by

News/Politics 7-18-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Interesting. It’s a small sample, but it appears to blow the President and Democrats line about fleeing violence out of the water. They blame his policies and lack of border enforcement.

From FoxNews  “A new intelligence assessment concludes that misperceptions about U.S. immigration policy – and not Central American violence – are fueling the surge of thousands of children illegally crossing the Mexican border.

The 10-page July 7 report was issued by the El Paso Intelligence Center (EPIC), which according to the Justice Department website is led by the DEA and incorporates Homeland Security. Its focus is on the collection and distribution of tactical intelligence, information which can immediately be acted on by law enforcement.

“Of the 230 migrants interviewed, 219 cited the primary reason for migrating to the United States was the perception of U.S. immigration laws granting free passes or permisos to UAC (unaccompanied children) and adult females OTMs (other than Mexicans) traveling with minors,” the report said.”

“The intelligence assessment, which is unclassified but not meant to go beyond law enforcement, also cited data from the United Nations office on Drugs and Crime Statistics saying despite an explosion in the number of illegal minors, crime data for Central America actually showed a dip in violence.”

______________________________________________

2. Anti-gun folks won’t like this. More guns = less crime.

From HotAir  “Via Bob Owens at Bearing Arms, a leftover from yesterday that shouldn’t be missed. Detroit PD chief James Craig has spent the past six months encouraging locals to arm themselves, an unusual — and politically perilous — position for a big city police officer to take. No regrets.

Detroit has experienced 37 percent fewer robberies in 2014 than during the same period last year, 22 percent fewer break-ins of businesses and homes, and 30 percent fewer carjackings. Craig attributed the drop to better police work and criminals being reluctant to prey on citizens who may be carrying guns.

“Criminals are getting the message that good Detroiters are armed and will use that weapon,” said Craig, who has repeatedly said he believes armed citizens deter crime. “I don’t want to take away from the good work our investigators are doing, but I think part of the drop in crime, and robberies in particular, is because criminals are thinking twice that citizens could be armed.

“I can’t say what specific percentage is caused by this, but there’s no question in my mind it has had an effect,” Craig said.”

______________________________________________

3. The White House is bribing insurance companies to try and delay the damage before mid-terms.

From Forbes  “Want to know what’s happening with Obamacare? Good luck finding out. The White House recently adopted a new approach for updating Americans on the country’s most consequential law. I call it the “needle in a haystack” method: Bury the announcement in hundreds of pages of regulations and hope no one finds it.

The White House tried a test run several weeks ago. Hidden in the midst of a 436 page regulatory update, and written in pure bureaucratese, the Department of Health and Human Services asked that insurance companies limit the looming premium increases for 2015 health plans. But don’t worry, HHS hinted: we’ll bail you out on the taxpayer’s dime if you lose money.

No wonder there wasn’t a press release. The White House is playing politics with Americans’ health care—and they’re bribing health insurance companies to play along.

The administration’s intention is clear: Salvage the 2014 midterm elections. Typically, insurance companies release their premium rates between summer and early fall—i.e., right before voters cast their ballots in November. If premiums skyrocket—which looks increasingly likely—then voters won’t look too kindly on Senators and Representatives who voted for Obamacare and created this problem.”

______________________________________________

4. Looks like those ObamaCare navigators were a waste of money.

From TheWeeklyStandard  “During the open enrollment period for the state and federal health care exchanges, each staff member and volunteer worked with an average of 1.8 people per day, according to a survey of assister programs released by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser calculated the number of people receiving aid between October 1, 2013 and the end of April, 2014:

More than 4,400 Assister Programs, employing more than 28,000 full-time-equivalent staff and volunteers, helped an estimated 10.6 million people during the first Open Enrollment period.

If you do the math, 28,000 individuals assisting 10.6 million people over 210 days breaks down to 1.8 people per day per service representative. While the individualized guidance was time consuming, the study revealed that the assister programs should have been able to help more people in the span of a full workday. The questionnaire answers indicated that 64 percent of the programs spent an average of 1-2 hours with each person, 18 percent took 2-3 hours, and just five percent exceeded three hours.”

