There is lots of talk on TV about Bergdeahl getting off with a light sentence.
They missed the real atrocity.
Obama bringing him back and giving the Taliban three (or was it five?) fighters.
What a horrible event yesterday at the church in Texas. Can’t even imagine.
And it was also sad to see the back-and-forth comments on Twitter throughout the rest of the day — conservatives saying the church shooter was a liberal, liberals claiming he was a Trump supporter (and even worse, he was white).
Everybody was just at each other’s throats blaming the “other side” (and there also was plenty of mocking going on about “thoughts and prayers” obviously “not working”).
I’m losing hope that we’ll ever feel like one nation again at this rate. There’s so much rancor, hatred and ill will over everything anymore.
Donna, anything to keep from realizing that there are evil people in the world.
A question about Russian intrusion into our elections:
How did the Russians get Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to steal the Primary from Bernie Sanders? How did Russia get Donna Brazile to leak debate questions to Hillary Clinton in advance of the debates?
Former “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Stand By Me” star Wil Wheaton faced a backlash after denigrating prayers offered for the Texas shooting victims, tweeting if “prayers did anything, they’d still be alive.”
On Sunday, in the midst of news coming out about the situation in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the 45-year-old star responded to House speaker Paul Ryan’s note of condolence on Twitter.
“Reports out of Texas are devastating. The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now,” Ryan wrote.
“The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive, you worthless sack of sh–,” the star wrote in a reply tweet. …
________________________________
I couldn’t find information on Twitter about the actual events–it was all mudslinging and making fun of people wanting to pray.
Very sad.
Out here all sorts of people who did not lose their houses are advising people who did that we need to take this historic opportunity to reconfigure their neighborhoods into a place of the future with high density housing, dog parks (not so frigid an idea here inland), bike paths, alternate transport lines, solar on every roof, less fire-vulnerable building techniques and the like.
Every the head of our County Board of Supervisors agreed–while speaking with a SAn Francisco journalist who printed the story.
She’s been backpedaling like mad ever since, “that, of course, is not my personal feeling.”
I don’t think she has much future in our politics, but we’ve been saying that for years about our inept City Council.
Now the shock has worn off, the knives are coming out. All sorts of out of town attorneys have set up shop to advise and sue.
They’re all aiming at the mammoth P,G, and E–who have been working like mad to get electricity back up. No one seems to remember that while yes, the fire followed the exact pattern from a 1964 fire, gale force winds blew most of the night. They tapped at 50-60 mph. No one could have stopped that fire, though they tried their hardest.
I think it’s a miracle only 43 people died (with four exceptions, they all were over 70 years old, which is also an interesting factoid).
My husband was totally shocked when we walked up to the fireline.
Mr. Cool Under Crisis, had no idea the fire got to 5 blocks from our house at 3 am, and that it was being fought with dirt and shovels because the electricity had gone out and the wells didn’t work.
We debated leaving for another hour while the fire was just a less than a 20 minute walk away–at a time when it was devouring land at an acre a minute.
I’ll try to avoid talking about the fire to you for the rest of the day. Everyone circles back to it all the time, every day. I know I’m becoming a total bore. I need another topic to gra my attention.
I found your facts, interesting, Michelle. Such is the way with divorce, death or tragic happenings—we seem to have a need to talk about them. That is just a part of grieving with those who grieve.
It’s understandable that you would need to talk about something so traumatic. You’re not boring us, so you talk about it all you want. 🙂
And this may help some with the Texas details. It has more details on the shooter, the citizens who pursued him and tracked him for police, and the timeline.
“House Republicans on Friday quietly made changes to their far-reaching tax overhaul: Now its tax cuts would be less generous for many Americans.
A day after the GOP unveiled its plan promising middle-class relief, the House’s top tax-writer, Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, released a revised version of the bill that would impose a new, lower-inflation “chained CPI” adjustment for tax brackets immediately instead of in 2023. That means more income would be taxed at higher rates over time — and less generous tax cuts for individuals and families.
The change, posted on the website of the Ways and Means Committee, reduces the value of the tax cuts for ordinary Americans by $89 billion over 10 years compared with the legislation released with fanfare Thursday.
As wages rise, middle-class taxpayers would have more of their income taxed at the 25 percent rate instead of at 12 percent, for instance.”
