If you doubt for one moment the power of money and its control over whether or not our nation will grant the human right of healthcare to all, just look at who has been arrested speaking up for publicly funded, privately delivered healthcare in the past 90 days:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/08/04-8
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A former Blackwater employee and an ex-US Marine who has worked as a security operative for the company have made a series of explosive allegations in sworn statements filed on August 3 in federal court in Virginia. The two men claim that the company's owner, Erik Prince ("an American hero just like Ollie North was"), may have murdered or facilitated the murder of individuals who were cooperating with federal authorities investigating the company. The former employee also alleges that Prince "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," and that Prince's companies "encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life."
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090817/scahill
Surely this can't be true, as Prince went to Holland Christian High School, interned at Gary Bauer's Family Research Council (which his parents co-founded), and he serves as a board member of Christian Freedom International, a non-profit group with a mission of helping "Christians who are persecuted for their non-profit group with a mission of helping "Christians who are persecuted for their faith in Jesus Christ."
Fun fact: this is Erik's mother, Elsa:
She hates teh gay and was the 4th largest Prop 8 donor.
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4,330 soldiers killed in Iraq; 767 in Afghanistan.
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Don't tell me I'm wrong when I've got your balls in my pocket: http://casadelogo.typepad.com/factesque/2009/08/pigs-in-space-31-dont-tell-me-im-wrong-when-ive-got-your-balls-in-my-pocket.html
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Teabaggers II: http://griperblade.blogspot.com/2009/08/teabaggers-ii.html
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Barack Obama is a secret alien from Slzrd Star System
Orly Taitz
Patriotic Law Dentist
Dear Dr. Taitz,
Until late yesterday afternoon, I was convinced that you had discovered Obama's original Kenyan birth certificate. Heck, I bought it completely. I had to...I had to believe it--that's what having faith is all about.
It did not matter that it was issued by the Republic of Kenya a year before that nation existed. That's easily explained by time travel. Hugo Chavez developed it a few years ago and used it to to clean up the Clintons' murders of Vince Foster, Liberace, and 763 people in Mena, Arkansas. Apparently, he also conspired with Obama to change African history as well.
Anyway, like I said, I believed your document to be absolutely genuine up until the moment, yesterday afternoon, when a one-armed man showed me an even more genuine birth certificate in a Nashville area Waffle House.
I was skeptical at first. It didn't look like any government document I'd ever seen. But then the man explained that it was an alien (not the kind of alien Lou Dobbs says gives us the leprosy--the other ones; the ones from space) document. He said that Obama's mother was actually a reptillian alien from Slzrd Star System.
Then he went on to translate the document, and it all made sense. You see, it was signed by George Soros. That's what convinced me. It's just the kind of thing Soros would do. He's like that. I have to believe that. It's a matter of faith.
Here's a photo of the document. I've annotated it with the translation: http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2009/08/barak-obama-is-secret-alien-from-slzrd.html
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Top 20 Largest Cases of Companies Caught For Committing Fraud Against the Government
Companies commit fraud against the US and State governments constantly. They run a simple calculation based on the chance of getting caught and how much they can earn in the short term. These companies ran the numbers, took their chances, got caught and paid through the nose.
1) Tenet Healthcare -- $900,000,000 under the False Claims Act
In July 2006, Tenet Healthcare (formerly known as NME, see #9 on this list) agreed to pay the Federal Government $900 million for billing violations that include manipulation of outlier payments to Medicare, as well as kickbacks, upcoding, and bill padding. The DoJ press release notes that the settlement was based on the company's ability to pay; a nice way of saying that Tenet stole more money than was recovered in this settlement.
2) HCA -- $731,400,000 under the False Claims Act
In December 2000, HCA The Healthcare Company (formerly known as Columbia HCA), the largest for-profit hospital chain in the United States, pled guilty to criminal conduct and agreed to pay more than $840 million in criminal fines, civil penalties and damages for unlawful billing practices. Of this amount, $731,400,000 was recovered under the False Claims Act. Under the settlement agreement, HCA's payment will resolve five allegations regarding the manner in which it bills the U.S. government and the states for health care costs. HCA 's frauds on the taxpaying public included: billing for lab tests that were not medically necessary and not ordered by physicians, "upcoding" medical problems in order to get higher reimbursements for more serious medical issues, billing the government for advertising under the guise of "community education," and billing the government for non-reimbursable costs incurred in the purchase of home health agencies around the country. Note that the December 2000 agreement does not resolve allegations that HCA unlawfully charged the U.S. Government for the costs of running its hospitals, and that it paid kickbacks to physicians to get Medicare and Medicaid patients referred to its facilities.
Go and read the rest here.
Billions of dollars paid in fines that could have been used to save people's lives and ease their suffering.
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Thank God we have no meaningful gun control laws
>Silent gunman's Pa. health club shooting kills 5. An armed man strolled to the back of an exercise class at a health club in suburban Pittsburgh on Tuesday night and then pulled out two guns and started spraying bullets, leaving five people dead, including himself, and injuring at least 10 others, police and a hospital said.
And you know that tomorrow the GOP will be lined up again saying that we need more guns to protect us from the people with guns.
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What Eugene Robinson has to say about the birthers.
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There are, sadly, a lot of Birthers out there. A recent poll showed that 11 percent of Americans - including 28 percent of Republicans - don't believe President Obama was born in the U.S. Another 12 percent aren't sure.
So, at some point, you're likely to find out that a friend or relative is a birther. Your Uncle Floyd will forward you a chain e-mail that says Obama was actually born in Kenya and there's a Kenyan birth certificate that proves it and hundreds of government officials and reporters are in on a conspiracy to hide the truth of his ineligibility for the presidency from the public. And you will wonder: How can I possibly deal with all the falsehoods in this e-mail without disappearing down a rabbit hole?
Well, wonder no more. In the spirit of public service, Salon has compiled this list of the most popular Birther myths, along with all the debunking you could ever ask for. Now you can just e-mail this list to Uncle Floyd and get on with your life.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/08/05/birther_faq/
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Disgraced Bush-era U.S. attorney still drawing government paycheck
At the height of the crony Bush Justice Department era, the President appointed a 33-year-old attorney named Rachel Paulose, whose sole qualifications for the job appeared to be personal connections to high-ranking Justice Department officials, as the U.S. Attorney in Minnesota. Her tenure was an unmitigated disaster. Paulose mishandled classified information, retaliated against employees who were "disloyal," and she "allegedly denigrated one employee of the office, using the terms 'fat,' 'black,' 'lazy' and 'ass.'" At one point, four of her top lieutenants voluntarily demoted themselves in protest of her mismanagement of the office. Nevertheless, Paulose has somehow found a new job representing the United States in court. According to Main Justice, Paulose was hired last March as a senior trial counsel in the SEC's Miami regional office. In light of her poor employment history, it's unclear why Paulose was able to get this job now that her close friend Monica Goodling is no longer calling the shots.
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The most trusted name in news
Continuing to wave goodbye to its integrity, CNN decides it will not run an ad criticizing Lou "whitey" Dobbs' birther claims.
The Media Matters ad was scheduled to run beginning Tuesday, including during "Lou Dobbs Tonight," the LATimes reported. However, the newspaper said, CNN issued a statement Monday saying it would not air the ad.
"CNN retains the right to object to any ad run by the cable operator on our network whose purpose is to attack CNN or our employees," the statement said.
"Even though said employees may be idiots," it didn't add.
h/t Dick
Unemployment still at 10+% out there? Hope you all have something to keep these folks busy. That is besides what they do best.
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-prisons5-2009aug05,0,774809.story?track=rss
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