Fine-tuning bad news. Recent statistical analysis finds sea levels are rising faster now than at any time in nearly 3,000 years.
Alex DeMetrick reports that’s not good news for Maryland. Maryland is vulnerable to sea level rise on two fronts: the Atlantic and along the Chesapeake Bay. A new study finds world wide…
“The sea level rise that we saw in the last century was really unprecedented in 2,800 years,” said Dr. Donald Boesch, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science.
Our knowledge of sea level for the last 2800 years is indirect at best, and badly contaminated with tectonic motions, and And now, here's the truth fresh today from the NOAA sea level records site:
Do you see any hint of change in the rate of sea level rise in the last 100+ years? Here, we can even look at the data with the linear increase taken out:
See any hint of recent acceleration due to global warming? If sea level now is rising faster than any time in the last 3000 years, it's clearly not due to CO2 induced warming, which, according even to global warming proponents, has only become significant since about 1950.
A legal challenge to the Philippines' rules on genetically modified organisms is threatening to spark a food crisis in the country and could cloud the outlook for GM technology around Asia.
Government agencies are scrambling to set new regulations on GMOs by Feb. 23 after the Southeast Asian nation's top court late last year demanded an overhaul of existing rules, halting GM planting and issuance of new GM import permits until that was done.
The Supreme Court was acting on a petition by environmental activists led by Greenpeace, with the move likely to be closely watched by governments elsewhere as the Philippines is seen as a trailblazer for GMO.
The country was the first in the region to allow planting and commercialization of GM corn, which it did in 2002, and has permitted GM crop imports for more than a decade.
And you can see all the harm it's done, right?
Around 70 percent of the Philippines' corn output, which stood at 7.5 million tonnes last year, is GM. The country's top GM import is soybean meal. Both are mainly used as animal feed and any supply disruption could spell disaster for the livestock sector.
The Supreme Court's December ruling is "anti-nationalistic when you look at it from the perspective of the country's food security", said Roger Navarro, president of Philippine Maize Federation.
Corn farmers are worried they might not be able to plant in May.
"The livelihood of almost 1 million farmers nationwide will be threatened," said Romualdo Elvira Jr., a farmer from the northern province of Bicol.
Using non-GM seeds, a hectare yields around 3 tonnes of corn, said Oliver Aldovino, part of a farmer cooperative on the southern island of Mindanao. Aldovino, who switched to GM seven years ago, said output doubled with GM corn.
Sure, go back to growing half as much food; we'll stay in San Francisco drinking Starbucks
A federal judge on Tuesday ruled that State Department officials and top aides to Hillary Clinton should be questioned under oath about whether they intentionally thwarted federal open records laws by using or allowing the use of a private email server throughout Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.
The decision by U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of Washington came in a lawsuit over public records brought by Judicial Watch, a conservative legal watchdog group, regarding its May 2013 request for information about the employment arrangement of Huma Abedin, a longtime Clinton aide.
Officials with the State and Justice departments said that they were aware of the order but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing litigation. Discovery orders are not readily appealable. An attorney for Abedin declined to comment.
Sullivan set an April 12 deadline for parties to litigate a detailed investigative plan--subject to court approval--that would reach well beyond the limited and carefully worded explanations of the use of the private server that department and Clinton officials have given.
“There has been a constant drip, drip, drip of declarations. When does it stop?” said Sullivan, a 1994 Bill Clinton appointee who has overseen several politically sensitive FOIA cases. “This case is about the public’s right to know,” he said.
Sullivan also suggested from the bench that he might at some point order the department to subpoena Clinton and Abedin to return all emails related to Clinton’s private account, not just records their camps previously deemed work-related and returned.
"This is one of several lawsuits filed by the same right-wing group, which will stop at nothing in pursuing the Clintons, just as they have done since the 1990s," Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said in an email.
In an interview with the Post, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton cites a report published last month by the Inspector General for the State Department. The IG faulted the Department for long delays in responding to FOIA requests (longer than any other agency) and instances where responsive records seemed to be overlooked by Clinton’s senior staff:
In December 2012, the nonprofit organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sent a FOIA request to the Department seeking records “sufficient to show the number of email accounts of, or associated with, Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the extent to which those email accounts are identifiable as those of or associated with Secretary Clinton.” On May 10, 2013, IPS replied to CREW, stating that “no records responsive to your request were located.” At the time the request was received, dozens of senior officials throughout the Department, including members of Secretary Clinton’s immediate staff, exchanged emails with the Secretary using the personal accounts she used to conduct official business. OIG found evidence that the Secretary’s then-Chief of Staff [Cheryl Mills] was informed of the request at the time it was received and subsequently tasked staff to follow up. However, OIG found no evidence to indicate that any of these senior officials reviewed the search results or approved the response to CREW. OIG also found no evidence that the S/ES, L, and IPS staff involved in responding to requests for information, searching for records, or drafting the response had knowledge of the Secretary’s email usage. Furthermore, it does not appear that S/ES searched any email records, even though the request clearly encompassed emails.