————————-
“You know Republicans are intellectually confused when they send out press releases defending a top marginal income-tax rate of nearly 50%. Yet that’s what they were up to this weekend as they tried to justify their bubble bracket tax rate of 45.6% after our criticism on Saturday.
We called it a stealth tax rate because it’s buried in the fine print of the Ways and Means proposal. It also isn’t part of the tax simplification story Republicans are selling by publicly claiming the House reform shrinks the individual code to four rates from seven. But caught out by our reporting, they are now denying that the fifth rate is stealthy while defending it as good policy.
The 45.6% is a bubble rate because it applies to tax-filing couples who make between $1.2 million and $1.6 million (above $1 million for single filers). The surcharge is intended to claw back any benefit these filers get from the new 12% income bracket that applies to income of less than $90,000 for couples ($45,000 for single filers).
Republicans apparently think it’s unfair for people to pay the same rate on the same dollar of income. So their surcharge applies the 39.6% rate to those first dollars of income for those more affluent taxpayers, which adds about six-percentage-points to the top rate and gets to the 45.6% bubble rate.
Add that to the 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge that Republicans are keeping as part of tax reform, and these taxpayers would now have a top marginal rate of 49.4%. Add state and local taxes, which would no longer be deductible against federal taxes (a policy we support), and these mostly Republican voters would in many states pay a marginal rate (on the next dollar of income) close to 60% and an effective rate (total share of income) higher than they do now. Keep in mind this is Republican tax policy.
It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans are resorting to Democratic arguments that this is no big deal because these taxpayers can afford it. They’re also claiming this is kosher because the 1986 Reagan reform also had a bubble rate of 33% in addition to a top rate of 28%. But a bubble rate of 33% is a lot lower than 50%, which was the top rate before Reagan’s 1986 reform.”
“The cups of urine travel by express mail to the Comprehensive Pain Specialists lab in an industrial park in Brentwood, Tennessee, not far from Nashville. Most days bring more than 700 of the little sealed cups from clinics across 10 states, wrapped in red-tagged waste bags. The network treats about 48,000 people each month, and many will be tested for drugs.
Gloved lab techs keep busy inside the cavernous facility, piping smaller urine samples into tubes. First, there are tests to detect opiates patients have been prescribed by CPS doctors. A second set identifies a wide range of drugs, both legal and illegal, in the urine. The doctors’ orders are displayed on computer screens and tracked by electronic medical records. Test results go back to the clinics in four to five days. The urine ends up stored for a month inside a massive walk-in refrigerator.
The high-tech testing lab’s raw material has become liquid gold for the doctors who own Comprehensive Pain Specialists. This testing process, driven by the nation’s epidemic of painkiller addiction, generates profits across the doctor-owned network of 54 clinics, the largest pain-treatment practice in the Southeast. Medicare paid the company at least $11 million for urine and related tests in 2014, when five of its professionals stood among the nation’s top billers. One nurse practitioner at the company’s clinic in Cleveland, Tennessee, single-handedly generated $1.1 million in Medicare billings for urine tests that year, according to Medicare records.
Dr. Peter Kroll, one of the founders of CPS and its medical director, billed Medicare $1.8 million for these drug tests in 2015. He said the costly tests are medically justified to monitor patients on pain pills against risks of addiction or even of selling pills on the black market. “I have to know the medicine is safe and you’re taking it,” Kroll, 46, said in an interview. Kroll said that several states in which CPS is active have high rates of opioid use, which requires more urine testing.
Kaiser Health News, with assistance from researchers at the Mayo Clinic, analyzed available billing data from Medicare and private insurance billing nationwide and found that spending on urine screens and related genetic tests quadrupled from 2011 to 2014, to an estimated $8.5 billion a year—more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. The federal government paid providers more to conduct urine drug tests in 2014 than it spent on the four most recommended cancer screenings combined.
Yet there are virtually no national standards regarding who gets tested, for which drugs and how often. Medicare has spent tens of millions of dollars on tests to detect drugs that presented minimal abuse danger for most patients, according to arguments made by government lawyers in court cases that challenge the standing orders to test patients for drugs. Payments have surged for urine tests for street drugs such as cocaine, PCP and ecstasy, which seldom have been detected in tests done on pain patients. In fact, court records show some of those tests rarely showed up positive—PCP, for instance, turned up just 1 percent of the time.
