CNN’s Zucker answered the question as to why his channel doesn’t broadcast even more glowball warmening programming:
“When we do do those stories, there does tend to be a tremendous amount of lack of interest on the audience’s part.”
That’s because the only people that care are so partisan that they off watching MSNBC because, in their world, CNN is “FOX-Lite”.
Dave the RNS Photographer in photos by Oleg Volk.
And here’s Orville Bierkle’s revolver, with model. I think he was perfect for the part.
It’s like it never happened.
AP Treats Obamacare Contractor’s Employees in Three States Doing Almost No Work As a Local Story
A search at 11:00 p.m. ET tonight at the Associated Press’s national web site on “Serco,” the company with a five-year, $1.25 billion contract to process paper Obamacare enrollment applications, returned no results. That’s absolutely pathetic, given that St. Louis TV station KMOV, based on multiple accounts from several current and former employees and contractors, has reported that the company has well over 1,000 people doing almost nothing all day simply because there are very few paper applications to process. KMOV, which carried five consecutive reports this week, even noted in its later segments that its work had drawn national attention.
What’s worse than AP not covering the story nationally? How about the wire service treating it as a local and regional story, even though Serco and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services are wasting roughly $20 million per month of U.S. taxpayers’ money, and even though calls for investigation have come from U.S. senators in at least two states?
Because they’re not doing any work, it’s almost like they’re practicing being federal employees.
You know, the people who have no issues with just giving away tax dollars because they know they’ll never be held accountable.
Obamacare Has Granted 1 Million Incorrect Health Insurance Subsidies
There are still huge technical problems yet to be resolved with Obamacare.
For example, the vast majority of people who gained private coverage through Obamacare are being subsidized through the law’s system of health insurance tax credits. But about a million of those subsidies are wrong, either too high or too low—it’s unclear how many fall on which side—according to The Washington Post.
The law’s subsidies are doled out based annual income, and people who apply for coverage are responsible for submitting income data in order to prove eligibility for the subsidies. The problem is that a million or so people have entered incomes that differ substantially from what the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has on file.
Normally this would be reconciled through a follow-up auditing process; when the system identifies people whose submitted incomes don’t match IRS records, those people are asked to send in further paperwork as proof. But only “a fraction” of those people have responded, according to the Post. And even when they have provided additional documentation, it doesn’t matter.
They’re too busy auditing Tea Party folks to look into whether people have been lying to get cheap health insurance.
Expect this to get resolved two days after never.
When you say you’re giving away US citizenship, you should expect a bum rush. Especially when you have singled out children for special compensation.
U.S. Setting Up Emergency Shelter in Texas as Youths Cross Border Alone
With border authorities in South Texas overwhelmed by a surge of young illegal migrants traveling by themselves, the Department of Homeland Security declared a crisis this week and moved to set up an emergency shelter for the youths at an Air Force base in San Antonio, officials said Friday.
After seeing children packed in a Border Patrol station in McAllen, Tex., during a visit last Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Monday declared “a level-four condition of readiness†in the Rio Grande Valley. The alert was an official recognition that federal agencies overseeing borders, immigration enforcement and child welfare had been outstripped by a sudden increase in unaccompanied minors in recent weeks.
On Sunday, Department of Health and Human Services officials will open a shelter for up to 1,000 minors at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, authorities said, and will begin transferring youths there by land and air. The level-four alert is the highest for agencies handling children crossing the border illegally, and allows Homeland Security officials to call on emergency resources from other agencies, officials said.
Next, expect MSNBC to have hour-to-hour coverage of the “deplorable conditions” these youths are “suffering” at taxpayer expense because Obama and the gang are getting a two-fer when it comes to that category of “thing that gives his friends in the media a reason to talk about immigration and the racists blocking it in Congress.”
The LAT Science section ran an article last week that will likely be getting them accused of being part of the “vast-right wing conspiracy”
Rocketing solar winds may spark lightning as they buzz Earth
The activity of the sun may have more of an influence on lightning storms on Earth than was previously thought, a new study suggests.
Researchers at the University of Reading in England found that when an especially fast-moving solar wind washed over the Earth, there was a corresponding uptick in the number of lightning storms recorded on the planet.
Wait, what. You mean we don’t know what the activity of our planet’s source of light and heat may be doing to our weather patterns, and that for all we know it may run in cycles that cause the planet to heat up and cool down over hundreds or even thousands of years?
And here I thought the science was settled or something.
When this happens, lives are actually saved.
Not like Obama’s “saved or created” hooie, but actually saved.
And the sooner the media figures this out the happier I’ll be.
Who needs #HashTags or even words when you have a few men with guns and a willingness to act.
Maetenloch @ the AoSHQ
That’s 200 fewer rapists, in my book.
I hope a city near me is more European
Switzerland rejects world’s highest minimum wage
Swiss voters have overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to introduce what would have been the highest minimum wage in the world in a referendum.
Under the plan, employers would have had to pay workers a minimum 22 Swiss francs (about $25; £15; 18 euros) an hour.
Supporters said the move was necessary for people to live a decent life.
But critics argued that it would raise production costs and increase unemployment.
The minimum wage proposal was rejected by 76% of voters. Supporters had argued it would “protect equitable pay” but the Swiss Business Federation said it would harm low-paid workers in particular.
The Seattle City Council is lining up behind a gradual raising of the minimum wage to $15 per hour. There are a shit-ton of exemptions and “phasing in” depending upon your industry and what type of business you own.
Needless to say, the horrible public schooling that voters in Seattle get will likely mean a swift passage as they do not get to even take anything resembling an Economics course in high school.
Caught Up in Smoke on IFC last night. Sadly, the wife put the kibosh on watching the Cheech & Chong marathon they had going on.
I vaguely remember this track from the old LP soundtrack album, which I put onto one of the first mix tapes I made on the turntable as a kid for listening through my boom box at school.
Anyway, great tune by a band called Yesca. Enjoy!
Back in the groove and on a schedule that lets me look around.
Still, I only found two, so there’ll be some non-panel filler.
And that needs to change
Under Obamacare, People Must Be Broken of Their Preference for Choice
We have a new contender for most-telling-ever Obamacare quote this morning: “We have to break people away from the choice habit that everyone has.†That’s Marcus Merz, head of Minnesota health insurer PreferredOne, in a New York Times report on the increasing prevalence of narrow network health plans.
Merz is basically stating openly what the Obama administration won’t, which is that Obamacare is intentionally designed to narrow consumer choice and plan design within the health insurance market. The Obama administration doesn’t want to say this because it is bad politics generally, and also because President Obama specifically and repeatedly promised that, under the law, people would be able to keep their choice of health plans and doctors, not that they would be broken of their preference for medical choice. But the law’s authors and administrators have a pretty good idea of what kind of health insurance they want you to have, and that’s the kind of insurance that you’re going to get.
“We’re all trying to break away from this fixation on open access and broad networks,” Merz continues. “We”—by which I mean the insurance industry—tried this before, in the 1990s, when narrow-network plans referred to as Health Maintenance Organizations were all the rage. It didn’t go so well, and eventually insurers cut it out.
Because people hated them and they didn’t work they way they were sold. Now people are finding out that they are mandated by law. As more and more of them figure this out, they will (hopefully) remember who forced it upon them.