______________________________________________

5. The VA is saying they need 17 billion to stop mistreating veterans.

From HotAir  “In which the agency that’s been giving millions in bonuses to people for causing and lying about the untimely deaths of veterans asks for the GDPs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Anguilla, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Equatorial Guinea combined from taxpayers to stop doing that. Super:

The Department of Veterans Affairs needs $17.6 billion in additional funds over the next three years to meet patients’ needs and fix the troubled agency’s problems, its acting director said Wednesday.

Testifying for the first time on Capitol Hill, interim VA Secretary Sloan Gibson told the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee that the money would help VA medical centers decrease appointment waiting times and hire more doctors.

You perhaps won’t be surprised to find this request is a-ok with Democrats while Republicans wonder how more money is going to solve this problem when the increasing backlog and problems at the Veterans Administration correlated with a rapidly increasing budget. And, in the case of the aforementioned bonuses, more money actually caused the problems.”

And that’s on top of the money already in current reform packages.

______________________________________________

6. How to renounce America, and still be called a patriot, at least by other hypocrites.

From NationalJournal  “This story is about a gilded class of people and corporations enriched by the new American economy while the rest of its citizens pay the tab. The protagonists could be any number of institutional elites, but this column happens to be about a Democratic senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, and his daughter, Heather Bresch, the chief executive of Mylan, a giant maker of generic drugs based outside Pittsburgh.

Her company’s profits come largely from Medicaid and Medicare, which means her nest is feathered by U.S. taxpayers. On Monday, Bresch announced that Mylan will renounce its United States citizenship and instead become incorporated in the Netherlands – leaving this country, in part, to pay less in taxes.

This is the sort of story that makes blood boil in populists – voters from the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party to libertarians who follow Rand Paul and including tea party conservatives. These disillusioned souls, growing in numbers, hate hypocrites who condemn the U.S. political system while gaming it.

Populists can’t be happy with how this story was told by Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times. Under the headline “Reluctantly, Patriot Flees Homeland for Greener Tax Pastures,” Sorkin cast Bresch as a helpless victim of a system that has made her wealthy and her father powerful.”

Oh the poor things… 🙄

______________________________________________

15 thoughts on “News/Politics 7-18-14”

  1. #5. I told you at the beginning that they would want money to fix it.
    But money won’t fix it.
    It takes the right people.
    And a system that doesn’t reward malpractice.

    Like

    Reply

  3. #2 The general perception in Ontario is every Detroit resident is heavily armed. I don’t think that’s a new perception nor do I think its limited to residents across the river. I think criminals would assume a Detroit resident is armed, whether the chief told them to get a gun or not. For a reason behind a drop in crime, one should look at the usual suspects first: an aging population, a decline in population, a lower use of illegal drugs, an uptick in the local economy, etc. If those fail maybe we could embrace other suggestions. However Detroit is aging and its population is declining. A declining and aging population would suggest lower drug use. As for the economy, the US and Michigan in particular are slowing improving (as for Detroit, data collection is probably not reliable)

    #6 Coincidentally a leftist site was complaining about a Republican supporter taking his/her corporations to Ireland a few weeks back. One can cite political preferences but in general the corporate class treats America (and other countries) as schmucks doing what’s in the immediate interest of the bottom line.
    Tax wise America does have the highest corporate tax rate in the world however its effective rate (or what it collects) is in the middle of the pack. The problem for the US is a tax rate that is full of holes and exemptions purchased through lobbying. ( a company can more or less bribe a Congressman to pay lower taxes) . The official tax rate is 40% but the effective rate is estimated to be around 13.5% which is below the OECD average rate of 16%.
    Tax rates in the Netherlands are actually very similar to the US. Is the corporation relocating to the Netherlands proper or to the Kingdom of the Netherlands? the latter includes a few Caribbean islands (eg Aruba, Curacao St St Martin, among others) which act as tax shelters.

    AJ – no comment on Malaysian Airlines — the internet is abuzz with speculation. And no comment on Gaza??

    Like

    Reply

  4. Bob,

    B, most definitely.

