This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden

  • Is Obamacare Being Scammed?

    This is another good article by Poetrooper.

    A recent article in the Miami Herald reports that if Obamacare is repealed, the Miami area will be one of the most highly impacted in the country due to the high number of enrollees there.  The article mentions five congressional districts and, true to the Herald’s reliably liberal slant, tries to make it look as though the three Republicans who are opposed to Obamacare are hurting their districts while the two Democrats are championing their federally insured voters.

    Four paragraphs into the article, my antennae were twitching, sensing related, possibly pertinent data from an earlier source.  A quick Google search proved the antennae still reliable, finding numerous articles describing Miami as the epicenter of Medicare fraud.  In fact, the problem is so extensive that Miami has the distinction of being the site of America’s first and largest federal Medicare Fraud Strike Force.  That information just naturally elicits a deepening suspicion of a correlation between such widespread corruption and the high utilization of Obamacare.

    Admittedly, the two programs are substantially different, but they are also similar in the most important way: they are federally mandated and heavily federally regulated.  It requires no special genius to conclude that criminal specialists in defrauding one federal health program just might be the same criminals to devise the means to criminally defraud another federal health program that in its infancy has far less policing oversight than an older, more established, and better regulated program like Medicare.  With even investigators at the Government Accountability Office admitting that Obamacare is susceptible to fraud through fictitious enrollments, such high utilization of Obamacare in the same areas where Medicare fraud is most prevalent begins to whiff of something more than coincidence.  One has to wonder just how many of those high numbers of Miami area enrollees exist only on paper.

    That, folks, is another good reason for getting the feds out of the health insurance business.

     

  • “Wet foot, dry foot” policy ends

    For decades, the US had a policy for Cuban immigrants that allowed them to remain in the US if they were able to make it our shores. According to CNN, that policy ended this week with the Obama Administration;

    “By taking this step, we are treating Cuban migrants the same way we treat migrants from other countries,” Obama wrote in a statement Thursday.

    “The United States, a land of immigrants, has been enriched by the contributions of Cuban-Americans for more than a century,” he continued. “Since I took office, we have put the Cuban-American community at the center of our policies. With this change we will continue to welcome Cubans as we welcome immigrants from other nations, consistent with our laws.”

    […]

    The US said Cuba had agreed as part of the announcement to accept migrants who were turned away from the United States back into the country.

    Havana has long argued the policy encourages Cubans to make the dangerous crossing from Cuba to Florida. Immigrants from other nations have argued the policy amounts to preferential treatment for one group.

    The decision was likely Obama’s last move in his historic dealings with Cuba. In 2014, he reopened ties to the island nation after a half-century of frozen diplomatic ties.

    “During my administration, we worked to improve the lives of the Cuban people — inside of Cuba — by providing them with greater access to resources, information and connectivity to the wider world,” Obama said. “Sustaining that approach is the best way to ensure that Cubans can enjoy prosperity, pursue reforms and determine their own destiny.”

    This is the same administration that encouraged millions of Central Americans to make the journey across our borders. The same political party that establishes “sanctuary cities” across the country to harbor those illegal immigrants. From what I understand, there are more Cubans in prison for political reasons today than there were before we “normalized” relations with them in 2014.

    “I think it’s a good idea,” said [Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont], long a proponent of thawing relations between the US and Cuba. “We were telling the rest of the world they were different, and I don’t think that was the right thing to do.”

    Yeah, Leahy smuggled sperm from a Cuban spy in a US prison to his wife in Cuba so they could conceive while the husband was in prison.

  • Military prefers Trump to Obama

    The US News and World Report noticed that active duty military folks will seemingly prefer their lives under Trump more than they liked serving Obama. Easy to figure, since their pay lost pace with inflation, they’re struggling with manpower shortages, training dollars are drying up, equipment is breaking and there’s no repair parts in the pipeline. But anyway;

    More than half the troops in a new poll had an unfavorable opinion of Obama’s leadership of the military for the past eight years, and about 36 percent said they approved of his performance as commander in chief, according to the latest survey by the Military Times and the Institute for Veterans and Military Families at Syracuse University.

    Nearly 49 percent of service members who voted in the November election cast their ballots for Republican Donald Trump, who was very critical of Obama, while 29 percent voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who was Obama’s secretary of state.

    […]

    The survey found that 29.1 percent of military personnel rated the president very unfavorably and 22.4 percent rated him somewhat unfavorably – 51.5 percent negative. Eighteen percent rated him very favorably and 18.4 percent somewhat favorably – 36.4 percent positive. About 12.1 percent were neutral.

    About 60 percent of women and 57 percent of minorities in the military approved of the job performance of Obama, the first African-American president.

    Probably comparable to statistics following the Carter and Clinton administrations. The troops aren’t blood thirsty – they just want the administration to shit or get off the pot. Either fight the wars or don’t. It’s impossible to do both at the same time like the Obama Administration has done for eight years.

    It makes you wonder how the IAVA and VoteVets could back sending Democrats in the White House while claiming that they support the troops – there’s a pattern here that someone might have missed.

  • Obama’s Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service

    Obama’s Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service

    Obama-Distinguished-Public-Service-Medal-Getty-640x480

    According to Breitbart, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter awarded the president the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service;

    Secretary Carter awarded his boss with the medal on January 4 during the Armed Forces Full Honor Farewell Review for the President held at Conmy Hall, Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Virginia.

    Carter insisted that the medal was a token of appreciation for Obama’s service as commander in chief, the Associated Press reported.