What this paragraph is really saying is that Clinton’s senior staff kept her private server a secret even from people tasked with responding to FOIA requests about her email arrangements. When the Inspector General sent attorneys to speak with Cheryl Mills about her role in this particular incident, she refused to speak with them.
Meanwhile, Trump might sound as though he's committing to prosecute Hillary: "You have no choice... In fairness, you have to look into that... She seems to be guilty... But you know what, I wouldn't even say that. But certainly, it has to be looked at... If a Republican wins, if I'm winning, certainly you will look at that as being fair to anyone else. So unfair to the people that have been prosecuted over the years for doing much less than she did. So she's being protected, but if I win, certainly it's something we're going to look at."
Today, Hillary supporter David Brock published an open letter at his Correct the Record site. The point of the letter is ostensibly to ask Bernie Sanders to tone down his negative advertising against Hillary Clinton.
I’m writing today to urge that you and your campaign immediately halt all negative campaigning against our party’s prospective candidate for the Presidency, Secretary Hillary Clinton. After first pledging to wage a positive campaign for President, you and your campaign have for weeks now engaged in a relentlessly ugly barrage of false character attacks against Mrs. Clinton, including running negative TV advertising of the sort you promised you never would… Your continued suggestions that Mrs. Clinton is untrustworthy and even corrupt – when nothing could be further from the truth – are a threat to our party’s standing, up and down the November ballot.
Attacking Hillary isn’t just politics as usual it’s a threat to the future of the entire Democratic party. Having made clear his desire for Sanders to shut up, Brock turns to his broader purpose, telling Bernie Sanders it’s time for him to fall in line. . .
Pull her far enough left and she'll be unelectable.
Quentin Tarentino referred to this as the greatest moment in television history.Words and Music by Serena.
Posted by Mark R. Simpson on Monday, April 15, 2013
A new state regulatory decision will allow farmers to continue selling electricity from manure-based digesters to utilities.
The digesters have been pushed as one way for agriculture to reduce nutrients that pollute the Chesapeake Bay.
Pennsylvania's Public Utility Commission in its ruling last Thursday exempted manure-fueled electricity generators at farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed — including those in Lancaster County — from new caps on how much electricity utility companies are required to buy from them at retail prices.
Under this law, (and there are many like it regarding "renewable energy"), farmers are allowed to sell any power they generate using manure digesters back to power distributors at retail rates. It's a bit like if grocery stores were required to buy peoples home grown tomatoes back at the price marked on the bin, even if they weren't quite as regular, and needed to be cleaned and displayed for sale. Do you think they'd be very happy about it?
Utilities aren't happy about purchasing excess power at retail price, which is higher than the wholesale price used to purchase most of their power.
That and costs associated with putting the excess alternative-energy power into electrical grid will have to be borne by other consumers, and that is unfair, utilities argue.
Initially, the commission had sided with the utilities and proposed limiting excess energy purchase to 110 percent beyond the alternative energy producer’s needs. However, Thursday, the commission voted 3-2 vote to raise the ceiling to 200 percent.
And, they exempted methane digesters at farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. In Lancaster County, that applies to at least nine farms.
It makes it look like the power companies are paying for the renewable power. Of course, that's not true, ultimately the consumers are paying the price in increased rates.
Traditionally, seals have been regarded in these parts as wintertime oddities – migrants precariously nosing along alone or in small groups around the lower Chesapeake Bay until the waters up north warm and lure them back.
Rees and other biologists are beginning to view their presence differently, however.
Around the man-made islands of the bridge-tunnel and on the sandbars of the marshy lower Eastern Shore, harbor seals are thriving in what seem to be growing numbers from mid-autumn to mid-spring. Rees has counted as many as 30 at one time around one bridge-tunnel island. A few weeks ago, Nature Conservancy scientist Alexandra Wilke logged 46 sunning in a seaside spot in Northampton County.
A northern animal found in increasing numbers in the south? Sounds like global cooling to me; or:
Thanks to a landmark 1972 federal law that banned killing or harassing them, seal populations had already dramatically rebounded in the heart of their territory from New England northward.
