A Glimpse Of What Socialized Medicine Would Produce

In another example of government bureaucracy s lack of compassion toward elder health care and complete disregard for accepted clinical treatment standards and the Hippocratic Oath. The federal government(DHHS) is demanding repayment of hundreds of millions of dollars from hospices that exceeded arbitrary Medicare reimbursement limits because they enabled residents to live longer than permitted by the government. The key words are "live longer than permitted". Showing no sense of humanity, the federal government’s retroactively assessed reverse charges are being sent to hospices that already spent the funds delivering care for the terminally ill in prior years.
The result of this retroactive Medicare reimbursement demand is that many hospice providers will be put out of business. The unintended consequences of this bureaucratic meddling will reduce the number of hospice facilities and encourage the remainder to withhold care while simultaneously demanding premium increases. It is rarely clearer that government health care and its cost-control rationing is a prescription for an early grave. And still we have Democrats running for President advocating socialization of the Fine Health Care system we now have for the majority of Americans. Better they build government clinics and hospitals for the indigent, and staff them with Doctors, PAs and Nurses who are delinquent in paying there student loans, which in many cases amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

We have a 9.13 trillion dollar National Debt. The three leading drains on the U.S. Treasury are Medicare, Social Security and the War. We can't quit spending for the war, or we will loose yet another war that we were wining, as we did in Vietnam.

If you don't believe that statement just read the memoirs of North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap that were recently published. He wrote," the American media won the Vietnam war for the Vietcong. “What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it,” then he wrote. “But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!” Giap’s words are an important lesson from the past, to be sure. He says, "had the U.S. kept bombing Hanoi for just a few more days after Johnson called a halt they would have surrendered!"

Perhaps politicians should concentrate on waste and extravagant spending first, before they advocate more burden on the already heavily taxed American middle class.

An example of waste outside the realm of 10,000 dollar toilets for Congressmen and other such extravagant spending is the lack of communication between the IRS and the Medicare Auditing arm of Health and Human services. This would be a good place to start.

The following was reported recently by The Washington Post: The federal government has failed to collect more than $1 billion in back taxes owed by Medicare doctors and suppliers, nearly half of it payroll taxes deducted by health-care providers who spent the money on luxury cars and other personal expenses rather than sending it to the IRS, a congressional report says.
The money has not been collected because the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicare, has failed to connect its computers to the Internal Revenue Service and other Treasury Department divisions, the Government Accountability Office report says. Such a connection would allow the agencies to quickly identify who owes taxes and begin deducting that money from checks the federal contractors receive from Medicare.

The situation is particularly distressing because there could easily have been a system in place to fix it. Apparently. in 2001, when the GAO first suggested to HHS that it could coordinate with Treasury to identify tax deadbeats, HHS said the two agencies' computers were not compatible, making it impossible to work together. HHS computers were updated by 2004, giving the department no excuse.
Imagine how much confusion we would have if the whole medical system was socialised if these type things were allowed, and in a free society it appears there is no limit to the graft and corruption that can occur.

Carbon Credits Another Step to World Government Control

The United Nations was founded in 1945 to replace the failed League of Nations, in the hope that it would intervene in conflicts between nations and thereby avoid war. The first session was convened on January 10,1946 in the Westminster Central Hall in London and included representatives of 51 nations. It actually came to exist on 10/24/1945 when The Republic of China, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, France and the United States signed the Charter. It now is located at "Turtle Bay" on the Hudson River.

Today the budget of the UN is 4.19 billion dollars, of which the U.S. pays 22%. Communist China pays 2.05%, United Kingdom pays 6.15% , Russia pays only 1.10 % of the UN budget. One of the oil rich Nations pays $18.7 million dollars, and the United States, an oil poor nation, is assessed $423,464,855 annually. This despite that each Country has the same vote and veto power over any proposal made by the United States to the U.N.

Why are these statistics important? Because behind the headlines and fears of doom from Global Warming, there is a movement by "Goreites" and international bankers and brokerage firms to jump on the "band wagon" to profit from Global warming. It comes in the form of Carbon Credits. The Kyoto Agreement produced the Carbon Credit scheme as a way for Nations and international businesses to contribute to the anti-CO2 problem without actually reducing their CO2 emissions. They can buy carbon credits!