Urine testing has become particularly lucrative for doctors who operate their own labs. In 2014 and 2015, Medicare paid $1 million or more for drug-related tests billed by health professionals at more than 50 pain management practices across the U.S. At a dozen practices, Medicare billings were twice that high.
Thirty-one pain practitioners received 80 percent or more of their Medicare income just from urine testing, which a federal official called a “red flag” that may signal overuse and could lead to a federal investigation.”
—————————–
When my wife broke her leg, the “pain management.” doctor they sent her to did this.
And now he’s arrested and lost his medical license for all sorts of unseemly behavior. This is used by doctors to provide cover for said unseemly behavior.
Gee, thanks, AJ . . . now, let me tell you about . . .
We live in a world where we do not want risk. We’re giving away our privacy for risk-management. Our children are so cushioned from the possibility of getting hurt, we’ve turned them into snowflakes who melt at the slightest suggestion of taking a risk.
I don’t like risk either, but growth can come through taking risks–indeed, it’s the only way. If that infant didn’t climb onto it’s feet and let go of the coffee table to take a few steps, it would never learn to walk.
And if the child never learned to walk, it would never grow into anything besides a big, fat baby.
As a Christian, we, too, need to take “risks” of faith. Stepping into an uncertainty because God indicated we should go that way. We, too, run the risks of turning into bottle-fed, milk only, Christians who don’t have the ability to walk in faith–if we never follow Jesus into the risk of sharing the Gospel, going to Gambia to minister, writing a book about God, choosing to believe and forgive someone no matter the personal cost.
Jesus didn’t invite us into safety–he invited us into walking with Him and seeing God’s glory.
Wandering Views 
There is lots of talk on TV about Bergdeahl getting off with a light sentence.
They missed the real atrocity.
Obama bringing him back and giving the Taliban three (or was it five?) fighters.
LikeLiked by 2 people
What a horrible event yesterday at the church in Texas. Can’t even imagine.
And it was also sad to see the back-and-forth comments on Twitter throughout the rest of the day — conservatives saying the church shooter was a liberal, liberals claiming he was a Trump supporter (and even worse, he was white).
Everybody was just at each other’s throats blaming the “other side” (and there also was plenty of mocking going on about “thoughts and prayers” obviously “not working”).
I’m losing hope that we’ll ever feel like one nation again at this rate. There’s so much rancor, hatred and ill will over everything anymore.
LikeLike
Donna, anything to keep from realizing that there are evil people in the world.
A question about Russian intrusion into our elections:
How did the Russians get Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to steal the Primary from Bernie Sanders? How did Russia get Donna Brazile to leak debate questions to Hillary Clinton in advance of the debates?
Them Russians are smart cookies, they really are.
LikeLike
http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/11/05/wil-wheaton-angers-people-faith-with-furious-tweet-at-paul-ryan.html
Classy timing
______________________________
Former “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Stand By Me” star Wil Wheaton faced a backlash after denigrating prayers offered for the Texas shooting victims, tweeting if “prayers did anything, they’d still be alive.”
On Sunday, in the midst of news coming out about the situation in Sutherland Springs, Texas, the 45-year-old star responded to House speaker Paul Ryan’s note of condolence on Twitter.
“Reports out of Texas are devastating. The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now,” Ryan wrote.
“The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive, you worthless sack of sh–,” the star wrote in a reply tweet. …
________________________________
LikeLike
I couldn’t find information on Twitter about the actual events–it was all mudslinging and making fun of people wanting to pray.
Very sad.
Out here all sorts of people who did not lose their houses are advising people who did that we need to take this historic opportunity to reconfigure their neighborhoods into a place of the future with high density housing, dog parks (not so frigid an idea here inland), bike paths, alternate transport lines, solar on every roof, less fire-vulnerable building techniques and the like.
Every the head of our County Board of Supervisors agreed–while speaking with a SAn Francisco journalist who printed the story.
She’s been backpedaling like mad ever since, “that, of course, is not my personal feeling.”
I don’t think she has much future in our politics, but we’ve been saying that for years about our inept City Council.
Now the shock has worn off, the knives are coming out. All sorts of out of town attorneys have set up shop to advise and sue.
They’re all aiming at the mammoth P,G, and E–who have been working like mad to get electricity back up. No one seems to remember that while yes, the fire followed the exact pattern from a 1964 fire, gale force winds blew most of the night. They tapped at 50-60 mph. No one could have stopped that fire, though they tried their hardest.