Late springtime estimates for harbor seals along the Maine coast nearly tripled to more than 75,000 between the mid-1990s and 2012, according to the Northeast Fisheries Science Center, a federal research arm based in Woods Hole, Mass. It found dramatic increases for gray seals and harp seals in the hearts of their ranges as well.
A Harp Seal was found up in Baltimore Harbor back in 2012, hanging around the aquarium. So, they're eating themselves out of house and home, and some of them are moving to the tropics to find grub.
Fortunately, nature always finds an answer.
In Massachusetts, around Cape Cod and islands like Nantucket, gray seals have become numerous and aggressive enough to earn distinction as “the most controversial animal in New England,” according to a Yankee Magazine article in 2014. They swarm popular beaches and snatch fishermen’s catches. And to the horror of many beach lovers, they’ve attracted a sizable following of white sharks, which love to chomp them (and still rarely attack humans).
A rainy day here in Slower Maryland. I would be tempted to skip this issue of reports from Clinton for lack of material, but there's not much else happening. Even the dog is content indoors for now.
A former CIA officer serving jail time for leaking documents to the New York Times accused federal officials of setting a double standard by apparently refusing to aggressively prosecute Hillary Clinton.
Clinton was “a high ranking official who should know better, but completely given a pass, and almost an apologetic pass,” Jeffrey Sterling, who was found guilty of leaking classified information to Times reporter James Risen last year, said in an interview with the Washington Post published on Monday.
“So how should us regular citizens feel, especially with heightened concerns about national security?”
Sterling released classified information to Risen about Iran's nuclear program, so there's no doubt he broke the law, and deserves the punishment. But, yeah, Hillary put far more secrets at risk than Sterling. It's almost mathematically certain that Hillary's server was hacked early and often by unfriendly and friendly powers, and nothing that passed through escaped their clutches. And I don't hear Hillary defending Sterling on the grounds of "over classification."
Victor David Hanson discusses the Clintons in Weimar America.
Mrs. Clinton is now like a tottering third-world caudillo—she can’t really continue on in politics and she can’t quit trying if she wants to stay out of jail. Her possible indictment depends entirely on her political viability and utility. She and the once disbarred Bill Clinton might appear like tired, tragic dinosaurs, bewildered that politics have left them behind in their late sixties—were it not for these aging egoists’ routine petulance and sense of entitlement.
I want to figure out how we can do that with Republicans. We need to get that dog and follow them around and every time they say these things like, "Oh, the Great Recession was caused by too much regulation," arh, arh, arh, arh!
But the truth?
“More Americans should own their own homes, for reasons that are economic and tangible, and reasons that are emotional and intangible, but go to the heart of what it means to expand the American Dream.”
William Jefferson Clinton, Forty second president of the United States, November 1994
. . .
The president of the United States was preaching to the choir when he made that proclamation in 1994, just two years into his first term. Facing an enthusiastic crowd at the National Association of Realtors’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Clinton launched the National Partners in Homeownership, a private-public cooperative with one goal: raising the numbers of homeowners across America.
Determined to reverse what some in Washington saw as a troubling decline of homeownership during the previous decade, Clinton urged private enterprise to join with public agencies to ensure that by the year 2000, some 70 percent of the populace would own their own homes.
An owner in every home. It was the prosperous, 1990s version of the Depression-era ‘A Chicken in Every Pot.’
With homeownership standing at around 64 percent, Clinton’s program was ambitious….
….the (Clinton) government enlisted help in 1995 from a wide swath of American industry. Banks, home builders, securities firms, Realtors - all were asked to pull together in a partnership made up of 65 top national organizations and 131 smaller groups.
The partnership would achieve its goals by ‘making homeownership more affordable, expanding creative financing, simplifying the home buying process, reducing transaction costs, changing conventional methods of design and building less expensive houses, among other means.’
Amid the hoopla surrounding the partnership announcement, little attention was paid to its unique and most troubling aspect: It was unheard of for regulators to team up this closely with those they were charged with policing….
…in just a few short years, all of the venerable rules governing the relationship between borrower and lender went out the window, starting with the elimination of requirements that a borrower put down a substantial amount of cash in a property, verify his income, and demonstrate an ability to service his debts.
Got that? As the book goes on to explain in detail, it was Bill Clinton who threw out “all of the venerable rules” that regulated the financing of homeownership. And while he wasn’t alone - Morgenson and Rosner list the entire seamy cast of characters, almost all associated with Clinton, Obama and the Democrats’ lobbying-industrial complex - it is a stark, documented truth that the Great Recession has Bill Clinton’s fingerprints all over it.
One throws out the intricately evolved rules and guidelines that govern entire industries at one's own risk. While it may seem a good idea, most the those rules and guidelines survived years because they helped. We are finding the same lesson in Obamacare.
