Less Health Care - More Money,. What's the Catch?

by Ann Coulter

The New York Times' Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a column about John Brodniak of Oregon, who developed a cavernous hemangioma, causing him great pain as blood leaks into his brain.

Health Care Pork: Big Win for Democrat Pet Projects

WASHINGTON – The little town of Libby, Mont., isn't mentioned by name in the Senate's mammoth health care bill, but its 2,900 citizens are big winners in the legislation, thanks to the influence of Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.

After pushing for years for help for residents, many of whom suffer from asbestos-related illnesses from a now-closed mineral mining operation, Baucus inserted language in a package of last-minute amendments that grants them access to Medicare benefits.

Government Health Care: The Road To Tyranny and Slavery

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
December 19, 2009

Democrats deceptively argue that health care is legal under the commerce clause of the Constitution. The commerce clause relates to business, not individuals, but the Democrats have skewed the original purpose and intent of the Constitution.

Health Insurance Company Stock Prices Say it All

Editor’s note: Recall Dennis Kucinich’s response to H.R. 3962 the Affordable Health Care for America Act in November. “H.R. 3962 would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care. In H.R. 3962, the government is requiring at least 21 million Americans to buy private health insurance from the very industry that causes costs to be so high, which will result in at least $70 billion in new annual revenue, much of which is coming from taxpayers.

The Grinch That Will Steal Your Health Care

by Dr. David Jandra

After reviewing the latest version of health care reform emanating from “the greatest deliberative body in the world”, The Senate, I was transported to Whoville, target of The Grinch…..from this point forward renamed America. It would appear that “Your mean ones,”   Mr., Ms and Mr. Grinch (Obama, Pelosi and Reid) have heard and learned nothing from the town hall meetings and from all of the e-mails, phone calls, faxes and letters from ALL of us Whos.

A merry Christmas; Senate eyes Dec. 24 vote on healthcare reform legislation

By Alexander Bolton - THE HILL 12/17/09 08:27 PM ET

The Senate is heading toward a Christmas Eve vote to pass landmark healthcare legislation, but instead of holiday cheer, Democrats and Republicans are digging in for trench warfare.

Geithner to Pelosi: TARP Extended to October 2010

Weak Dollar Scares Gulf States: Dropping Dubai & Greece to Pursue Unified Currency

Given the troubles of Dubai and, seemingly, a third of the EU countries, a move on the part of gulf states to pursue a unified currency can only be interpreted as a major vote of

Economic Roundup: Featuring, Obama's Leveraging of America

Congressional appropriators agreed Tuesday night to give civilian federal employees a 2 percent pay increase -- which includes a locality pay increase President Obama didn't want.

Indiana: City Threatens $2500 Fines for Challenging Traffic Tickets

Source: The Newspaper
Lawyer sues traffic and parking courts in Indianapolis, Indiana over threatened $2500 penalty for contesting a ticket in court.

Around The World of Money in 128 Seconds

Can it happen here? The UK government plans a super tax levy of 50% on banks' bonus payouts, to take effect immediately ... READ MORE

Call for the intervention of international bank regulators to set global banking compensation restrictions .. READ MORE

Socialist Debt Crises Puts Pressure on ECB For Bailout ... READ MORE

Have We Avoided the Economic Depression Many Feared? ... READ MORE

ACLU Loses Donor, One-Fourth of Yearly Donations

Print ShareThisNEW YORK — The American Civil Liberties Union has lost a quarter of its yearly donations after a major donor cut off $19 million in annual donations because of economic difficulties.

Bah Humbug! Christmas Trees Axed From Copenhagen Conference

Participants at Copenhagen's global climate summit will be meeting during the holiday season, but they will not be surrounded by festive Christmas decor, according to Denmark's Foreign Ministry.

Climategate: A Crime Against Humanity - Global Deception

Posted From: What Really Happened

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken (1918)

"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have."
-- Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.

The Science is In: Global Warming Is a Complete and Total Scientific Lie and an Outright Fraud

Lord Christopher Monckton Speaking in St. Paul



THE SCIENCE IS IN, YOU JUST HAVEN'T BEEN TOLD. You won't see this presentation on CNN or MSNBC, nor even on Fox News, because this presentation fully and completely exposes the outright fraud and the admitted lie that is global warming. Lord Christopher Monckton gives a thoroughly detailed expose` on the outright scientific fraud that is global warming. After watching this video, you will never view these issues in the same light again.

The Great Global Warming Swindle

The recent hacking of emails and documents from so called global warming scientists should remove the doubts of even the most ardent proponents of man-made climate change and the disastrous predictions that they have scamed the world with. This is not a new video. But the facts that are presented may be new to millions that have had the wool pulled over their eyes. It is one of many well produced and documented videos that offer evidence and data (there is a difference) to expose the biggest fraud in the history of the world. Yet chances are, you've never seen it. The alphabet networks would never broadcast any documentory submitting a contrary view, unless it would be to discredit those that would dare to differ with governments and the 'scientific' community.