Carbon credits create a market for allegedly reducing greenhouse emissions by giving a monetary value to the cost of polluting the air. Emissions become an internal cost of doing business and are visible on the balance sheet alongside raw materials and other liabilities or assets.
For example, a business that owns a factory putting out 100,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in a year. Its government enacts a law that limits the emissions that the business can produce. So the factory is given a quota of 80,000 tonnes per year, 20,000 less than last year.The factory either reduces its emissions to 80,000 tonnes or is required to purchase carbon credits to offset the excess.
After costing up alternatives the business may decide that it is uneconomical or infeasible to invest in new machinery. Instead may choose to buy carbon credits on the open market from organizations that have been approved as being able to sell legitimate carbon credits.Which still leaves the company producing 100,000 tons of pollution, but makes some Carbon Credit broker a fee!
One seller might be a company that will offset emissions by planting a number of trees for every carbon credit you buy from them under an approved CDM project. So although the factory continues to emit gases, it would pay another group to go out and plant trees which allegedly will draw back 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year.
Another seller may have already invested in new low-emission machinery and have a surplus of allowances as a result. The factory could make up for its emissions by buying 20,000 tonnes of allowances from them. The cost of the seller's new machinery would be subsidized by the sale of allowances. Both the buyer and the seller would submit accounts( to whom? a World regulating organisation?) for their emissions to prove that their allowances were met correctly.

Credits were chosen by the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol as an alternative to Carbon taxes. It is easier to convince a credulous public to accept Credits than to impose taxes. A criticism of tax-raising schemes is that they are frequently not pledged as security, and so some or all of the taxation raised by a government may be applied inefficiently or not used to benefit the environment. IE your social security taxes!
The theory of the Carbon Credit advocates is: "By treating emissions as a market commodity it becomes easier for business to understand and manage their activities, while economists and traders can attempt to predict future pricing using well understood market theories. Thus the main advantages of a trade in Carbon Credits over a carbon tax are:
the price is more likely to be perceived as fair by those paying it, as the cost of carbon is set by the market, and not by politicians. Investors in credits have more control over their own costs." (source Wikapedia)
The flexible mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol supposedly ensure that all investment goes into genuine sustainable carbon reduction schemes, through its Internationally agreed validation process. Here again you have a World Government body deciding and dictating how business in the United States will be conducted!

Goldman Sachs, the investment bank, has strongly come out in favor of government regulation that creates long-term value for greenhouse gas emissions reductions and new technologies. Voluntary action, it reasons, is insufficient. It also will guarantee a market for it's investment in Carbon credits!

Market analysts have called the U.S carbon market a "hibernating giant." With Goldman Sachs leading the way. Greed is the middle name for these people.

Goldman Sachs has a history of making long-term strategic investments in new product lines. Gus Levy, its former legendary partner, famously conceded that the investment bank was greedy, but clarified, "long-term greedy." The fact that the powerhouse of capitalism is taking the plunge into environmental markets is perhaps the embodiment of this mantra, and the surest signal yet that there is money to be made on sustaining ecosystem services.

Goldman Sachs has made overtures to leadership in Communist China, one of the Worlds worst polluters, to form a joint venture with their Carbon Credit scheme. It is Reforestation, to creation of a carbon sink--a carbon reservoir that is increasing in size--in which plants and other organisms use photosynthesis to remove carbon from the atmosphere by incorporating it into biomass and release oxygen into the atmosphere. The carbon sink concept has become more widely known because the Kyoto Protocol allows the use of carbon dioxide sinks as a form of carbon offset credit, which can be traded on global markets subject to obtaining United Nations approval through a formal application process. My question is how long does it take a tree to grow before it is a CO2 "sink"?

Do Americans really want to go down this road. It only leads to more World Government control, and less freedom for us.

Is Poor Officiating Tolerated BY NFL?

In September of 1920, 14 team representatives met in Akron, Ohio to create a new football league. In the interest of ticket sales and crowning a yearly champion, they decided to form the American Professional Football Association. On October 17, 1920, the Decatur Staleys( who became the Bears) played their first NFL game.Their coach was George Hallas, who changed the name to Bears when he bought the team for $100.00 in 1922. The owners adopted the name National Football League also in 1922. The league currently consists of 32 teams.
The first Commissioner, Elmer Layden, was appointed in 1941. He was a member of the legendary "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame's 1925 football team.
Layden left Notre Dame in February of 1941 to become Commissioner of the NFL, a post that had been renamed upon him taking the job. Prior heads of the league had been referred to as presidents. In five years as Commissioner, Layden struggled with less skilled players due to many "stars" being drafted during WWII.
The NFL muddled through for years as a small group of 10 teams with small attendance and no television contracts.