Unexpectedly, and without explanation, my @rsmccain Twitter account was suspended Friday evening. Based on past experiences, my guess would be that this resulted from a complaint by one of the leading “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who have been at war with #GamerGate since August 2014. However, there was no reason stated for the suspension, and who knows? So I’ve switched to the @SexTroubleBook account I created to promote my book and meanwhile, friends who are fed up with Twitter’s bias and censorship started the #FreeStacy hashtag.
Maybe I shouldn’t tell stories like that, but I was a Democrat and a dopehead back then. It was the ’70s, man. Being a teenager in an era when the American people thought it was a good idea to elect Jimmy Carter president is the kind of experience which, if you were lucky enough to have survived it, should permanently cure you of such folly. Polyester pants? Disco? Voting for Democrats? What were we thinking?
Eventually the drugs wore off. Some of us grew up, got married, had kids, paid taxes, and vowed our kids would be spared the helpless gloom of existential despair that Jimmy Carter’s presidency represented. Other people, however, never grew up. They voted for Barack Obama, the narcissistic epitome of political adolescence.
Meanwhile, totalitarian forces seek to silence voices of sanity in this lunatic wilderness of 21st-century “progressive” madness. Allum Bokhari at Breitbart.com reports:
It’s about partisan politics, you see. The whole build-up of the Feminist™ brand the past three or four years has been about establishing a cultural narrative that would benefit Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. This is why, as much as I enjoy talking about myself, #FreeStacy is not about me.
The Left will always find excuses and pretexts for smearing or silencing anyone who exposes the lies by which the Left gains power. Democrats could never be elected if the American people knew the truth about who the Democrats are — unless, of course, the perversity of the culture meant that the American people were themselves so corrupted that they would elect a person as dishonest as Hillary Clinton.
@rsmccain
Hello,
Your account was suspended because it was found to be violating the Twitter Rules (https://twitter.com/rules), specifically our rules around participating in targeted abuse.
Your account will not be restored.
Thanks,
Twitter
Reference #ref:00DA0000000K0A8.500G000000tVGuS:ref
Twitter, Inc. 1355 Market Street, Suite 900 San Francisco, CA 94103
Well, what is “targeted abuse,” what constitutes “participating” in this behavior, and what are the “rules around” it? Where is the evidence that I have been “violating the Twitter Rules”? Who was “targeted”? What was the nature of the “abuse”? Questions like this multiply, you see, if we can be permitted to ask questions of the arbiters of “Twitter Rules,” but that’s just it: No questions allowed!
It's no secret that Stacy has gone hammer and tong after feminism, and tangled with quite a few feminist SJW's, including some on Twitters new Trust and Safety Council Star Chamber, but as near as I can determine, the hate is mutual. I see no "targeted abuse."
I don't Tweet, and I don't really understand the attraction of Twitter; it seems to encourage nasty behavior rather than thoughtful exchange. My own lifelong boycott of Twitter continues, just when I was thinking of trying to make sense out of it.
Federal officials are investigating the death of 13 bald eagles.
The Baltimore Sun reports investigators were called to a farm in Federalsburg, Md. Saturday afternoon after a man discovered some of the birds.
Maryland Natural Resources Police spokeswoman Candy Thomson says the man was looking for shed deer antlers when he noticed four dead bald eagles. Thomson says officers went on to search the grounds and discovered an additional nine dead eagles.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is now investigating the situation.
Officials have not said if the eagles were killed intentionally. Additional information has not been provided.
That's a whole lot of eagles. I would suspect some form of attractive poisoning if there is no evidence of violence. Hopefully it's not deliberate, and they can identify it and stop it. This time of year, without Ospreys to steal from, Bald Eagles are forced to fish for themselves, or more often eat carrion, and are more vulnerable to environmental and human poisons.
Standing directly above the 150,000-gallon aeration basin of Ommegang’s wastewater treatment plant does bring to mind the smell of skunked beer. It is the destination for a pipe that carries all the production waste from the brewery—municipal and human waste is handled differently. Like a miracle in reverse, this is where the leftovers of an alcoholic beverage are turned back into water.
While yeast is fundamental to brewing beer, different microorganisms play a central role in breaking down Ommegang’s liquid waste. The process removes almost all the nitrogen and phosphorus from the water leaving the plant, keeping excess nutrients out of the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay.
“Usually it's 99.9 percent removal [of nitrogen and phosphorus],” Poliseno says. “That's pretty amazing—we meet our regulations and far pass them.”