I think it’s a miracle only 43 people died (with four exceptions, they all were over 70 years old, which is also an interesting factoid).
My husband was totally shocked when we walked up to the fireline.
Mr. Cool Under Crisis, had no idea the fire got to 5 blocks from our house at 3 am, and that it was being fought with dirt and shovels because the electricity had gone out and the wells didn’t work.
We debated leaving for another hour while the fire was just a less than a 20 minute walk away–at a time when it was devouring land at an acre a minute.
I’ll try to avoid talking about the fire to you for the rest of the day. Everyone circles back to it all the time, every day. I know I’m becoming a total bore. I need another topic to gra my attention.
Hey! What about Biddy Chambers? LOL
LikeLiked by 4 people
There’s a new push everywhere in California for high-density housing as one way to lower housing costs and solve the homeless problem
LikeLiked by 1 person
I found your facts, interesting, Michelle. Such is the way with divorce, death or tragic happenings—we seem to have a need to talk about them. That is just a part of grieving with those who grieve.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Michelle,
It’s understandable that you would need to talk about something so traumatic. You’re not boring us, so you talk about it all you want. 🙂
And this may help some with the Texas details. It has more details on the shooter, the citizens who pursued him and tracked him for police, and the timeline.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5053013/Devin-Kelley-outcast-preached-atheism.html
LikeLiked by 1 person
Ah yes…… The old bait and switch.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/house-gop-quietly-changes-tax-bill-to-tax-income-at-higher-rates-over-time/
“House Republicans on Friday quietly made changes to their far-reaching tax overhaul: Now its tax cuts would be less generous for many Americans.
A day after the GOP unveiled its plan promising middle-class relief, the House’s top tax-writer, Rep. Kevin Brady, R-Texas, released a revised version of the bill that would impose a new, lower-inflation “chained CPI” adjustment for tax brackets immediately instead of in 2023. That means more income would be taxed at higher rates over time — and less generous tax cuts for individuals and families.
The change, posted on the website of the Ways and Means Committee, reduces the value of the tax cuts for ordinary Americans by $89 billion over 10 years compared with the legislation released with fanfare Thursday.
As wages rise, middle-class taxpayers would have more of their income taxed at the 25 percent rate instead of at 12 percent, for instance.”
————————-
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tax-rate-cleanup-in-aisle-two-1509923183
“You know Republicans are intellectually confused when they send out press releases defending a top marginal income-tax rate of nearly 50%. Yet that’s what they were up to this weekend as they tried to justify their bubble bracket tax rate of 45.6% after our criticism on Saturday.
We called it a stealth tax rate because it’s buried in the fine print of the Ways and Means proposal. It also isn’t part of the tax simplification story Republicans are selling by publicly claiming the House reform shrinks the individual code to four rates from seven. But caught out by our reporting, they are now denying that the fifth rate is stealthy while defending it as good policy.
The 45.6% is a bubble rate because it applies to tax-filing couples who make between $1.2 million and $1.6 million (above $1 million for single filers). The surcharge is intended to claw back any benefit these filers get from the new 12% income bracket that applies to income of less than $90,000 for couples ($45,000 for single filers).
Republicans apparently think it’s unfair for people to pay the same rate on the same dollar of income. So their surcharge applies the 39.6% rate to those first dollars of income for those more affluent taxpayers, which adds about six-percentage-points to the top rate and gets to the 45.6% bubble rate.
Add that to the 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge that Republicans are keeping as part of tax reform, and these taxpayers would now have a top marginal rate of 49.4%. Add state and local taxes, which would no longer be deductible against federal taxes (a policy we support), and these mostly Republican voters would in many states pay a marginal rate (on the next dollar of income) close to 60% and an effective rate (total share of income) higher than they do now. Keep in mind this is Republican tax policy.
It’s no surprise, then, that Republicans are resorting to Democratic arguments that this is no big deal because these taxpayers can afford it. They’re also claiming this is kosher because the 1986 Reagan reform also had a bubble rate of 33% in addition to a top rate of 28%. But a bubble rate of 33% is a lot lower than 50%, which was the top rate before Reagan’s 1986 reform.”
