisco-area’s public agency, according to a newspaper report.

Former BART general manager Dorothy Dugger resigned under pressure in May 2011, but stayed on the payroll for another 19 months, the Bay Area News Group reported Sunday.

Dugger, 57, cashed in nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits. During that period, she earned nearly two extra months of vacation, received management bonuses and medical insurance, and boosted her pension benefits by more than $ 1,000 a month for life. When she left BART’s payroll in December, she began to draw an annual pension of $ 181,000, according to the newspaper.

Dugger said she was entitled to the money because she earned more than 3,100 hours of unused vacation time during two decades with the light-rail agency.

“It was time I earned my whole career at BART,” she said. “It’s a cost of having the option” to save the vacation until the end of a career, she said.

The value of her unused vacation days soared after she took the top job in 2007 and received a raise of nearly $ 100,000 a year because the unused time-off was paid at her final, highest pay rate — not her rate when the time was accrued, records show.

“She was still on the payroll? I did not know this. It’s startling,” said James Fang, a BART board member who tried to oust Dugger in 2011. “We have to look at this.”

Some BART riders are also upset.

“I hope it becomes a big stink,” said BART patron Mitch Roland, of Alameda. “This is an agency funded by taxpayers. … They should have stricter controls.”

The months of extra pay were on top of the $ 920,000 that BART paid Dugger to leave in May 2011 after the agency’s board botched an effort to fire her by violating public meetings laws. She left amid mounting complaints about BART’s service and cleanliness as well as her leadership.

Dugger told the newspaper she was proud of her time with BART. Asked if her lucrative use of vacation time exposed a fiscal flaw in the agency, she said, “I think BART’s track record on fiscal management is quite solid.”

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Calif Transit Official Made $330K Without Working