The fermentation that makes beer and other alcoholic beverages is an anaerobic process, meaning it has to occur in the absence of oxygen. The waste process, however, is aerobic. The large blowers deliver oxygen to an activated sludge made of living microorganisms. The sludge takes about eight days to cycle through the aeration basin’s membrane bioreactor that filters the wastewater.
The sludge is mostly bacteria but also tiny animals like rotifers and nematodes. As Poliseno describes it, he could be describing cattle rotated on fields of grass.
“All those hungry organisms will be brought right back to where the feed is so they can break down even faster, because they'll be super hungry at that point,” Poliseno says.
As the bacteria eat, they grow and reproduce. The excess sludge is pressed dry and harvested as a valuable biomass that farmers spread on their fields.
So, all the nutrients are sequestered into the sludge, which is spread on farm fields where it will wash into the bay, the same as chickenshit. Which is fine, as long as the amount used is not more than the soil can hold.
When my dog caught a rabbit at Hillsdale College a couple years ago, I was horrified. I’m no hunter and I don’t like seeing cute things kill other cute things. But when I yelled at my Carolina swamp dog, she looked at me with a single clear conviction she wanted to impart: You don’t understand — this is what I am about.
Conservatives are frequently seen supporting affirmations of English as the official language of the country and the default choice for official government forms, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard anyone shouting down a translator at one of our own events. This is some seriously uncharted territory for two groups of workers on election day when they’re all supposedly on the same “team” in terms of ideology. But then, some of the worst racism you’ve ever run into in American politics comes from liberals. It’s just not a story that the media likes to tell. Don’t expect to see Hillary or the cable news networks bringing this instance up too often or too loudly. It just spoils the narrative.
I’ve generally tried to go easy on Sanders. I like his vision, and I like his general attitude toward Wall Street. But this is insane. If anything, it’s worse than the endless magic asterisks that Republicans use to pretend their tax plans will supercharge the economy and pay for themselves. It’s not even remotely in the realm of reality. If it were, France and Germany and Denmark would by now be consumer paradises to make Croesus blush.
A group of stuffy establishment economists says “no credible economic research” supports Friedman’s analysis, which “undermines our reputation as the party of responsible arithmetic.” Or, in Austan Goolsbee’s more colorful language, Sanders’ plans have “evolved into magic flying puppies with winning Lotto tickets tied to their collars.”
Enough is enough. Everyone needs to get back to reality. This ain’t it.
That's an extremely difficult question. It should be easy, because you only need to pick one and you've got 4 choices, but each is tough for Clinton in his own way and each presents some opportunities for attack. I feel I need to start at the opposite end: Who would she least like to run against? Even that way, it's difficult.
. . .
I'm going to guess Hillary would prefer that nice Mr. Kasich.
It sounds like a bad dream — a really bad dream — but in a matter of days or at most weeks the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could become our national zoning board. Some say that, with the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia, the chances just became much bigger.
The reason is that the Supreme Court is about to decide whether to give the environmental agency the authority to make land use decisions throughout the nation. The court will not even have to hear arguments in American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA to do this. It will only have to decide not to hear the appeal of a Third Circuit decision.
You don’t have to be a legal expert to have heard of the EPA’s Waters of the United States (WOTUS) regulation, stayed by the Sixth Circuit in October. As one newspaper put it, WOTUS empowers regulators to “micromanage any creek, pond or prairie pothole” and the land around them. In American Farm Bureau Federation v. EPA, the 3rd Circuit gave EPA the go-ahead to impose even farther-reaching control.
In an executive order signed weeks after taking office. President Obama instructed the environmental agency to “make full use of its powers” to lower the levels of phosphorus, nitrogen, and sediment in rainwater runoff, groundwater movement, and tributaries that reach the East Coast’s Chesapeake Bay. He added that this was to be done in a manner that “can be replicated” nationally. The goal was an EPA blueprint for watersheds covering the entire American landmass — from East Coast to West, including Alaska and Hawaii. But this “blueprint” wasn’t so much about improving the environment as grabbing more power to Washington.
In the WOTUS regulations, EPA has effectively claimed the authority to regulate land use anywhere that precipitation falls; in other words, everywhere. They won't assert this authority all at once, of course, because massive resistance might turn the tables. In any event, they don't have the staff to enforce it at the microlevel they would like, but like boiling the frog, they will slowly increase the pressure on land owners, taking the worst cases first, and when they need more staff, asking Congress for more, and in the meantime starving other functions of the EPA to pay the bills. Eventually, it will take permission from the EPA to turn a shovel in the garden, and change the contours of the land, with the permit coming months after the site visit, paid by the landowner, of course, and months for the decision to be made.
