Social Security

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News/Politics 3-10-15

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. It’s time to drag her in and get some answers.

From FoxNews  “In the depths of the hacker and IT-blogger community, a skirmish has broken out over the nature of Hillary Clinton’s email server — a debate that could have profound implications for national security during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, and for investigators hoping to mine her emails for evidentiary purposes.

The questions center on where, exactly, Hillary Clinton’s email server is, or was, physically located; which private-sector firms may have been hosting it; and how secure Clinton’s emails were at any given point. 

Why does the physical location matter? Because if the server was not in Clinton’s home, and was maintained at some other site, then the secretary of state and the Diplomatic Security corps that guarded her were not in physical control of her server. This would have raised the possibility for compromise of Clinton’s account, either from an inside job, carried out by the very firm retained to host the server, or from external actors that could range from the Kremlin to China to independent hackers.”

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2. The dispute intensifies…

From MSN/WaPo  “An already heated battle between the White House and Republicans over negotiations to curtail Iran’s nuclear program grew more tense Monday when 47 Republican senators sent a letter to Iran designed to kill any potential deal.

The White House responded by accusing the Republicans of conspiring with Iranian hardliners, who oppose the delicate negotiations, and suggested that their goal was to push the U.S. into a military conflict.

“It’s surprising to me that there are some Republican senators who are seeking to establish a back channel with the hard-liners in Iran to undermine an agreement between Iran and the broader international community,” said White House spokesman Josh Earnest on Monday.

He characterized the Republican effort as a “rush to war or at least a rush to the military option that …is not at all in the best interest of the United States.”

The letter’s main author Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) described the one-page letter as a remedial civics lesson to help Iran’s mullahs better understand the limits of presidential power.”

Says the guy who wants to give those same hardliners a nuclear weapon…

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3. Jihad, American style.

From TheTelegraph  “Egyptis facing a new campaign of violence, this time a series of attacks targeting western companies like KFC and Vodafone.

A series of bombings has killed at least three people and injured scores more in Cairo and Alexandria in recent weeks, separate from the intense jihadist violence being inflicted by Isil-backed terrorists against the police and military.

It seems in part inspired by an American Muslim convert with an anti-capitalist agenda, who posts texts online urging Egyptians to throw off a “neo-liberal” order in favour of Islam.

Shahid King Bolsen – born Shannon Morris – served time in Dubai for killing a German businessman, and hiding his body in a suit-case. Now he inspires young radicalised Egyptians with online calls for action – though he told The Telegraph he does not approve of violence.”

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4. Hold his feet to the fire.

From WND  “Pro-life activist Jill Stanek is joining with the Christian Defense Coalition later this month to stage a sit-in on Capitol Hill over lack of action on a late-term abortion ban that was supposed to be passed in January.

The sit-in is scheduled for 11.a.m. EST on March 25 outside the office of House Speaker John Boehner.

At issue is the GOP leadership’s handling of the “Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act,” which bans abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy but includes exceptions for victims of rape and incest.”

“The bill was supposed to be voted on Jan. 22 in conjunction with the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to legalize abortion and while Washington was filled with pro-life activists for the annual March for Life. Stanek said the concept is very simple.

“It is a ban on abortion past 20 weeks,” she explained. “It is known that by 20 weeks, and probably before, children feel pain. When they are aborted at 20 weeks, they are literally drawn and quartered. They’re just ripped apart, limb by limb. So this ban would make it a federal offense [and] ban abortions past 20 weeks.” But the bill, which sailed through the House with a smaller Republican majority in the previous Congress, never received a vote.”

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5. Oh boy…. 🙄

From CNSNews  “Many people are living longer, but not to age 112 or beyond — except in the records of the Social Security Administration.

The SSA’s inspector general has identified 6.5 million number-holders age 112 — or older — for whom no death date has been entered in the main electronic file, called Numident.

The audit, dated March 4, 2015, concluded that SSA lacks the controls necessary to annote death information on the records of number-holders who exceed “maximum reasonable life expectancies.”

“We obtained Numident data that identified approximately 6.5 million numberholders born before June 16, 1901 who did not have a date of death on their record,” the report states.

Some of the numbers assigned to long-dead people were used fraudulently to open bank accounts. And thousands of those numbers apparently were used by illegal immigrants to apply for work:”

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by

News/Politics 12-15-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Just one question……

What didn’t they cave on?

From HumanEvents  “As they had a habit of saying throughout the interstellar empire of “Dune,” the spice must flow.  Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively neutering freshly-elected conservatives.  The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied.  Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s to be expected when you tie your own hands.  It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way.