    I just find the hypocrisy from them annoying. After all, Democrats are always whining about companies avoiding taxes and “shipping jobs overseas” at the expense of American workers. Yet when one of their own does it for tax reasons they fall all over themselves to justify it.

    And just this week Obama’s Labor Sec. was complaining about this exact thing. He called for, as he put it, “economic patriotism.” He also called for a legislative fix to stop it. Does anyone think that will happen when some Democrat legislatures family members are running some of the companies being “unpatriotic?”

    http://online.wsj.com/articles/obama-administration-urges-immediate-action-on-inversions-1405475326

    “The Obama administration joined the growing debate over U.S. companies reincorporating overseas for tax purposes, urging lawmakers to pass legislation to limit the moves.

    In a letter to leaders of the congressional tax-writing committees, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said lawmakers “should enact legislation immediately…to shut down this abuse of our tax system.” The letter was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday night.

    Just this week, two U.S.-based drug firms— AbbVie Inc. ABBV +0.99% and Mylan Inc. MYL -0.45% —moved ahead with plans for foreign mergers that would allow them to move overseas and reduce their tax rates. They would join a growing list of about 50 U.S. firms that have reincorporated overseas through inversion in the last 10 years, most of them since 2008.”

    “”What we need as a nation is a new sense of economic patriotism, where we all rise or fall together,” Mr. Lew wrote. “We should not be providing support for corporations that seek to shift their profits overseas to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.”

    Like

    Reply

  5. HRW,

    I figured I’d wait on the airline story til more details are known. Like the last Malaysian Airlines crash, this is all just best guesses and accusations at this point. I’m not CNN and won’t milk it like they do. 🙂

    But yes, it’s a troubling story and sad that many, including 23 Americans, have died. I’ll post something when we actually know something other than that a plane crashed.

    As for Gaza….

    Well that ones been beaten to death for about the last 70 years. When isn’t there a story on hostilities there? It’s always the same. Palestinians and their terrorist leaders start a fight they can’t win, and then whine to the world when they get punched out. Always the same story, always the same result. It gets old. No thanks.

    Like

    Reply

  10. A friend of mine feels the need to see a doctor. She called around to several doctor’s offices, all told her that unless she had BCBS they would not see her.

    Like

    Reply

  11. Jon Stewart did a great piece on CNN’s coverage of the missing airline.

    There are three or four possible culprits in the Ukrainian mix, its interesting to watch the various media and social media sites backtrack and invent new stories. Russia Today is being quite acitve in its story telling while the Russian leader of the separatists discovered you can can’t delete internet posts. When the dusts settles, I predict it will show what little control Putin had over the separatists (or over some of his own forces).

    Gaza is deju vu all over again with Hamas defining the meaning of stupidity; doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Since I’m generally further to the left than most people, I surprise some people with my attitude toward any Gaza conflict. Why support stupidity.

    Ricky — and thats also a good explanation; every building has been stripped bare of any value.

    Like

    Reply

  13. HRW,

    I know right! Apparently Russian backed “rebels” and their leaders have never heard of Twitchy. 🙄

    The internet is forever. There are 9 million screen shots of the Tweet taking credit for the downing floating around as we speak. Yet this clown thinks “I’ll just delete it. That’ll fix everything.” 🙄

    Who’s runnin’ their internet outreach, the RNC? 😯

    Like

    Reply

  14. Tychicus, Nice addition!

    HRW, I have heard that the census figures for Detroit are overstated. It seems that to be employed by the city, you must have a Detroit address. However, most of those people have the money and good sense not to actually live in Detroit, and they own another home in the suburbs.

    You are correct that most buildings have been stripped of all copper and other items that can be sold. I think there are also very few people left to rob.

    Detroit is a scary lesson. In 1960, it had a stronger middle class than any US city. The 1967 riot and its aftermath was very traumatic. It is interesting to compare Detroit and Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh suffered greatly with the collapse of the US steel industry, but adjusted and survived. The US still has a strong auto industry, but Detroit has made itself completely unattractive to individuals and industry alike. Former Mayor Coleman Young deserves much of the blame, but many people contributed to the collapse of a once great city.

    Like

    Reply

Leave a reply to the real Aj Cancel reply