Happy Stella!
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My wife tells me a problem and I try to solve it and it drives her up the wall because all she wants is for me to listen so I now have this video to show her:http://vimeo.com/66753575
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Sent to me by a dear friend and educator: "This documentary on Frontline features one of Louisville's projects, the equivalent of Frazier Homes in Savannah.
The most staggering figure, and one we cited constantly is:
$80,000+ per year to incarcerate a child and climbing... yet the school district balks at spending around $9,000 per child per year on school. Prisons are for-profit entities with lobbyists... what about schools?
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The Benghazi Lie should disqualify Hillary from further public office but then that was the case over 30 years ago. She lied then, she lies now and therein lies the story of Hillary. (See 1 below.)
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Obama has accomplished, again, what he did not seek. I suspect he may now use it to create more warfare between haves and have nots. (See 2 below.)
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Thinking outside the box can produce solutions but government bureaucrats are too boxed in by rigid rules, and regulations (red tape) and fear of retribution if they do so.
And, perhaps, Obama does not wish to hurt his friend Putin or his reset relationship?
Of course the the Liberal solution is spend more more, bigger government and deficits! (See 3 below.)
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My missile is bigger than your missile. Take note Obama! (See 4 below.)
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My missile is bigger than your missile. Take note Obama! (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)The Missing Benghazi Email
New evidence that Ben Rhodes told Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton to blame the video.
Most of the media refuses to cover what happened in Benghazi in 2012, and Congressional Republicans have been less than skillful in their probes. But the story isn't going away despite the best efforts of the Obama Administration and the Hillary for President campaign.
The latest revelation comes from White House emails in the days after the September 11, 2012 terrorist strike on the U.S. mission in Libya's second largest city. These emails weren't included last year in what the Administration claimed was a complete set of documents about its handling of the attack and its aftermath. They were released Tuesday after the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request. We can see why the Administration tried to keep them under wraps.
Opinion Video
Editorial Board Member Matt Kaminski on newly uncovered emails which show that the White House prioritized political spin over truth-telling after four Americans were killed in Benghazi, Libya. Photo credit: Getty Images.
A September 14, 2012 email from Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, sets out the Administration's view of the cause of the Benghazi attacks. He wrote it to prepare U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. and current national security adviserSusan Rice for her appearances on the Sunday news shows two days later. As Mr. Rhodes wrote, the Administration wanted her "to underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy."
In fact the attack on the diplomatic compound and CIA annex was a planned and well-coordinated assault by Islamist groups with ties to al Qaeda that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. Within hours, State and CIA officials at the Embassy in Tripoli, Libya's president and video footage made that clear. Yet the Administration settled on deceptive spin and stuck to it for over a week.
Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, on Sept. 14 blamed the attack on a spontaneous protest against an obscure anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube. Two days later, Ms. Rice returned repeatedly to the video in her appearances on the Sunday shows, saying on Fox News that "what sparked the recent violence was the airing on the Internet of a very hateful, very offensive video that has offended many people around the world."
Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary ClintonAFP/Getty Images
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also pushed the video fiction, telling the public on Sept. 14 at Andrews Air Force base as the remains of the four dead were returned that, "We have seen rage and violence directed at American Embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with."
The White House also found a scapegoat in the intelligence community, blaming the CIA for drawing up the faulty "talking points" used by Administration officials. Last May it released drafts of emails from the CIA, with input from State and the White House, that spontaneous protests had "evolved into a direct assault." Yet those talking points never mentioned a video, and earlier this month former acting CIA Director Mike Morell said he didn't understand why Ms. Rice had mentioned it.
Mr. Rhodes's email provides the answer. The message directive came directly from the White House and was followed to the word. Mr. Rhodes alluded to the video in five spots in his email. On Wednesday, Mr. Carney still insisted Ms. Rice had "relied on points about the Benghazi attack that were produced by the CIA." He must think the press corps is stupid.
The Rhodes email shows a White House political operative trying to protect his boss two months before Election Day. Mr. Obama's campaign said al Qaeda was on the run and it was time for "nation-building at home." The terror attack on Americans in Benghazi didn't fit this story. It did, however, expose the "broader failure of policy" (to use Mr. Rhodes's phrase) in North Africa in the wake of the Arab political upheavals in 2011.
After the election, the Administration was slow to cooperate with congressional investigations. The "talking points" emails were released last May only after parts were leaked to the press. The Rhodes email was subpoenaed last August, but the White House blocked release until it seemed obvious it would lose its attempts to keep them secret.
All of this bears directly on Mrs. Clinton's qualifications to be President. Her State Department overlooked repeated warnings about a growing militant threat in Benghazi, denying requests for improved security. And the father of a CIA contractor told media outlets that Mrs. Clinton tried to comfort him by promising that the maker of the YouTube video would be "prosecuted and arrested," though the video had nothing to do with his son's death.
The several congressional investigations into Benghazi have been undermined by turf battles and shoddy work. We long ago advised that a select committee could focus the effort and bring overdue clarity to a shameful episode in American history. It still could.
