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POPSUS Health Tech for Licensing - Interested? Our tax dollars pay for all sorts of inventions, research, etc. All of it may be licensed and sold for a profit and/or improved upon. These are healthcare related - so there is one on a different treatment for AIDS and another for a different way to isolate viruses for vaccine production. Not exactly money for nothing but one of the users reading this might be in the market - eh?
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POPSBlackwater:Ain't Misbehaving, Saving My Contracts for You
Of course the US government was blind to this - they didn't want to know, they turned a blind eye to what Blackwater was doing because it would have been too hard to arrange for another contractor to do all the security missions that it had ongoing. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, there are as many private contractors as there are uniformed military personnel. Most of them are not security guards as Blackwater's most visible function was. The lack of oversight is abhorrent but not surprising; the State Dept's failure to can this company is inexcusable. My only observation on this article is to suggest how the US government got into this predicament, and it's pretty easy to see. The Bush administration wanted to hold onto the fiction of a few conservative principles, one of those being the concept of a small federal government. Since it already blew that "principle" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, I'm betting there was White House guidance that directed "no mo
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POPSThe US House of Presumptive Meddlers Advocates of government control want you to believe that the serious shortcomings of our medical and insurance system are failures of the free market. But that's impossible because our market is not free. Each state operates a cozy medical and insurance cartel that restricts competition through licensing and keeps prices higher than they would be in a genuine free market. But the planners won't talk about that. After all, if government is the problem in the first place, how can they justify a government takeover?
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POPSPOLITICAL AFFILIATION BY SOCIO-ECONOMIC STATUS If one’s mind-set is rooted in the new liberalism, one tends not to be materialistically successful. If one is unsuccessful, one is likely to support intermedling state authority in the hope that through government management, he or she will be provided for by economic-leveling. Those who support "progressive" government, hope to escape their personal ineffectiveness. Those who are intellectually advanced, do not support the advancement of centralized power that encroaches upon, and diminishes their liberty.
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POPSDreams Die Hard
Within the context of conventional party politics - the kind that has been baseline "normal" in the USA for a long time - we see this playing out in two factions that are increasingly out-of-touch with reality. The Obama government has made itself hostage to a toxic form of pretense and lying. In order to sustain the wish for "hope" - if not hope itself - the President and his White House advisors along with his cabinet appointments, are pretending that the historical forces of compressive contraction are not underway. They're flat-out lying about the employment figures issued in the government's name. They're willfully ignoring the comprehensive bankruptcy gripping government at all levels. They refuse to bring the law to bear against "the malefactors of great wealth." They appear to not understand the epochal energy scarcity problem the whole world faces, or its implications for industrial economies. Most of all, they persist in promoting the lie that this economy can return t
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POPSFannie & Freddie NOT included in Obama's Financial Regulations In analyzing the mortgage crisis, economist Walter E. Williams has written: “Starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, that was given more teeth during the Clinton administration, Congress started intimidating banks and other financial institutions into making loans, so-called sub-prime loans, to high-risk homebuyers and businesses. “The carrot offered was that these high-risk loans would be purchased by the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have known that this was a prescription for disaster but there was a congressional chorus of denial,” he added. “The financial collapse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is not a failure of the free market because lending institutions in a free market would not have taken on the high-risk loans,” said Williams. “They were forced to by the heavy hand of government.”
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POPSMSNBC: Gun-Toting Protesters are 'White' Racists... Black Guy with AR-15 Edited to Conceal his Race. Bill Wilson, president of Americans for Limited Government, is now calling on the network to fire those responsible for producing the broadcast, in what he describes as a "nefarious assault on decency." "On behalf of the nearly half million members of Americans for Limited Government — and tens of millions of other equally appalled Americans of all races nationwide — I hereby demand the immediate termination of Contessa Brewer, Toure, Dylan Ratigan and any and all others involved in any way with the fraudulent news that ran in the 10:45AM segment of your August 18 broadcast." Wilson sent the letters to NBC News President Steve Capus and GE / MSNBC president Jeffrey Immelt. Link to the letter: http://tinyurl.com/klyxtc More at http://www.newsbusters.org
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POPSThe Lords of Entitlement They WILL subjugate us. They do not represent us; they have, indeed, become our "lords". We work for Washington. The American people have entered a new era of serfdom and slavery. The action in the Senate on this bill and the 2010 elections are our last hopes.
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POPSPages, Costs, and Agencies Added To The Obama/Pelosi Health Care Behemoth
“Additionally, this bill cuts critical Medicare and Medicaid funding by $628 billion, accounts for nearly $1.2 trillion in tax and fee increases and will explode the scope of government by putting the nation’s health care system in the hands of Washington bureaucrats. The $3 trillion price tag defies common sense " we simply cannot add all this new spending to the government rolls and claim to control the deficit. “If we continue to pile more and more debt on the next generation, they will never be able to get out from under it. The health care system needs reform, but this massive expansion of government, financed by our children and grandchildren, is the wrong way to proceed.” And listen…this is what our government believes will be the cost. But look at programs our government has run historically and you find decades of added costs and overruns that our forced onto the taxpayer. Insanity http://www.bizzyblog.com/2009/11/07/how-to-go-from-1200-to-2000-pages/
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POPSGovernment health care rescues protesters at anti-government health care rally. By the end of the day, “medics had administered government-run health care to at least five people in the crowd who were stricken as they denounced government-run health care.” Bachmann=proof that being severely developmentally and emotionally delayed does not preclude Government service. Ironically, she's the best argument that the government should not be running anything.