When Pete Rozelle was appointed Commissioner, in 1960, after more than 23 ballots by the owners, the NFL .was still struggling financially.
The election of Pete Rozelle as Commissioner turned out to be a fortuitous event for the NFL.

When he took office there were ten teams in the NFL playing a twelve game schedule to frequently half-empty stadiums, and only several teams had television contracts. By the time of Rozelle's resignation, the number of teams had grown to 28 and team owners presided over sizable revenues from U.S. broadcasting networks. The NFL in 1960 was following a business model that had evolved from the 1930's.

Mr.Roselle negotiated television contracts for all NFL games, and persuaded the owners of the large City teams to share TV revenues with smaller city owners. In doing so, Rozelle not only cleverly played one television network against the other, but also persuaded NFL team owners of the Baltimore Colts, and the Washington Redskins to agree to share revenues between teams of smaller cities like Green Bay, as the competing AFL had done since its inception. His business model was essentially a "cartel" that benefited all teams equally, from revenue sharing to the player draft.
This money has not only changed the wealth of the owners of NFL teams and the players. It has made the NFL organisation a major influence in the game itself.
The reason for this is the dramatic and exorbitant amount of money the NFL receives for the television rights to it's games.
Beginning in 1962 when CBS paid the NFL 4.65 million dollars for the contract to televise all regular season games. The revenue has exploded to a total of 3.735 billion dollars paid by the networks involved in televising NFL games in 2007.

The NFL's status as a prime offering that makes billions in advertising for the networks has led some to conclude that unbiased coverage of the league is not possible.

ESPN attempted to run a dramatic series showing steamier aspects of pro football, "Playmakers", but dropped the series after the league reportedly threatened to exclude the network from carrying its games under the next set of TV contracts.
The NFL also has a strict policy prohibiting networks to run ads during official NFL programming (pre and post-game studio shows and the games themselves) from the gambling industry, and has rejected some ads from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

Commissioner Roger Goodell explained in 2007 that he did not think it behooved the sport to associate with sports betting. Additionally, the networks and their announcers cannot discuss or run graphics showing point spreads during NFL shows. They do allow Fantasy Football, however.
Despite all the above it is my opinion that either the NFL has some incompetent Referees, Linesmen and Umpires, or they have a potential scandal brewing over the Officials involvement in determining the outcome of games. This could be the Achilles Heal of the NFL.

The Coaches, game announcers and players are forbidden from commenting negatively about the officiating of games. Those coaches who do are severely fined. Those announcers who express criticism of the officiating seem to do it in a way that lends one to believe they are incompetent or did not see what happened.
The Commissioner routinely fines players for their infractions on and off the field, and these fines and suspensions are made known to the Media. But the league goes merrily along through the years without publicly chastising any official for actions on the field of play.
Scandals involving officials have surfaced in other major and collegiate sports. Why not the NFL?

We all see games each Sunday that have obvious missed calls, or phantom calls for holding or interference. But the final four minutes of the Game between the Patriots and Ravens was the worst I have seen in over 40 years of watching NFL games on TV. The Patriots have to be the luckiest team in the NFL or the officials gave them the game! I am neither a Raven fan nor a Patriot hater!

The Ravens won every category of statistic in that game but the score. The last four calls by the officials in the final minutes determined the eventual winner, New England Patriots.

There were two calls on 4th down plays, a 3rd on a pass interference call. The additional down, after Brady failed to score on a quarterback sneak, in the final minute due to a phantom time out was the topper. The winning drive in the final minutes covered 73 yards and required two fourth-down conversions, one on a defensive holding penalty, on a pass play where the ball thrown was incapable of being caught, 6 seconds before Gaffney beat Dawan Landry in the left corner of the end zone.

Is the problem with officiating caused by people who are unproficient?

The officials make from $25,000 to $70,000 per season depending on seniority. For a part time job that ain't bad, so they should be able to find 119 men/women who could call the game correctly.

Or does the league tolerate incompetence because they don't want to rock the "Money Boat"? An officiating scandal not only would rock the boat it could sink it!

Where Is The Outrage?