LikeLike
A large part of the problem with the opiates epidemic is the large number of “professionals” who profit from it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-11-06/how-doctors-are-getting-rich-on-urine-tests-for-opioid-patients
“The cups of urine travel by express mail to the Comprehensive Pain Specialists lab in an industrial park in Brentwood, Tennessee, not far from Nashville. Most days bring more than 700 of the little sealed cups from clinics across 10 states, wrapped in red-tagged waste bags. The network treats about 48,000 people each month, and many will be tested for drugs.
Gloved lab techs keep busy inside the cavernous facility, piping smaller urine samples into tubes. First, there are tests to detect opiates patients have been prescribed by CPS doctors. A second set identifies a wide range of drugs, both legal and illegal, in the urine. The doctors’ orders are displayed on computer screens and tracked by electronic medical records. Test results go back to the clinics in four to five days. The urine ends up stored for a month inside a massive walk-in refrigerator.
The high-tech testing lab’s raw material has become liquid gold for the doctors who own Comprehensive Pain Specialists. This testing process, driven by the nation’s epidemic of painkiller addiction, generates profits across the doctor-owned network of 54 clinics, the largest pain-treatment practice in the Southeast. Medicare paid the company at least $11 million for urine and related tests in 2014, when five of its professionals stood among the nation’s top billers. One nurse practitioner at the company’s clinic in Cleveland, Tennessee, single-handedly generated $1.1 million in Medicare billings for urine tests that year, according to Medicare records.
Dr. Peter Kroll, one of the founders of CPS and its medical director, billed Medicare $1.8 million for these drug tests in 2015. He said the costly tests are medically justified to monitor patients on pain pills against risks of addiction or even of selling pills on the black market. “I have to know the medicine is safe and you’re taking it,” Kroll, 46, said in an interview. Kroll said that several states in which CPS is active have high rates of opioid use, which requires more urine testing.
Kaiser Health News, with assistance from researchers at the Mayo Clinic, analyzed available billing data from Medicare and private insurance billing nationwide and found that spending on urine screens and related genetic tests quadrupled from 2011 to 2014, to an estimated $8.5 billion a year—more than the entire budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. The federal government paid providers more to conduct urine drug tests in 2014 than it spent on the four most recommended cancer screenings combined.
Yet there are virtually no national standards regarding who gets tested, for which drugs and how often. Medicare has spent tens of millions of dollars on tests to detect drugs that presented minimal abuse danger for most patients, according to arguments made by government lawyers in court cases that challenge the standing orders to test patients for drugs. Payments have surged for urine tests for street drugs such as cocaine, PCP and ecstasy, which seldom have been detected in tests done on pain patients. In fact, court records show some of those tests rarely showed up positive—PCP, for instance, turned up just 1 percent of the time.
Urine testing has become particularly lucrative for doctors who operate their own labs. In 2014 and 2015, Medicare paid $1 million or more for drug-related tests billed by health professionals at more than 50 pain management practices across the U.S. At a dozen practices, Medicare billings were twice that high.
Thirty-one pain practitioners received 80 percent or more of their Medicare income just from urine testing, which a federal official called a “red flag” that may signal overuse and could lead to a federal investigation.”
—————————–
When my wife broke her leg, the “pain management.” doctor they sent her to did this.
And now he’s arrested and lost his medical license for all sorts of unseemly behavior. This is used by doctors to provide cover for said unseemly behavior.
LikeLike
Gee, thanks, AJ . . . now, let me tell you about . . .
We live in a world where we do not want risk. We’re giving away our privacy for risk-management. Our children are so cushioned from the possibility of getting hurt, we’ve turned them into snowflakes who melt at the slightest suggestion of taking a risk.
I don’t like risk either, but growth can come through taking risks–indeed, it’s the only way. If that infant didn’t climb onto it’s feet and let go of the coffee table to take a few steps, it would never learn to walk.
And if the child never learned to walk, it would never grow into anything besides a big, fat baby.
As a Christian, we, too, need to take “risks” of faith. Stepping into an uncertainty because God indicated we should go that way. We, too, run the risks of turning into bottle-fed, milk only, Christians who don’t have the ability to walk in faith–if we never follow Jesus into the risk of sharing the Gospel, going to Gambia to minister, writing a book about God, choosing to believe and forgive someone no matter the personal cost.
Jesus didn’t invite us into safety–he invited us into walking with Him and seeing God’s glory.
Can you see God’s glory if you never take a step?
LikeLiked by 2 people