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2) The Coming Two-Tier Health System
ObamaCare is already creating one class of care for the poor and middle class and another for the affluent.
By Scott Atlas
With the unveiling of the Affordable Care Act's website, the public experienced a painful reminder of the consequences of the government's new authority over health care. While millions signed up for insurance, millions of others abruptly lost their existing coverage and access to their doctors because that coverage didn't fit new ObamaCare definitions.
The health-care law was generated by an administration promoting government as the solution to inequality, yet the greatest irony of ObamaCare is what will undoubtedly follow as a long-term, unintended consequence of the law: a decidedly unequal, two-tiered health system. One will be for the poor and middle class, and a separate system will be for those with the money or power to circumvent ObamaCare.
With the Affordable Care Act, the government has dramatically expanded its authority as final arbiter over health insurance and consequently over access to medical care. After the law's Medicaid expansion and with the population aging into Medicare eligibility, the 107 million under Medicaid or Medicare in 2013 will skyrocket to 135 million five years later, growing far faster than the ranks of the privately insured.
David Klein
Add to that centralization of power the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), ObamaCare's group of political appointees tasked with reducing payments to doctors and hospitals. Even Howard Dean, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, warned that "The IPAB is essentially a health-care rationing body. By setting doctor reimbursement rates for Medicare and determining which procedures and drugs will be covered and at what price, the IPAB will be able to stop certain treatments its members do not favor by simply setting rates to levels where no doctor or hospital will perform them."
The hidden truth is just around the corner—those more dependent on public insurance, mostly the poor and middle class, will have limited access to medical care. About one-third of primary-care physicians and one-fourth of specialists have already completely closed their practices to Medicaid patients. Over 52% of physicians have already limited the access that Medicare patients have to their practices, or are planning to, according to a 2012 survey by Merritt Hawkins for the Physicians Foundation. More doctors than ever already refuse Medicaid and Medicare due to inadequate payments for care, and that trend will only accelerate as government lowers reimbursements.
At the same time, ObamaCare is squeezing out the middle class from affordable private insurance that correlates with far better disease outcomes than government insurance. By bloating coverage requirements and minimizing the consideration of risks fundamental to pricing insurance, the law has already increased premiums by 20%-200% in more than 40 states, according to a 2013 analysis by the Manhattan Institute's Avik Roy and others.
Less widely known is that inadequate reimbursement by government insurance to doctors substantially increases private-insurance prices. According to a December 2008 Milliman report presented by Will Fox and John Pickering, a shortfall of more than $88 billion in payments from Medicaid and Medicare beneficiaries added more than $1,500 extra a year in premiums and $1,800 extra in total out-of-pocket costs to every family of four with private insurance. With increasing enrollment into government insurance, private premiums will undoubtedly rise even more.
Even inside Medicare, two-tiered access will occur. Under political pressure in advance of this fall's midterm elections, the administration backed off from the ObamaCare plan to eliminate affordable private drug-coverage options inside Medicare, options that all Medicare beneficiaries enjoyed before the law. These substantial cuts will likely return post-election, limiting those choices to more-affluent seniors.
Despite the government's assertion that the health-care law increases insurance choices, the ObamaCare exchanges do the opposite for those dependent on them and the government subsidies they offer. The average number of plans offered in individual states has decreased from 117 in 2013 to 41 in the new exchanges; consumers in 16 states now suddenly have their choices limited to three or fewer insurers.
ObamaCare is also eliminating access to many of the best specialists and the hospitals for middle-income Americans. To meet the law's requirements, major insurers are declining to participate in the exchanges, or only offering plans that restrict choice of doctors and exclude many of America's best hospitals. McKinsey reported a marked narrowing of hospital networks on the ObamaCare exchanges: In 2013, 33% of individual insurance offerings contained narrow or very narrow networks, but this year under the exchanges 68% of options cover only those limited networks.
For cancer care, the overwhelming majority of America's best hospitals in the National Comprehensive Cancer Network—including MD Anderson Cancer Center of Houston, New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Barnes Hospital in St. Louis, and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance uniting doctors from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, UW Medicine and Seattle Children's—are not covered in most of their states' exchange plans.
Meanwhile, concierge practices are increasing rapidly, as patients who can afford it, along with many top doctors, rush to avoid the problems of an increasingly restrictive health system. The American Academy of Private Physicians estimates that there are now about 4,400 concierge physicians, 30% more than last year. In a recent Merritt Hawkins survey, about 7% to 10% of physicians planned to transition to concierge or cash-only practices in the next one to three years. With doctors already spending 22% of their time on nonclinical paperwork, they will find more government intrusion under ObamaCare regulations taking even more time away from patient care.
As America doubles down on government authority over health care, Europeans with the means to do so are increasingly circumventing their own centralized systems. In Britain, even though they're already paying for the National Health Service, six million Brits—two-thirds of citizens earning more than $78,700—now buy private health insurance. Meanwhile, more than 50,000 travel out of the U.K. annually, spending more than $250 million, to receive treatment more readily than they can at home. Even in Sweden, the mother of all welfare nations, half a million Swedes now use private insurance, up from 100,000 a decade ago.