It is troubling to this blog writer that three politically powerful groups have been strangely silent, if not active supporters, of the Muslim Community and it's organizations, despite the obvious animus written and spoken in their dogma against these groups.

The three groups I am referring to are the Feminists. Gay and Lesbian Groups and the Jews.

None of these groups have come forward to condemn what is an apparent threat to their existence, if the Muslim movement gains political or military power in the U.S.

Is it the hatred for the current occupant of the White House or is it something else that keeps these three groups, and too many others from asking why if there are radical Muslims and peaceful Muslims? Why don't the Muslims as a group, who professes to be a peaceful Religion, do not renounce the parts of the Koran and the Hadith that proclaims the following: One Hadith of the Prophet Muhammad appeared in Egyptian publications in the 1930s and 1940s:
"The resurrection of the dead will not come until the Muslims will war with the Jews and the Muslims will kill them; ... the trees and rocks will say, "O Muslim, O Abdullah, here is a Jew behind me, come and kill him."2 The holy writings of Islam also contain benign references to Jews, which often are cited to support the fantasy of "harmonious relations between Muslims and Jews in Arab lands." Wherever Jews have lived under Arab Islam, however, their conditions appear to have been determined by the negative images of Jews within the Hadith Reports and the Koran, the juridical source of Islamic law, images found in such statements as the following:

"Muslims Oppress women in general. Men are allowed to have as many as four wives simultaneously and as many concubines as they wish or can afford. Men can easily divorce their wives and automatically have the custody of the children, if they so decide. Women have subservient status to men in all areas of the Sharia law. Equality under the law has no meaning in Islam. Just one example of the dreadful way of treating women in Islam is a case of a Saudi woman who was gang-raped. The Islamic court convicted the woman to prison term and lashes for having committed the “sin” of riding in a car with a male who was not her relative. This is a standard form of Islamic Shariah justice—a savage heritage of barbarism that ruled the Arabian Peninsula some centuries ago."

The Islam solution for Homosexuals should be a subject the Gay and lesbian Community would fear. Muslims deal with homosexuals, for instance, by hanging them "en mass", even though homosexuality is just as prevalent in Islamic lands as anywhere else. Recently an Ayatollah made a ruling on homosexuals. He said that they should be hanged and tortured before they are hanged.

This reminds this blogger of the type of Punishment King Henry the VIII wrought upon people who threatened or disagreed with him. In 1535 he had Sir Thomas Moore tried, found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered for refusing to sign an oath rejecting Catholicism and recognizing the Kings New Church (Anglican Church of England) that King Henry formed because the Pope refused to grant him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, so he could Marry Anne Boleyn.

The Muslim Religion is considered the most anti-homosexual of all world’s religions by condemning the practice and enforcing strict punishments. Twenty-one percent of the world follows Islam giving this denomination great power and influence. There is no degree of acceptance and the Koran clearly states that it is sinful and undisputedly illegal.
(Koran 4:16)If two men among you are guilty of lewdness, punish them both...
(Koran 27:55)Would ye really approach men in your lusts rather than Women? Nay, ye are a people (grossly) ignorant!
The Hadith are a group of passages and rights claimed to be written by Muhammad and are used in teaching Islam.
“When a man mounts another man, the throne of God shakes.”
“Kill the one who is doing it and also kill the one that it is being done to.”he following is a quote from the Quran:

If this were not enough to alert all Americans to a potential threat to freedom that is posed by the Muslim movement.

Then the Israeli-Palestinian problem should alert the American Jews to awaken to the threats posed to their fellow Jews in Israel.

The recent Annapolis Conference, that had the purpose of getting Israel to give more concessions to the Palestinians, is a case on point.

Diplomats have tried in vain for decades to resolve the Palestinian crisis, but when you know that the children are being brain washed in their schools to hate Jews. It is hard to fathom the idea that diplomacy will bring peace to that region of the world.

" Palestinian Authority school children are actively taught that the Jews and Israel are the enemy, in a broad range of contexts. The school texts portray the Jew as the enemy of believers, the enemy of Islam, the enemy of the Arabs, as well as generally evil and dangerous. Jews are killers and robbers and have stolen Arab land. Modern events are misrepresented to portray Israel and Jews as the evil force in their world. Zionism is equated to Nazism, together they are depicted as the prototype examples of racism. These themes also appear regularly on Palestinian Authority television."
The preceding quotations were taken from a study by The Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace, which is based on 85 current Syrian textbooks.