And that's why the next Supreme Court Justices is so damned important.
A report by Minnesota’s Office of the Legislative Auditor released last month, found that more than 80,000 Minnesotans were enrolled in Medicaid, and the state’s Obamacare exchange even though they were ineligible for the services. That incredible number of ineligible enrollees cost Minnesota taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
The problems apparently stem from “miscommunication and poor training at the Department of Human Services.” However, the audit found that, “software issues” are were also blamed for the errors, which seems to be an all too standard bureaucratic excuse these days for any expensive failure within government health care programs.
(Winston Salem Journal) North Carolina’s largest health insurer is considering dropping coverage under the Affordable Care Act. The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that Blue Cross and Blue Shield expects to report its second consecutive financial loss as it deals with cost overruns.
CEO Brad Wilson said Wednesday the company cannot continue to suffer losses indefinitely in North Carolina. Wilson said the company may have to decide later this year whether to stop offering coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
The company raised rates by nearly one third this year but says it was not enough to cover losses.
This is on top of United Healthcare announcing in November 2015 that they were considering the same, and would pretty much leave Aetna as the only ACA provider left.
I was listening to local talk radio this morning on this, and the doctor they had on said this was caused by a flaw in Ocare. I disagree: it’s a feature. We had this discussion as Ocare was being considered, and right after it was passed and we could see the whole thing, and driving insurance companies out of business, as well as out of the Exchanges, is purposeful, as the government could now say ” well, listen, we tried it the free market way, look what happens, we need government to directly provide the insurance.” This is all a step towards single payer.
Yep, designed to fail and set the stage for single payer.
Hundreds of thousands of people lose subsidies under the health law, or even their policies, when they get tangled in a web of paperwork problems involving income, citizenship and taxes. Some are dealing with serious illnesses like cancer. Advocates fear the problems, if left unresolved, could undermine the nation's historic gains in health insurance.
. . .
The government says about 470,000 people had coverage terminated through Sept. 30 last year because of unresolved documentation issues involving citizenship and immigration. During the same time, more than 1 million households had their financial assistance "adjusted" because of income discrepancies. Advocates say "adjusted" usually means the subsidies get eliminated.
Now, in the clearest sign of Obamacare’s illicit coverage of illegal immigrants to date, a bombshell report from the Senate Homeland Security Committee found that the healthcare law doled out an estimated $750 million in taxpayer-funded insurance subsidies to some 500,000 people of unverified immigration status.
Here’s the real problem: this money has already gone out the door. So now the Obama administration has set up a pay-and-chase cycle where they must attempt to recoup taxpayer dollars after they’ve been spent – and the government does a notoriously poor job of getting that money back.
Both cybersecurity and customer service at the Internal Revenue Service have suffered because of Obamacare, the agency's head said in remarks to Congress on Thursday.
"Congress, as I noted in my testimony, has underfunded … the Affordable Care Act," IRS Commissioner John Koskinen told a panel of the House Appropriations Committee. "That does not remove the statutory mandate we have that we have to implement the act."
Koskinen delivered his remarks in response to a question from Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., who pointed out that Congress had "increased funding specifically for taxpayer services" in 2014 and 2016.
Koskinen said it didn't matter where Congress intended the money to go, explaining the agency had pulled funding for customer service and cybersecurity in order to ensure compliance with the ACA.
So the lousy customer service at the IRS is a deliberate choice by the Koskinen to punish citizens and by extension, their congressmen, by putting the money elsewhere.
. . . the same core coalition that created and passed Obamacare has sprung into action to blast drug companies and shift the blame to them. To head the effort, they turned to John Rother, a former AARP top lobbyist who spearheaded AARP’s surprising support for Obamacare – despite the fact the group’s own members opposed the bill 14 to 1.
NCHC’s goal is not just to misdirect anger over Obamacare to help Democrats survive the 2016 elections. They intend to actually implement price controls that would pad the profits of their industry allies, but have a potentially devastating impact on the discovery of new cures.
. . .
That would be a disaster. As Milton Friedman and 100 of his distinguished peers explained: “Drug price controls are more difficult to remove than other price controls. Controls on oil and other products often tend to be limited or short-lived, as voters eventually object to the resulting shortages and distortions. The effects of drug price controls, however, are far more difficult to observe because they mainly affect medicines that haven’t been invented yet.”
“To improve the quality of our health care while lowering its cost, we will make the immediate investments necessary to ensure that, within five years, all of America’s medical records are computerized,” President Obama said in 2009. “This will cut waste, eliminate red tape and reduce the need to repeat expensive medical tests.”