Everything you've ever been told about Global Warming is probably untrue. From Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth' to news reports from the popular media outlets and even public classrooms which, in chicken little fashion, seem to be screaming - the sky is falling. But is it really? This film blows the whistle on what may be the biggest swindle in modern history. We are told that 'Man Made Global Warming' is the biggest threat ever to mankind and that it may even threaten our very survival; and, if we do not change our ways and reduce CO2 emissions - polar ice caps will melt, coastal areas will flood and hurricanes like Katrina will become common. With nearly Gestapo like tactics we are told not to question! There is absolutely no room for doubt because there is a "scientific consensus." Anyone who questions the data or conclusion is an enemy of the state and humanity. Well, bring it on because this is exactly what this well documented film does. The Great Global Warming Swindle uses a plethora of leading scientists who will not bend to political or philosophical or ideological pressure. So watch this film and make up your own mind. (2007)



Related Video: The Science is In: Global Warming Is a Complete and Total Scientific Lie and an Outright Fraud (2009)


THE SCIENCE IS IN, YOU JUST HAVEN'T BEEN TOLD. You won't see this presentation on CNN or MSNBC, nor even on Fox News, because this presentation fully and completely exposes the outright fraud and the admitted lie that is global warming. Lord Christopher Monckton gives a thoroughly detailed expose` on the outright scientific fraud that is global warming. After watching this video, you will never view these issues in the same light again

FDIC reports biggest drop for business loans on record

By Paul Wiseman and Pallavi Gogoi, USA TODAY


U.S. banks are earning money again, but they're writing fewer business loans, threatening a fragile economic recovery.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reported Tuesday that U.S. bank loans fell by $210.4 billion or 2.8% during the third quarter – the biggest drop since the FDIC started keeping records in 1984. Banks booked $2.8 billion in third-quarter profits, reversing a second-quarter loss of $4.3 billion. "We need to see banks making more loans to their business customers," says FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. "This is especially true for small businesses."

Loans to businesses fell 6.5%, and real estate loans plummeted 8.1%.

"Until small businesses are able to borrow, we can't have a robust economy, because that's your largest source of jobs," says Richard Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago and a federal circuit judge. The Small Business Administration has said that small businesses created 64% of new jobs in the past 15 years.

Banks are reluctant to make new loans until they've cleared off the bad ones they made during the housing boom. Back then, they paid "insufficient attention to certain kinds of risky loans," says Edward Kane, finance professor at Boston College. "You can't expect them to turn around and turn the lending machine back on."

Non-current loans rose more than 10% during the quarter to $366.6 billion or nearly 5% of all loans, the highest rate on record. Banks charged off nearly $51 billion in bad loans last quarter, the 11th straight quarterly increase and up more than 80% from a year earlier. "Loan losses will continue to climb as long as foreclosures keep rising and homeowners, builders and developers continue to hurt," says Kate Monahan, banking analyst at Aite Group.

Banks don't expect things to get better anytime soon: Two out of three banks set aside more reserves for losses during the quarter, reserving a total of $62.5 billion, 22% higher than last year. Banks are hoarding money in super-safe Treasury securities, and, "Businesses were not as eager to take on debt," says FDIC chief economist Richard Brown.

ARE YOUR DEPOSITS INSURED? Check the FDIC website

Increasing bank failures are feeding the worries: 124 banks have failed this year, up from 25 in all of 2008, draining the FDIC's deposit insurance fund, which fell below zero (to minus $8.2 billion) in the third quarter. But the FDIC had earlier set aside $38.9 billion to cover losses, giving it total reserves of $30.7 billion to protect depositors in failed banks. The FDIC has another $23.3 billion in cash. The agency expects to collect another $45 billion at the end of the year when banks pay three years of deposit insurance premiums in advance.

Bair warns not to read too much into one quarter's results, noting that banks won't return to full health until the economy improves. "It really is all about the economy at this point," she says. "I don't want to make any predictions."

Regulators shut AmTrust Bank in Ohio plus 5 others

Posted on December 4, 2009 at 11:00 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) — Regulators have shuttered six banks, including Ohio's AmTrust Bank.


The Cleveland-based bank is the fourth largest of the 130 banks that have failed so far this year.

Its failure is expected to cost the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. $2 billion. The federal Office of Thrift Supervision put restrictions on AmTrust about a year ago because of concern that its reserves against losses were dangerously low.