Americans with some vague memory of how the system is supposed to work might be wondering what happened to the sober deliberation of budgets, the careful spending of every dollar, and even the basic rules of accounting.  Welcome to the new millennium, old-timers!  We don’t do things that way any more.  Government by perpetual crisis is so much more exciting, and lucrative for the Ruling Class.  Now we wait until the hands of the fiscal doomsday clock stand at one minute to midnight, and the political class has to fund everything with “emergency spending bills,” scribbled in blind haste and posted on glitchy websites for public review in a half-hearted ritual of “transparency.”  We live in the shadow of the cromnibus, an appropriately clunky word that combines “continuing resolution” emergency tactics with “omnibus spending” irresponsibility.  The Cromnibus is a flabby beast a gaping maw and many tentacles to feed itself, but it lacks eyes, ears, and a frontal lobe.

Anyone who raises the slightest objection to this panicky spending bonanza is denounced as a penny-pinching extremist monster who just wants to kill children, puppies, and kittens for fun, by shutting down the government that keeps them alive.  You don’t want Obama to throw up barricades around your national parks and memorials again, do you?  No?  Then shut up and spend.“

Even when they win, they still find a way to lose.

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2. Interesting tactic. But will it accomplish anything?

From FoxNews  “”75 of 91 homicides Black lives,” read a recent headline in the renowned black newspaper’s crusade against black-on-black violence. It was accompanied, as always, by a literal body count: The name, race and manner of death for every homicide in Pittsburgh in 2014 — with victims being overwhelmingly black, as the headline shows.

For years across the news media, stories have focused on cases like the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. And for years, the Courier has kept asking: What about all these other black lives lost? That gun on its front page might as well be a finger pointed at black America — from a mirror.

 “We are challenging the community to own this problem,” says Rod Doss, editor and publisher of the 107-year-old weekly newspaper, which sometimes does an in-depth story on a particular victim but unfailingly updates and reprints its list, including whether anyone has been arrested.

 The campaign began almost a decade ago because editors at the Courier simply felt black-on-black killings were not getting the attention they deserved. At first, it met with strong resistance from the paper’s readership — “almost like we were uncovering dirty laundry. Nobody wanted us to talk about it,” Doss says. 

 Slowly, though, that attitude started to change. The number of rallies and vigils increased. Mothers of the dead banded together to try to stop the tragedies. Police were pressured to solve more of the murders.”

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3. Social Security continues it’s policy of trying to collect overpayments from survivors, despite assurances that it would stop the practice.

From MSN  “The Social Security Administration, which announced in April that it would stop trying to collect debts from the children of people who were allegedly overpaid benefits decades ago, has continued to demand such payments and now defends that practice in court documents.

After The Washington Post reported in April that the Treasury Department had confiscated $75 million in tax refunds due to about 400,000 Americans whose ancestors owed money to Social Security, the agency’s acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said efforts to collect on those old debts would cease immediately.

But although some people whose refunds were seized were reimbursed in recent months, some of those same taxpayers have since received new demands from Social Security, asserting that the debts remain and seeking repayment.

In March, the U.S. government intercepted Mary Grice’s tax refunds from both the IRS and the state of Maryland. It turned out that after Grice’s father died in 1960, when she was 4, her mother got survivor benefits to help feed and clothe her five children. Social Security says it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. With Grice’s mother long since dead, the government came after Mary to pay the debt.

The Takoma Park woman, now 58, filed suit against Social Security, challenging the government’s right to take her money without notice to satisfy her mother’s debt. After The Post wrote about her case, the government returned Grice’s tax refunds to her. But in August, she received a new bill from Social Security, seeking the same $2,997 that the agency had refunded to her four months earlier.”

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4. Obama’s new college ratings system is already under fire and it hasn’t event launched yet.

From FoxNews  “A controversial Obama administration rating system for colleges and universities already is being scrutinized ahead of its late-December rollout by educators who claim the government’s goal of more transparency could come at the expense of schools that don’t happen to fit the ivory tower model. 

The federal government, with its long-awaited rating system, is trying to hold the country’s 7,000 colleges and universities accountable not only to taxpayers, but also to prospective students trying to weigh the pros and cons of different institutions.”

“But critics say the government should butt out and worry a broad system could lead to unintended consequences — like creating perverse incentives for schools in pursuit of higher ratings. They worry it could hurt institutions that serve low-income and underprivileged students, as well as junior colleges and those that feature liberal arts programs. 

“What we are opposed to is the federal government taking the factors IT thinks is important from a policy perspective and putting a federal letter grade INSTEAD of leaving that judgment up to students and families depending on their individual needs,” Pete Boyle, vice president of public affairs for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told FoxNews.com in an email. “

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by

News/Politics 3-20-14

What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Democrats paid bribed to oppose voter ID laws in their state? 🙄 Say it isn’t so….

And don’t think for a minute this is the only state it’s happened in.

I’m sure Holder will be all over this, like he was with Bob McConnell, a Republican indicted for allegations of the same thing. Yep, any minute now….

