REPUBLICANS ARE MORE ETHICAL THAN DEMOCRATS!

[Uncle Han]

Expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare a failure

Designers of Obamacare and the administration all predicted confidently - even after the Supreme Court ruled that states could not be forced to expand Medicaid - that even Republican states would fall in line eventually.
After all, the reasoning went, what governor in their right mind would turn down all those federal dollars? Washington promised to fund 100% of the expansion for 3 years and then never less than 90% thereafter. Surely GOP governors would cave and bring this wonderful benefit to their poorer citizens.
But only 24 states are on board to fully expand Medicaid. As you might suspect, the best laid plans of mice, men, and Democrats...
National Journal:

As predicted, Republican governors started flipping. First Gov. Brian Sandoval of Nevada endorsed a full expansion. Then came the governors of New Mexico, Arizona, Ohio, Michigan. Even Rick Scott, the Florida governor elected on an anti-Obamacare platform, said expanding Medicaid was the right thing to do. Chris Christie followed suit in New Jersey, as did others. But endorsements haven't always led to expansions. The Florida Legislature did not share the governor's conversion, and Scott quickly backed down. At press time, both Ohio and Arizona's Legislatures continue to debate expansion.
Other governors who were considered obvious gets--such as Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett and Tennessee's Bill Haslam--declined expansion. Some of the poorest states with the most to gain have left piles of federal cash on the table. Medicaid was such a toxic issue in Mississippi that the Legislature adjourned without even reauthorizing the state's current program. While governors know they'll be judged on the health of the state economy, many legislators care more about ideological purity, and few Republican lawmakers are interested in the political risk associated with voting for anything branded with the president's name. Brian Haille, a former health aide to Haslam, says he doesn't expect any Medicaid enthusiasm in Tennessee until after the Republican primary filing deadline next year. "You've got lawmakers who are ducking and covering and do not want to vote on anything related to Obamacare before then," he said.
There may still be some stragglers. Kentucky Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear announced in May his state would move forward (he doesn't need legislative approval). Republican Gov. Terry Branstad in Iowa, an early skeptic about Medicaid, just reached an agreement with his Legislature to expand. But to do so, he needed to rebrand the program as something else. The plan, which still needs federal approval, will move some poor residents into private insurance markets and other into a state-run program that covers different benefits and pays doctors differently from the state's existing Medicaid program. "It isn't Medicaid expansion," insists Michael Bousselot, a policy adviser to Branstad, although he notes that it will use the federal funds. Utah Gov. Gary Herbert tells NJ he won't be making a Medicaid decision until at least September.

One of the big reasons that governors are leery of expanding Medicaid is that despite the promises of the federal government, few believe they will live up to the rules and states will be stuck holding the bag on massively increased Medicaid costs after 3 years or so. That, and the ridiculous rules to which states must adhere are a recipe for potential risk of fiscal disaster that many governors refuse to run.
Just one more indication that the Obamacare rollout is going to be a clusterfark of massive proportions.

[Uncle Han]

The Enemy is Us

By Christopher Chantrill


It's great for President Obama to grandly assure the world that "This war, like all wars, must end." That's what liberals have been wanting to do since about ten minutes after 9/11. But the president wants to hedge his bet. For political reasons, if nothing else, he wants to be sure that there isn't a repetition of 9/11. So there will be no end to the war at the NSA.
If the president wants to end the war on terror while keeping the intelligence apparatus on a full wartime footing, it's a problem, according to Walter Russell Mead.

Here's the big problem: to the degree that the strategy works, and the public begins to feel safe and the war atmosphere fades, the intelligence work and the drone strikes that the strategy requires look less and less justifiable. After all, the President's message is that the threat is under control and the terrorists are on the run. Why then is the NSA tapping every phone and reading every email in the country?