While the shift that Obama and many others pushed may have improved care, electronic medical records led to quite the unique hostage situation in Los Angeles this week. There, a hospital fell prey to a cyberattack — and the hospital has escaped its plight by paying hackers a $17,000 ransom.
. . . Fast-forward to today. We get our 1095 form. It shows that our kids have been covered under Medicaid, which qualifies as full coverage under the ACA, but my wife and I, who have PCN, do not. PCN is apparently only a “limited” plan and does not qualify as full coverage under the ACA. We are now on the hook for penalties going back four months for not having adequate care under the ACA. And the enrollment period ended on Jan 31st, so we will be on the hook for the next year as well. We are talking thousands of dollars here.
This, understandably, sent my wife into a panic and tears. It’s money we don’t have.
I want to re-iterate: we went to the government website, which funneled us to a state website, where we got coverage, and NO ONE informed us that this did not comply with the law or that the coverage for us was not enough under the standards of the law. My wife and I are not dumb bunnies. This wasn’t an oversight. There was simply no way we could have known.
The website was worthless – an endless maze – so we worked the phones. We sat on hold for over an hour, but finally got a hold of a person, who admittedly, was very nice and helpful. We told her our situation, told her we acted in good faith, and wound up here anyway. She told us that since we make so little, we may qualify for an exemption. She gave us the info on how to apply for this exemption through the IRS, what forms to use etc. Part of this application for an exemption requires that we go to Healthcare.gov and look up and submit what the lowest bronze plan would have cost us.
But now you are probably seeing the first paradox: our income is so low, that the website automatically sent us to the Medicaid site without ever taking us to the exchanges. How do we get there to know what we didn’t know? She doesn’t have an answer.
Now comes the second paradox. Even if we get this exemption, how will we make sure we get adequate coverage in the future? My employment situation is unlikely to change in that time. How can we even get to the exchanges to get a plan we are REQUIRED to have when the website immediately redirects us back to the Medicaid application? Where do we go to buy into a plan we can’t even see because the application process won’t let us see it?
Again, she was very nice, but she didn’t have an answer. She thinks there might be a “tool” to help us on healthcare.gov. She suggests that we go to Healthcare.gov and search for “exemptions.” A search for “exemptions” on Healthcare.gov produces 50 hits, by the way.
Finally she suggested we talk to the local Medicaid office in Utah. Perhaps they can help. Maybe Utah offers a Medicaid benefit plan that has full coverage and qualifies under the ACA. So we do. The person at the Utah Medicaid office is very nice, but told us that there is only one full coverage Medicaid plan and it is basically only offered to invalids. PCN, which is, frankly, very generous (thank you, Utah taxpayers!) is what they offer to most of their clients.
It seems crazy that PCN somehow does not qualify under ACA, but here’s where the story gets surreal.
The person tells us that they have never been told whether or not PCN qualifies under ACA! Let that sink in for a moment.
The ACA has been law since January, 2010 and been implemented since 2013. Six years in, and the state government Medicaid office STILL does not know if their main Medicaid program complies with the law. They still don’t understand the ACA. This is obviously the root of the confusion.
Is everyone on Medicaid in Utah in violation of the law? Are they all paying penalties or forced to go through the exemption process? Do they even know? The person, who again, is very nice, has no answers. Who does know? Again, no answers.
All of this happened this morning. We have been delivered into a system that is completely opaque, with a curtain of websites and applications processes that are nearly impenetrable, and been left at the mercy of bureaucrats who do not even know the full meaning of the law they expect us to live under.
This simply cannot stand. . . .
This is what happens when unaccountable bureaucrats are put in charge of healthcare. Paperwork is all important, and service is not.
We used to sell Clown Knife Fish in the aquarium store I used to work in as a teenager. Cool fish. Lots of aquarium fish have escaped into Florida and become established, including Oscars, Peacock Bass, various catfish and now, apparently the Clown Knife Fish. They are edible, at least to Thai's:
The clown featherback is commonly seen in the cuisine of Thailand and other southeast Asian countries. In Thailand when deep-fried as Pla krai thot krathiam (ปลากรายทอดกระเทียม) it is served with a spicy dipping sauce on the side made by mashing up coriander roots, bird's eye chillies and garlic, and mixing this with fish sauce, lime juice and sugar. The clown featherback is also the main fish used in the production of fish balls.
By Takeaway - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13252332
I got word through Facebook this morning that an old fishing friend, Capt. Jim Brincefield was critically injured in what appears to have been a bizarre accident at his home in North Carolina: Well-known NC fishing charter captain hurt in explosion
A well-known fishing charter captain was seriously burned in an explosion on Friday in his backyard, officials say Captain Jim Brincefield, of Camden, was airlifted to Norfolk Sentara Hospital on Friday after he was seriously burned during an explosion in a burn barrel, said Camden County Sheriff Tony Perry.