Unless ObamaCare is drastically altered, America's health care will also become even more divided, with rising inequality. Just as in the U.K. and other countries where governments take an outsize role in dictating health-care policy, only the lower and middle classes in America will suffer the full consequences of ObamaCare.
Dr. Atlas is a physician and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
Weaken Putin With a Russian Brain Drain
With Russia already suffering from capital flight amid economic sanctions and rising tensions over the Ukraine conflict, the U.S. has another option for ratcheting up financial pressure on the Putin regime: Start a brain drain too.
Call it an "anti-sanctions" approach. Blacklisting individuals and companies closely tied to Vladimir Putin is fine, but let's also open America's doors to Russia's best and brightest. The instruments to do so are a pair of special U.S. visas that already exist—the O-1A and the EB-5.
The O-1A is a special visa for individuals of "extraordinary ability" in the sciences, education and business. It entitles them to reside and work for three years, can be followed by an unlimited number of one-year extensions, and often leads to citizenship. There is a parallel O-3 visa routinely issued to the spouses and children of O-1A holders, as well as O-1B visas for artists and entertainers. But these visas are now issued slowly, grudgingly, with only 22,080 O-visas of all types issued in 2013, and they usually require heaps of testimonials to prove extraordinary ability.
The Kremlin and St. Basil?s Cathedral in Moscow.Corbis
But President Obama, who is not averse to using executive orders to shape legal matters more to his liking, could simply issue an executive order declaring that in the case of citizens of the Russian Federation, an advanced degree—a doctorate or its equivalent—would suffice for an O-1A visa. If O-1A visas were available to Russians on a large scale, the present outflow of talent from the country, already in the thousands, would likely become a flood. President Putin can ill afford the loss of talent, and the U.S. economy would benefit. If America presented such a visa offer, it would also neatly expose the false depiction of the U.S. as hostile to the Russian people—a theme of Mr. Putin's recent speeches and of the entire Kremlin propaganda apparatus.
Presidential easing of visa rules is hardly unprecedented. On Jan. 19, 2012, for example, Mr. Obama issued Executive Order 13597 streamlining tourist visas and visitor-entry procedures, a measure taken to promote the travel and tourism industry. Surely he could do something similar to help address a crisis that threatens world order.
The other weapon at Mr. Obama's disposal is the EB-5 visa. The EB-5 is for immigrants who invest money in the U.S. It entitles recipients to immediate permanent-resident "Green Card" status, but in spite of the great volume of foreign investment into the U.S. only 50,141 such visas were issued in 2013 because of complicated and unnecessary employment requirements. If, for example, EB-5 visas were issued on demand to any citizen of the Russian Federation with a clean criminal record and with $5 million deposited in the U.S., the capital outflow from Russia, already reliably estimated in the tens of billions so far this year, would almost certainly spike further—again, to the detriment of Mr. Putin and to America's benefit.
Instituting these "anti-sanctions" would be a dramatic move, likely far more effective than any other action now feasible, and Mr. Obama could do it quickly on his own. But he shouldn't expect much criticism from Congress—this is one kind of immigration reform everyone can support.
Mr. Luttwak is the author, most recently, of "The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy" (Harvard, 2012).
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4) The Mideast Missile Race
4) The Mideast Missile Race
The Saudis parade ballistic missiles for the first time.
Saudi Arabia's rulers capped a large military exercise on Tuesday by publicly parading their ballistic missiles for the first time. The King of Bahrain, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Kuwait's Defense Minister and the Pakistani Chief of Army Staff were also in attendance, according to Jane's Defense Weekly. Don't think they weren't trying to send a message.
The weapon on display was the DF-3, a 1960s-era Chinese missile with a range of 1,500 miles and a 4,400-pound payload. The missiles aren't known for accuracy, but parading them at all is a signal that the Kingdom can strike an adversary far outside its borders. Tehran is some 800 miles from the Saudi capital of Riyadh. The Saudis haven't disclosed how many of the DF-3 missiles they have, but Jane's reports that the number is believed to be between 30 and 120.
The missile display is one more sign of the Middle East arms race that is already well underway. As the U.S. retreats from the region, and Iran advances to the edge of acquiring a nuclear weapon, the Saudis no longer trust U.S. security guarantees. They are looking to arm themselves lest Iran use what everyone will understand is a nuclear-breakout capacity to demand concessions from its neighbors.
Ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads will become the preferred method of deterrence. The Saudis have broadcast their close ties to their fellow Sunni Muslims in Pakistan who already have a nuclear weapon. They will be able to buy warheads if they want to. Egypt, Turkey and perhaps some other Gulf states will inevitably try to acquire their own nuclear deterrent as well, with the missiles to deliver it.
Americans—and President Obama's strategists—may want to believe that this isn't our problem. But a world of proliferating ballistic missiles and nuclear powers will become our problem soon enough.
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