If the war has ended, there is no justification for massive and intrusive eavesdropping on Americans any more. No war emergency means no need for emergency war powers.
Of course, it could be that the NSA really needs all that signal intelligence to detect the bad guys. Or it could be that it's much easier for intelligence agency bureaucrats to build huge computer databases and huge data-mining operations rather than do the difficult and dangerous job of identifying and penetrating terrorist cells.
There is another reason to curtail emergency powers in peace time. It is that the government will find a reason to use its powers. To a politician, a domestic opponent is just as much of a threat as a foreign enemy. That's what the IRS scandal is all about. Normally, the IRS agents would be sitting around counting the days until retirement and merely going through the motions of vetting 501(c) applications. But if there's a war, I mean an election, to be won, that's different.
So as sure as eggs is eggs, the government will end up using the NSA data for the harassment of its domestic opponents. Unless we stop it now.
It's lucky that we have the IRS scandal right before our eyes, otherwise the MSM would tell us that we ought to trust the government, and reject those voices that warn that "tyranny is always lurking just around the corner." According to President Obama: "If people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress, and don't trust federal judges, to make sure that we're abiding by the Constitution with due process and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here."
You can see the president's point. If everyone was skeptical of government then pretty soon it wouldn't be able to do anything, not even run a bankrupt pension plan, educate kids badly, or keep the poor in multigenerational dependency. How then could an honest politician buy votes?
If you want to understand the Obama administration and the Obama scandals you should start with James C. Scott and Seeing Like a State. Jonah Goldberg says that Seeing "left a lasting impression" on him; it certainly did on me.
All governments, according to Scott, want to make their people "legible" so that they can be taxed and controlled. That is why we have censuses and income taxes; they make us "legible." So governments always want to collect more data on their subjects. The collection of cellphone "metadata" is merely the ultimate project in legibility.
Here's a concurring view from James J. Sheehan's German History 1770-1866, that I discuss in "Government and the Technology of Power."

Money -- for whatever purpose -- was the dominant force behind the construction of the modern state... To support their courts and pay their soldiers, rulers needed a steady, inexhaustible supply of income... Taxation required that rulers penetrate their territories more deeply than ever before, and thereby cut through or circumvent the web of institutions separating them from their subjects.

The only real job for a government is to make war on enemies, foreign and domestic, but liberals don't want to make war on foreign enemies, and they don't want to enforce the law on domestic enemies, the common criminals. Yet government must have a war, otherwise it can't justify its power and its expense. So liberals look around them for something to fight, and the first thing they see is corporations, conservatives, gun owners, Chick Fil-A.. And it sure would help to have all that NSA metadata.
We have met the liberals' enemy, and he is us.

[Uncle Han]

The Education Bubble Has Burst

By Frank Ryan


The student loan debate in Congress is bringing to the forefront the student loan crisis plaguing our nation, as well as the financial instability of academic institutions in the United States.

Relative to the student loan crisis, the New York Federal Reserve concluded in its 2012 report that the obligations for student loans total approximately $1 trillion, or approximately $25,000 per graduate.

The report notes that there are over 15 million borrowers under the age of 30, while the total number of borrowers is almost 39,000,000. The delinquency rates on the loans range between 10% to 20% for the various age categories.

Surprisingly, the report indicates that there are 2.2 million borrowers over the age of 60, with an average balance due of $19,000. The delinquency rate for these borrowers is approximately 12%.

Concurrent with the higher student loan balances, college enrollment rates for students have declined 2.3% in 2013 compared to 2012. This decline is the first downward trend in enrollment in decades.

There are many factors which have contributed to the decline in college enrollment. Major factors include rapidly increasing tuitions, higher unemployment rates for recent graduates, and the debilitating effects of student loan repayments on students and their parents.

The 21st century is the first time in our nation's history in which the parents have had student loan debts and obligations and now have children considering entering college. The experiences of these parents as well as the debt obligations themselves have discouraged their children from incurring too much debt.

Additionally, tuition increases for the period 2001 to 2011 have averaged 42% for public institutions and 31% for private institutions. Such increases have significantly outpaced increases in income for the families supporting students as well as for the students themselves. The net result is that the affordability index for college, meaning the ability to pay relative to income and funds available for education, is widening and making colleges relatively more expensive than they were decades ago.

Concurrently, Moody's in 2013 gave a negative financial outlook for all universities. Recent studies have indicated that over 50% of all colleges and universities are projected to close, merge, or shut down in the next 50 years.

The consolidation, failure, and decline have already started, and the pace will accelerate.

The causes of the insolvency for universities include:

• Continued escalation in college tuitions and fees compared to the overall rate of inflation.
• Limited growth in incomes of parents and students in recent years and continued high levels of unemployment of graduates.
• Extensive outstanding student loan debt already amounting to $1 trillion.
• Development of alternative education systems such as remote classes and internet systems.
• Growing debt of colleges and universities.
• Extraordinarily high fixed costs of colleges and universities, making the education system very susceptible to losses from reduced enrollment.
• Growing trend to "discount" tuition at major universities. This is very similar to the problem that faced hospitals with "contractual allowances."

