What’s interesting in the news today?
First up, 60 Minutes/CBS had a new piece on Benghazi last night. Basically everything CBS and Fox News has reported has been confirmed.
No wonder they’ve tried to cover it up.
And now you know why releasing Gitmo terrorist detainees isn’t a good idea as well.
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Next up today, complaints about Hurricane Sandy and associated relief efforts. Gov. Christie is blaming the feds. And Congress.
From Verizon/AP “Gov. Chris Christie says he understands victims’ frustrations a year after Superstorm Sandy but maintains that his administration isn’t to blame for delays in aid reaching victims.
In an interview with The Associated Press as the anniversary of the Oct. 29 megastorm approached, Christie blamed Congress, which took three months to approve a $50.7 billion relief package for the region, and a thicket of red tape put in place to prevent the type of fraud that occurred after Hurricane Katrina.”
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A name you’ll recognized has come up in the relief discussion too. One that’s already associated with a large scale govt failure.
From DailyCaller “CGI Federal Inc., the mastermind behind healthcare.gov, is assisting the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in the distribution of $1.7 billion in relief for Hurricane Sandy.
In a memo obtained by FreedomWorks titled, “Minutes of the 295th meeting of the members of the Housing Trust Fund Corporation held on May 9, 2013, at 8:30 a.m.,” CGI Federal is tasked with implementing the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. Additionally, they are asked to aid in the implementation of the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Program, an assistance program that had recently obtained $1.7 billion.”
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And that’s not all, they’re associated with other govt offices, and even more govt money. And more failure. The NSA and PRISM ring a bell? Foreign govts too.
From WeaselZippers “A great deal of media focus has been devoted to the epic failure of Healthcare.gov, the Obamacare website. Less has been said about the company who was engaged by HHS with responsibility for the design of the website and the roll out.
The company was CGI, a Canadian company. CGI has a long and checked past of failures and overruns on projects from Canada to Hawaii.”
“CGI, the Canadian company whose U.S. subsidiary built the failed Obamacare website, was once contracted to build a federal gun registry for the Canadian government, Breitbart News has learned.”
“CGI has a subsidiary called Silver Oak Solutions (SOS) which operates the PRISM platform. If that rings a bell, it’s because the NSA uses the PRISM platform to help spy on people.”
Getting worried yet?
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And we now also know that one of their top executives was a classmate of Michelle Obama, and that the company president is an Obama supporter. No bid contracts and cronyism don’t mix well for taxpayers.
From TheDailyCaller “First Lady Michelle Obama’s Princeton classmate is a top executive at the company that earned the contract to build the failed Obamacare website.
Toni Townes-Whitley, Princeton class of ’85, is senior vice president at CGI Federal, which earned the no-bid contract to build the $678 million Obamacare enrollment website at Healthcare.gov. CGI Federal is the U.S. arm of a Canadian company.”
“Toni Townes ’85 is a onetime policy analyst with the General Accounting Office and previously served in the Peace Corps in Gabon, West Africa. Her decision to return to work, as an African-American woman, after six years of raising kids was applauded by a Princeton alumni publication in 1998
George Schindler, the president for U.S. and Canada of the Canadian-based CGI Group, CGI Federal’s parent company, became an Obama 2012 campaign donor after his company gained the Obamacare website contract.”
Nice huh? 🙄
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Meanwhile the middle class continues to experience sticker shock from ObamaCare.
From TheLATimes “Thousands of Californians are discovering what Obamacare will cost them — and many don’t like what they see.
These middle-class consumers are staring at hefty increases on their insurance bills as the overhaul remakes the healthcare market. Their rates are rising in large part to help offset the higher costs of covering sicker, poorer people who have been shut out of the system for years.
Although recent criticism of the healthcare law has focused on website glitches and early enrollment snags, experts say sharp price increases for individual policies have the greatest potential to erode public support for President Obama‘s signature legislation.”
“”This is when the actual sticker shock comes into play for people,” said Gerald Kominski, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “There are winners and losers under the Affordable Care Act.”