Congress Moves Toward More Deaths On Highways

Will Rogers once said, "We're all ignorant, just about different things." The business of our governments is often complex and hard for regular folks to follow. Responsible elected representatives work to inform and enlighten their constituents - not to use their ignorance against them.

What Congressional Democrats are doing in the name of Ecology is a perfect example of the harm our elected officials can do to us while they profess to be doing "the peoples" good.

House and Senate Democrats have proposed a 40% increase in the mileage passenger cars get per gallon of fuel. They also are dictating through the back door what fuels will be used in our cars.

Business week has reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., a longtime protector of the auto industry, settled their differences in an agreement late Friday on the fuel economy, or CAFE, issue, clearing the way for a House vote on a broader energy bill, probably on Wednesday.
Automakers would be required to meet an industry wide average of 35 miles per gallon for cars and light trucks, including SUVs, by 2020, the first increase by Congress in car fuel efficiency in 32 years.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada called the compromise "good news" and said he hoped to take up the legislation quickly after the House acts.
Dingell said the tougher standards are "both aggressive and attainable" and include provisions that give manufacturers the needed flexibility to bring SUVs and small trucks under compliance and to avoid job losses.
"We have achieved consensus on several provisions that provide critical environmental safeguards without jeopardizing American jobs," said Dingell in a statement.
Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that the tougher CAFE requirements "will serve as the cornerstone" of the energy bill, which also is expected to require a sharp increase in ethanol use as a motor fuel and require nonpublic electric utilities to produce 15 percent of their power from renewable energy sources such as wind or solar energy.
The amount of ethanol required to be used as a motor fuel would be ramped up to 36 billion gallons a year by 2022, a sevenfold increase over today's production.

No where in their legislation will be the same kind of attack on large trucks, that they are aiming directly at the "individual" motorist.. They are too wedded to the Teamsters Union politically to include the greatest threat to our safety on the highway in their legislation.

Nancy Pelosi "crows" that this legislation is for the attack on global warming. She said: "It is a major milestone and the first concrete legislation to address global warming," declared Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was involved in the discussion with House Democrats as the agreement with Dingell was worked out. Not a mention of preserving the precious life-blood of our Capitalist system ,oil. She is doing this at our peril to satisfy her constituents who worship at the false idol of Conservation!

No consideration for the safety of those who drive these new vehicles is mentioned. The only way we have come to today's mandated mileage per gallon is to strip automobiles of the steel that once protected them and replace it with fiberglass and plastics. Thus making us more vulnerable to the behemoths of the highway, semi-trailer trucks.

Over 40,000 Americans die each year on our nation's roadways - a price quietly accepted by most of us. ("Only" about 58,000 Americans died in the entire Vietnam war and that brought out riots in the streets.) Aside from the fatherless or motherless children - or the grieving parents - or entire families wiped out in seconds, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety reported a few years back that its research revealed that the monetary cost, alone, of deaths on American highways exceeds the national debt each year.

Trucks, including tractor-trailers, single-unit trucks, and certain heavy cargo vans with gross weight of more than 10,000 pounds - account for a disproportionate share of traffic deaths based on miles traveled. The fatal crash rate for large trucks is 2.4 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled - more than 50 percent greater than the rate for all vehicles on the roads. People in passenger vehicles are especially vulnerable in collisions with large trucks because of the great difference in weight between cars and large tucks. In two-vehicle crashes involving passenger vehicles and large trucks, 98 percent of the fatalities were occupants of the passenger vehicle.
Overweight trucks are even more dangerous than trucks that stay within the current federal weight limits. Overweight trucks not only take longer to brake and are more prone to roll over in crashes, but they also damage roads and bridges at rapidly increasing rates even when slightly overloaded.

Most of the fatal crashes involving large trucks occur in rural areas (67 percent), during the day (69 percent) and on weekdays (80 percent). (NHTSA, 2001)
Ninety-eight percent of people killed in two-vehicle crashes involving passenger vehicles and a large truck in 1999 were the occupants of the passenger vehicle. (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IIHS, 2000)
In 2001, there were 483 fatalities in Texas, 376 in California, 85 in Arizona, and 60 in New Mexico caused by large truck crashes. (NHTSA, 2001).

How much longer are we Americans going to allow those elected officials in Washington to continue to work for special interests and not the good of those of us who elected them? Time to throw them all out!