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POPSDeadly Drugs (Infomation is Beautiful) Last week, the government has sacked its most senior drugs advisor, Dr Professor Nutt, after he claimed cannabis was no more harmful than alcohol. And that horse-riding was riskier than taking ecstasy.
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POPSBarbara Ehrenreich: The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up More: According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the government was misled by these companies, which failed to report manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was "relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that those numbers were overly rosy." If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens, though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the public's health, and that is, of course, profit…
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POPSShhhh! Census Worker May Have Committed Suicide * The Democratic Underground quickly posted a ‘Handy Guide to how Republicans and Fox News are responsible for Census worker being hanged'. * Rachel Maddow suggested Sparkman was killed simply because ‘he was a federal employee'. * Time chalked it up to government distrust, a sentiment fanned by ‘talk media, tea parties and white-hot town-hall meetings'. * The Huffington Post immediately assumed this was a case of right-wing paranoia. * True/Slant opined that the body of Sparkman should be shipped to Glenn Beck. * Think Progress pointed the finger at Michelle Bachman and her ‘inflammatory and fear-mongering rhetoric against the Census'. * New York Magazine linked the death to that of ‘some wide-eyed, hysterical woman' named Michelle Bachman. (The irony in this is that the reference to a wide-eyed, hysterical woman was made in an article mentioning Nancy Pelosi).
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POPSHated Roosevelt, Hate Obama: Paleoconservative Persuasions Nock saw the state as “them,” not “us,” and “them” really came to mean Roosevelt. You must know that Roosevelt was hated by many during the Great Depression. Not disliked, hated. The laissez faire crowd saw every move toward government relief of intolerable conditions as government self-aggrandizement—Nock’s term, not mine. Despite the fact that people were desperate in the streets, extreme-sport capitalists saw only usurpation of the powers of the church (as the precursor to the modern social relief agency) and the individual—that old fall-back, the rugged individual—Nock’s term, not mine. Professor Nock pulls no punches. With a Beckian flourish he proclaims, “This regime was established by a coup d'État of a new and unusual kind, practicable only in a rich country.” Yup. A coup d’etat. You almost want to ask for Mr. Roosevelt’s birth certificate. Nock’s antipathy to Roosevelt knew few boundaries. Perversely, Nock saw in the New Deal, “the erection of po
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POPSKeep the government out of the news business
Turning to Washington for help to save the declining news business says much about the mentality of mainstream journalism leaders, an attitude that we and the government are on the same side. This is the mentality that led to the news establishment’s acceptance of the Iraq War. Go to the clip to learn what happened to Mother Jones after becoming a tax exempt non-profit after it reported on lobbying in Washington. Once you allow the government or private corporation to have any controlling link to the media you lose independence. Editors become fearful of criticizing the hand that feeds it. Publishers and benefactors become cozy and unbiased reports become fewer and fewer. Journalism becomes a de facto advertisement for consumer products. We hope in the future we’ll see more I.F. Stones, more guerrilla warriors on the Web, in print and on the air. Because of them—and not because of a government handout—great reporting will survive, as it always has.
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POPS Uncle Sam’s Collections Continue Their Steep Drop It is ironic to say the least that Congress and the Obama administration are glorifying the idea of a “public option” that would ultimately lead to government-run health care while Treasury receipts continue to shrink. If the private health insurance market disappears, so will its taxes. To name just one example, Aetna’s recorded income tax expense on its financial statements for 2005-2008 (including state and local taxes) averaged roughly $900 million per year. Put the company’s health insurance segment out of business, and a large portion of those taxes would stop coming in, digging the country’s and various states’ debt holes that much deeper. The establishment press has paid very little attention to fiscal 2009’s drop of 19.5% in receipts from economic activity, so I expect similar treatment of October’s continuation of the trend. It would appear that they don’t want any unsettling news getting in the way of the statist agenda.
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POPSSaudi Royal Air Force carries strikes against Yemeni rebels The same dynamic has played out in various forms in Lebanon, where Iran supports the Shiite militant Hezbollah and Saudi Arabia favors a U.S.-backed faction, and in Iraq, where Saudi Arabia and Iran have thrown support to conflicting sides in the Sunni-Shiite struggle. A top Saudi government adviser confirmed "a large scale" military operation underway on the Saudi-Yemeni border with further reinforcements sent to the rugged, mountainous area. "It is a sustained operation which aims to finish this problem on our border," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. He said Saudi troops were coordinating with Yemen's army, but Yemen's defense ministry denied the Saudis were inside the country. The northern rebels, known as Hawthis, have been battling Yemeni government forces the past few months in the latest flare-up of a sporadic five-year conflict. They claim their needs are ignored by a Yemeni government that is increasingly allied wit
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POPSThe High Price of Nuclear Waste The federal government agreed in 1982 to provide a permanent site to deposit nuclear waste...and now, just like that, it's off the table & closed. MORE incompetency. He just jerked the rug out from under the nuclear power program and the nation's utilities are in a real financial bind..
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