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My wife has been telling me this for years. It’s why we don’t go to the doctors for colds, respiratory infections, and minor illnesses. Antibiotic use is out of hand, and it not working like it used too 😯
From TheDailyMail “‘For a long time, there have been newspaper stories and covers of magazines that talked about “The end of antibiotics, question mark?”‘ said Dr Arjun Srinivasan. ‘Well, now I would say you can change the title to “The end of antibiotics, period.”’
The associate director of the CDC sat down with Frontline over the summer for a lengthy interview about the growing problem of antibacterial resistance.
Srinivasan, who is also featured in a Frontline report called ‘Hunting the Nightmare Bacteria,’ which aired Tuesday, said that both humans and livestock have been overmedicated to such a degree that bacteria are now resistant to antibiotics.
‘We’re in the post-antibiotic era,’ he said. ‘There are patients for whom we have no therapy, and we are literally in a position of having a patient in a bed who has an infection, something that five years ago even we could have treated, but now we can’t.’”
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Wandering Views 
One of the problems is, some people like to take medicine.
Some people like to go to the doctor. I think it’s mostly older women.
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Hey, I resent that. I rarely go to the doctor. Usually I wait a month. 🙂 However I knew that I needed medicine for scabies after a couple of months of itching. Mostly no medicine.
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I hate to go to the doctor. I need a regular check up right now and I’m stalling.
The Kid’s doctor has always been reluctant to prescribe antibiotic and the child is very healthy.
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I hate to go to the doctor, as well. I have to really need to go, because of illness or to get my meds renewed. Anyone with a chronic illness has little choice, but to go.
My own father is fighting two terrible infections. He has suffered with asthma all his life and receive experimental drugs for it as a boy. He is now in his 80’s. He gets pneumonia regularly and must take anti-biotic to save his life. He is currently on a pump to try to get the most efficient help.
My parents never took us to doctors, except for stitches or broken bones. Even immunizations were done in school, so they had no need. Check ups were unheard of.
My children were all very healthy, so the need for medicine was few and far between.
I am sure grateful for when we do need anti-biotic. Those before they were discovered and developed had little chance for survival or saving limbs.
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I hate to go to the doctor, too. So did my mom. But I had an uncle who went all the time.
Sheesh, Chas. 😉 Now I do have a girlfriend who goes to the doctor constantly and she is scarily obsessive about going in for those annual checkup tests without delay. She claims she had to retire at 59 just to make time for all her doctor appointments and re-checks.
But I still think it’s a minority of the population — of either sex — who do that.
Good to see Benghazi finally getting some attention.
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Chas, I see all our ladies here are younger women.
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My mother was an older woman who was on a lot of medications & had to go to the doctor a lot. Unfortunately, she had to be on those meds & had to see those docs (along with several hospitalizations for pneumonia, gallbladder trouble, & carotid artery surgeries.) She would have loved to stop taking the pills, but her various docs insisted she needed them COPD & other health issues).
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Oops. I missed the beginning parenthesis. It should be “…she needed them (COPD…”
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Anonymous has a good point. I used to be Dept. Director of an Adult III SS dept. Mostly ladies, as is the case for that age group. In their chatter before the session started, they would tell about their trips to the doctor. I began to think that many of them enjoyed going to the doctor. It was an item in their schedule.
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Chas, I confess I was Anonymous. There are some men that like going to the doctor. Many, if not most, women, don’t like going to the doctor. However, you are correct that more women than men like going to the doctor just as more men than women like going hunting or to the golf course.
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Karen raised an interesting point. I have some women relatives that go to the doctor often and some that like going to the doctor. I have no male relatives that like going to the doctor. Women tend to believe docs more than men and consent to their treatment more than men. Even in the Bible, it was a woman who had spent all her money on docs before she was healed by Jesus. Apparently, the Romans had not adopted HRW’s single payer plan.
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I think women may be more open to going to docs than men because they have to deal with docs during pregnancy and childbirth. I know many men who go decades between doctor visits.
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I interviewed a 90-year-old GP today who said one of his patients was a 70-year-old man who had NEVER been to a doctor when he came to see him.
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