The sum of all these factors will cause a collapse of the education systems as we know it.

Obviously, schools that are well-funded and well-endowed will be little affected by this change.

However, marginally profitable schools, or schools with high debt loads which depend upon taxpayer support, will find survival difficult at best.

The economic realignment of education will occur due to the factors above, such that the following will most likely take place in the next five to ten years.

First, to stem declining enrollment, tuition will decrease. Schools will struggle to maintain enrollment and in order to cover their fixed cost will be forced to reduce tuitions to encourage students and enrollment.

Second, faculty tenure and burgeoning cost of academic instruction will come under question and will be changed. While existing tenured faculty will probably not be affected, the probability of getting tenure for other professors will be significantly more difficult, except at well-funded academic institutions. Pay will likely decline as well.

Third, entire educational institutions will begin to file bankruptcy. There has already been a major bankruptcy of a university in Atlanta, Georgia. Other institutions that are not well-funded will meet the same fate.

Fourth, it is very obvious that academia will be forced to justify its cost relative to the value garnered from the education. This will be one of the first times in history that the value of education relative to the cost will come under scrutiny.

The education bubble has burst! It appears that it is only the university and government that do not understand the magnitude of the problem.

Parents and students alike are demanding accountability and results. Once the system has been critically scrutinized by educators, students, taxpayers, and parents, improvements and cost reductions will finally be achieved. The result will be a much stronger academic environment once the "cleansing" process has been completed.

[Uncle Han]

SURPRISE, Ariz. (CBS Cleveland) — Arizona authorities charge a man for driving under the influence despite him blowing a .000 on a breathalyzer test.
KNXV-TV reports that 64-year-old Jessie Thornton – a native of Ohio – was recently pulled over by Surprise police after he recently left an LA Fitness gym. Thornton then says the officer accused him of driving drunk.
“He walked up and he said ‘I can tell you’re driving DUI by looking in your eyes,’” Thornton told KNXV.
Thornton was then given a sobriety test.
“I take my glasses off and he says, ‘You’ve got bloodshot eyes.’ I said, ‘I’ve been swimming at LA Fitness,’ and he says, ‘I think you’re DUI,’” said Thornton. “He goes, ‘Well we’re going to do a sobriety test.’ I said, ‘OK, but I got bad knees and a bad hip with surgery in two days.’”
Documents obtained by KNXV shows that Thornton did have hip replacement surgery shortly after his arrest.
After the sobriety test, Thornton was handcuffed and placed on the curb.
“I couldn’t even sit on the ground like that and they knew it and I was like laying on the ground, then they put me in the back of an SUV and when I asked the officer to move her seat up because my hip hurt she told me to stop whining,” Thornton explained to KNXV.
At the station, Thornton took a breathalyzer test and was examined by a drug recognition expert. The breathalyzer test came back .000 and the tests done by the drug recognition expert showed no signs of drug abuse.
“After he did all the tests, he says, ‘I would never have arrested you, you show no signs of impairment,’” Thornton told KNXV.
RELATED: Police: Drugs Sent To Perez’s House Addressed To Dog
Despite the DUI charge being dropped, his car was impounded. He is now suing the City of Surprise for half a million dollars.
“This is a case of D-W-B, driving while black,” Marc Victor, Thornton’s attorney, told KNXV.
The Surprise Police Department did not comment on the case.

[Whirlaway]

One element of the Limbaugh Theorem.

[WTF]

Originally Posted by Uncle Han

The Education Bubble Has Burst



Concurrently, Moody's in 2013 gave a negative financial outlook for all universities. Recent studies have indicated that over 50% of all colleges and universities are projected to close, merge, or shut down in the next 50 years.

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Somebody needs to explain this to Tea Turd JD Cornhole. He should have stayed in the Navy, his government teet teaching job is on the decline.

[Guest040616]

Originally Posted by WTF

Somebody needs to explain this to Tea Turd JD Cornhole.

You can tell by JD's responses that explaining something to him, and actually getting through are not the same thing.

[Uncle Han]

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[Uncle Han]

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[Uncle Han]

[Uncle Han]

[Uncle Han]

[Uncle Han]

[Uncle Han]

[Guest040616]

Originally Posted by Seeker

Just wasted 2 minutes of my life trying to read this shit

+1,000