    Before anyone goes off into hyper-space ranting about this award, according to Wiki, Obama’s predecessors have also been awarded the medal.

    1280px-William_S__Cohen_presents_President_Clinton_the_Department_of_Defense_Medal_for_Distinguished_Public_Service

    US_Navy_090106-F-6655M-124_Secretary_of_Defense_Robert_M__Gates_awards_the_Department_of_Defense_Medal_for_Distinguished_Public_Service_to_President_George_W__Bush

    Ashton Carter has been awarded the medal. So, I guess it’s really no big deal – like the Nobel Prize.

  • 35 Russian diplomats ordered out of US

    35 Russian diplomats ordered out of US

    Fox News reports that the Obama Administration has imposed sanctions on the Russian diplomatic mission in the United States and they’ve ordered 35 Russian diplomats out of the country in the next 72 hours.

    The threat came after U.S. President Barack Obama on Thursday imposed sanctions on Russian officials and intelligence services over alleged Russian interference in the U.S. presidential election, as American political sites and email accounts were hacked. Thirty-five Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the U.S. in 72 hours and two facilities closed.

    Russia has continued to deny accusations by the U.S. that it hacked and stole emails in order to help Trump win. Trump commented on the matter saying the U.S. should move on. Trump is planning on meeting with U.S. intelligence leaders next week to learn more.

    Of course, Obama never would done such a thing before he became a lame duck president. He allowed Russia to run roughshod over Eastern Europe for years without a peep.

    Good Morning America reports that Vladimir Putin will not respond in kind to US sanctions;

    Russian President Vladimir Putin said today he will not expel American diplomats, despite the recommendation from his country’s foreign minister to do so.

    Putin said he views the latest moves of the outgoing Obama’s administration as a provocation aimed at further undermining U.S.-Russia relations.

    Democrat Party officials still aren’t denying the content of the leaked emails.

  • Obama seeks to punish Russia for hacks

    The Washington Post reports that the Obama Administration is close to taking measures to punish Russia for their hacks of the Democrat email system, even though there really is no proof that the Russians hacked the emails.

    With the clock ticking, the White House is working on adapting the authority to punish the Russians, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. President Obama pledged this month that there would be a response to Moscow’s interference in the U.S. elections.

    One consideration is that the Trump Administration would reverse any sanctions;

    Administration officials would also like to make it difficult for President-elect Donald Trump to roll back any action they take.

    “Part of the goal here is to make sure that we have as much of the record public or communicated to Congress in a form that would be difficult to simply walk back,” said one senior administration official.

    It seems to me that a more fruitful endeavor would be to teach Democrats to stop gaming the system – in fact, the reason that folks voted against Democrats was because of the content of the emails, not the fact that the system was hacked. So, the Obama Administration is siding with the actual criminals by punishing the whistleblowers.

  • Obama to release 17 Guantanamo detainees before leaving office

    Obama to release 17 Guantanamo detainees before leaving office

    So, it doesn’t look like the president will make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo detainee facility during his eight years in office. The New York Times says that he’ll release 17 or 18 more detainees before his term in office ends, but there will still be a few dozen behind bars there.

    By law, the Pentagon must notify Congress 30 days before a transfer, so the deadline to set in motion deals before the end of the Obama administration was Monday.

    By late in the day, officials said, the administration had agreed to tell Congress that it intended to transfer 17 or 18 of the 59 remaining detainees at the prison; they would go to Italy, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. If all goes as planned, that will leave 41 or 42 prisoners in Guantánamo for Donald J. Trump’s administration. Mr. Trump has vowed to keep the prison operating and “load it up with some bad dudes.”

    Closing Guantanamo made a nice campaign promise in 2008, but it was much more difficult to actually accomplish – even for a Nobel Prize winner. Of course, President Bush got the idea of keeping prisoners offshore from his predecessor when President Clinton filled Guantanamo with Haitian refugees to keep them from getting “dry feet” on US soil.

  • False news and Russian hacking

    According to Fox News, the President has announced that his administration will “take action” against “Russian hacking” of the Presidential election.

    The tough talk from Obama came in an interview scheduled to air on National Public Radio Friday. It followed complaints of Republican lawmakers that federal authorities refuse to brief them on investigations into Russia’s role in leaking tensof thousands of damaging emails from top Clinton campaign officials.

    “I think there is no doubt that when any foreign government tries to impact the integrity of our elections … we need to take action,” Obama said. “And we will — at a time and place of our own choosing. Some of it may be explicit and publicized; some of it may not be.”

    According to Julius Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, Russia was not the source of the emails;

    Wikileaks founder Julian Assange denied Thursday that hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta were stolen and passed to his organization by Russian state actors.

    “Our source is not the Russian government,” Assange told “The Sean Hannity Show.”

    “So in other words, let me be clear,” Hannity asked, “Russia did not give you the Podesta documents or anything from the DNC?”

    “That’s correct,” Assange responded.

    The media is fond of calling the election results “hacked” even though the only thing hacked was Democrat campaign emails. There is no evidence that anyone hacked the actual vote tally, but the media likes to use the term giving us that impression. No one is denying any of the content of the emails is inaccurate – you know, the part that actually turned voters against Hillary, supposedly.

    Also, today, Facebook says that they’re going to begin a war against “fake news” on their website. I wonder if their standard will include these stories about a “hacked election”.

    If anyone really wants to do something about how the Democrats lost the election last month, they should change the way they are portrayed in the emails, the way that they do business.