From PJMedia  “Pennsylvania Democrats were caught on surveillance tape reportedly accepting cash bribes in return for opposing voter ID in the Pennsylvania legislature. Gifts of Tiffany’s jewelry were also given to Democrat legislators from Philadelphia, reportedly in exchange for “NO” votes on a Pennsylvania voter ID bill that passed in 2012. Despite this evidence, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has not charged any officials. Kane is a Democrat.

Kane’s excuse for her inaction? Racism: some of the legislators caught on tape accepting bribes were black Democrats from Philadelphia. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“Those who favored the sting believe Kane killed a solid investigation, led by experienced prosecutor Frank G. Fina, that had ensnared several public officials and had the potential to capture more. They said they were outraged at Kane’s allegation that race had played a role in the case.

Before Kane ended the investigation, sources familiar with the inquiry said, prosecutors amassed 400 hours of audio and videotape that documented at least four city Democrats taking payments in cash or money orders, and in one case a $2,000 Tiffany bracelet.”

Disgusting. As a state resident I’m ashamed that these people are still sitting in positions of authority. They should be indicted and impeached.

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2. Looks like ObamaCare’s gonna need another illegal re-write, and another insurer bailout to keep them quiet.

From TheHill  “Health industry officials say ObamaCare-related premiums will double in some parts of the country, countering claims recently made by the administration.

The expected rate hikes will be announced in the coming months amid an intense election year, when control of the Senate is up for grabs. The sticker shock would likely bolster the GOP’s prospects in November and hamper ObamaCare insurance enrollment efforts in 2015.

The industry complaints come less than a week after Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius sought to downplay concerns about rising premiums in the healthcare sector. She told lawmakers rates would increase in 2015 but grow more slowly than in the past. “The increases are far less significant than what they were prior to the Affordable Care Act,” the secretary said in testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee.

Her comment baffled insurance officials, who said it runs counter to the industry’s consensus about next year.”

She’s fibbin’ and she knows it.

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3. The CBO director says it’s time for some painful choices, and the sooner the better.

From CNSNews  “The United States faces “fundamental fiscal challenges” stemming from the growth in spending for Social Security and major health care programs,” CBO Director Douglas Elmendorf told a gathering in Washington on Tuesday.

The rising cost of those programs leaves Americans with “unpleasant” choices to make, but the sooner they’re made, the better, he said: 

“So we have a choice as a society to either scale back those programs relative to what is promised under current law; or to raise tax revenue above its historical average to pay for the expansion of those programs; or to cut back on all other spending even more sharply than we already are,” Elmendorf said.”

“Elmendorf said Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid and Obamacare will be much more expensive relative to GDP in future years because health care costs are rising, subsidized health insurance is expanding, and the population is aging: “There will be a third more people receiving Social Security Medicare benefits a decade from now than there are today,” he noted.”

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4. So they’re saying that even though federal and state law says it’s illegal to discriminate based on religion, that they can because it’s only Christians they’re excluding?

Giving special consideration to some religions while excluding others is discrimination. It’s nothing more than a religious version of affirmative action.

From EAGNews  ” The teachers union contract in Ferndale Public Schools in Oakland County gives “special consideration” to applicants that are of “the non-Christian faith.”

Michigan’s Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment and public services on the basis of religion. The state constitution says it, “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.” And the Federal Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on religion.”

“Should there be two (2) or more of these applicants with equal qualifications for the position and one (1) or more of these applicants with equal qualifications is a current employee, the current employee with the greatest seniority shall be assigned. Special consideration shall be given to women and/or minority defined as: Native American, Asian American, Latino, African American and those of the non-Christian faith. However, in all appointments to vacant positions, the Board’s decision shall be final.

Earlier in the contract is a “no discrimination clause” that states no employee can be discriminated against based on their religion.”

Liberals love non-discrimination laws and push for them for just about every group. Shouldn’t they take care to follow their own rules?

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5. Biden says the US will respond to any Russian aggression. Eventually. No really, he’s totally serious.

But it will already be over by the time they type up their next strongly worded reprimand.

From YahooNews  “Ukraine’s government said Wednesday it has begun drawing up plans to pull its troops from Crimea, where Russia is steadily taking formal control as its armed forces seize military installations across the disputed peninsula.

In a warning to Moscow, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden declared the United States will respond to any aggression against its NATO allies, which include neighbors to Russia.

Standing side by side with a pair of Baltic leaders in Vilnius, Lithuania, Biden said the U.S. was “absolutely committed” to defending its allies, adding that President Barack Obama plans to seek concrete commitments from NATO members to ensure the alliance can safeguard its collective security.

“Russia cannot escape the fact that the world is changing and rejecting outright their behavior,” Biden said, after meeting in Vilnius with Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite and Latvian President Andris Berzins.”

And you and the President can’t escape the fact that it just changed because of Russia, and that they continue to reject your attempts to stop them. You’re a day late and a dollar short Joe.

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