Rumor has it that it was likely an aerosol can in the trash that exploded.
The Camden County Sheriff’s Office say they were notified at 2:36 p.m. for an emergency in the 200 block of Pinch Gut Road in Camden.
When they arrived, they found Captain Jim Brincefield was inside his home showering to cool the burns after the explosion.
That would be the Capt. Jimmie I know.
He was airlifted by Nightingale to Norfolk Sentara General after suffering burns over 75 percent of his body. Brincefield operates a charter boat named “Jil Carrie” in the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean.
Those are certainly life threatening injuries. Word on Facebook is that he is intubated and on a respirator.
“A seaworthy boat Captain (Brincefield) is a well-known community leader for helping others and was instrumental in the cooperation the Sheriff’s Office Thanksgiving Mission this past year at Camden Methodist Church,” Sheriff Perry said.
“Capt. Jim, as he is known, loved nothing better than to be out assisting his fellow man and neighbor and carries this deep desire in his heart to help others,” said Sheriff Perry.
Perry also requests prayers for Brincefield and his family at this time.
Capt. Jim, wife Jil and children at a charity benefit in 2001
Jim is one of the most generous men I have ever met. He is always ready to lend his hand to a friend, and his business to a charity. He ran his charter boat Jil Carrie out of Deale for many years, and only recently departed the Bay for North Carolina, saying the fishing had seriously deteriorated in recent years. He has a great, if distinctly off color, humor (did I tell you the one about the difference between a refrigerator and Barney Frank?).
My heart goes out to Jim and his family
UPDATE: Word comes via Facebook that Capt. Jim has succumbed to his burns.
As we enter 2016, Americans must now comply with the new Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) volumes, which were set late last year. The latest iteration of the regulation calls for 18.11 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be blended with gasoline, an amount over 4 billion gallons short of the EPA’s original target of 22.25 gallons. The final regulation shows that the EPA has failed once again to get the RFS on track to comply with the goals of the Energy Policy Act. As the EPA struggles to find enough renewable fuel to meet its goals, it may be time to consider a reset on this costly, uncertain, and challenging regulation…
The RFS has an impact on fuel prices. Ethanol is more expensive per gallon than gasoline. The current fuel prices (dated 1/27/16) are $1.05/gallon for RBOB gasoline (Reformulated Gasoline Blendstock for Oxygen Blending), and $1.40/gallon for ethanol.* Ethanol also has a lower energy density than gasoline (reflected in fuel efficiency), and it takes 1.51 gallons of ethanol to achieve the energy of a single gallon of gasoline, meaning at current prices it costs $1.06 more for the same amount of energy. The latest RFS will require 14.5 billion gallons of ethanol to be blended, which will have the energy equivalent of 9.6 billion gallons of gasoline. If the cost difference continues to be around $0.35/gallon higher for ethanol, then the RFS could end up costing consumers around $10 billion in 2016. Even if the gap compresses to around $0.20 (what was originally projected for 2016), the costs would still be around $9 billion.
The blending gap is slowly but surely being felt, though current, rock bottom oil prices around the globe are muting the effect on prices at the pump for now. But there are more concerns regarding ethanol than the bite out of your wallet, and they are of particular interest to fisherman and boaters… the “boater voters” if you prefer. (This segment of the voting population is even more massive in the south than other parts of the nation.) Over the years, we’ve seen a constant stream of complaints from outdoor sports enthusiasts, such as this one which warns that ethanol is deadly for outboard motors.
Just when you believe government regulations can’t get any more bizarre, intrusive, or anti-business, along comes the EPA opening the way for E15 gasoline…
Although all major manufacturers of outboard motors reports their engines run just fine on E10 fuel (E15 support is doubtful, and, in fact, may void warrantees), spokespersons for those same companies know that in the real world of fishing and boating, ethanol-added fuel has been a disaster.
Their complaints come from real world experience and are very specific to the boating community, but also apply to most other small engines. They include:
Ethanol is hygroscopic, meaning it has a strong attraction to moisture.
Ethanol increases the amount of water accumulating in fuel tanks.
Ethanol produces less energy (BTUs) than an equivalent unit of gasoline.
Ethanol fuel’s usable life span may be less than the normal length of off-season boat storage.
Corn ethanol is a bipartisan folly. It hardly saves any fossil fuel, puts more land into corn production, and yet takes food out of the economy, and if you worry about carbon emissions, it doesn't help much there either.