In addition to its Ohio branches, AmTrust had banks in Florida and Arizona. Its 66 branches will reopen tomorrow as offices of New York Community Bank.

Three Georgia banks were also seized by the FDIC. They are Buckhead Community Bank, based in Atlanta; First Security National Bank, based in Norcross, Ga. and Tattnall Bank, of Reidsville, Ga.

Aurora, Ill.-based Benchmark Bank has also been closed as was Greater Atlantic Bank, of Reston, Va.

Is Obama looking a little like Nixon?

Afghanistan vs. Vietnam

Obama went to great pains to distinguish Afghanistan from Vietnam, and there are indeed many differences. The core strategy adopted by Richard Nixon (not Lyndon Johnson) in Vietnam, called “Vietnamization,” saw U.S. forces working to blunt and disrupt the main North Vietnamese forces while the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) would be trained, motivated and deployed to replace U.S. forces to be systematically withdrawn from Vietnam. The equivalent of the Afghan surge was the U.S. attack on North Vietnamese Army (NVA) bases in Cambodia and offensives in northern South Vietnam designed to disrupt NVA command and control and logistics and forestall a major offensive by the NVA. Troops were in fact removed in parallel with the Cambodian offensives.

Nixon faced two points Obama now faces. First, the United States could not provide security for South Vietnam indefinitely. Second, the South Vietnamese would have to provide security for themselves. The role of the United States was to create the conditions under which the ARVN would become an effective fighting force; the impending U.S. withdrawal was intended to increase the pressure on the Vietnamese government to reform and on the ARVN to fight.

Many have argued that the core weakness of the strategy was that the ARVN was not motivated to fight. This was certainly true in some cases, but the idea that the South Vietnamese were generally sympathetic to the Communists is untrue. Some were, but many weren’t, as shown by the minimal refugee movement into NVA-held territory or into North Vietnam itself contrasted with the substantial refugee movement into U.S./ARVN-held territory and away from NVA forces. The patterns of refugee movement are, we think, highly indicative of true sentiment.

Certainly, there were mixed sentiments, but the failure of the ARVN was not primarily due to hostility or even lack of motivation. Instead, it was due to a problem that must be addressed and overcome if the Afghanistation war is to succeed. That problem is understanding the role that Communist sympathizers and agents played in the formation of the ARVN.
By the time the ARVN expanded — and for that matter from its very foundation — the North Vietnamese intelligence services had created a systematic program for inserting operatives and recruiting sympathizers at every level of the ARVN, from senior staff and command positions down to the squad level. The exploitation of these assets was not random nor merely intended to undermine moral. Instead, it provided the NVA with strategic, operational and tactical intelligence on ARVN operations, and when ARVN and U.S. forces operated together, on U.S. efforts as well.

In any insurgency, the key for insurgent victory is avoiding battles on the enemy’s terms and initiating combat only on the insurgents’ terms. The NVA was a light infantry force. The ARVN — and the U.S. Army on which it was modeled — was a much heavier, combined-arms force. In any encounter between the NVA and its enemies the NVA would lose unless the encounter was at the time and place of the NVA’s choosing. ARVN and U.S. forces had a tremendous advantage in firepower and sheer weight. But they had a significant weakness: The weight they bought to bear meant they were less agile. The NVA had a tremendous weakness. Caught by surprise, it would be defeated. And it had a great advantage: Its intelligence network inside the ARVN generally kept it from being surprised. It also revealed weakness in its enemies’ deployment, allowing it to initiate successful offensives.

All war is about intelligence, but nowhere is this truer than in counterinsurgency and guerrilla war, where invisibility to the enemy and maintaining the initiative in all engagements is key. Only clear intelligence on the enemy’s capability gives this initiative to an insurgent, and only denying intelligence to the enemy — or knowing what the enemy knows and intends — preserves the insurgent force.
The construction of an Afghan military is an obvious opportunity for Taliban operatives and sympathizers to be inserted into the force. As in Vietnam, such operatives and sympathizers are not readily distinguishable from loyal soldiers; ideology is not something easy to discern. With these operatives in place, the Taliban will know of and avoid Afghan army forces and will identify Afghan army weaknesses. Knowing that the Americans are withdrawing as the NVA did in Vietnam means the rational strategy of the Taliban is to reduce operational tempo, allow the withdrawal to proceed, and then take advantage of superior intelligence and the ability to disrupt the Afghan forces internally to launch the Taliban offensives.

The Western solution is not to prevent Taliban sympathizers from penetrating the Afghan army. Rather, the solution is penetrating the Taliban. In Vietnam, the United States used signals intelligence extensively. The NVA came to understand this and minimized radio communications, accepting inefficient central command and control in return for operational security. The solution to this problem lay in placing South Vietnamese into the NVA. There were many cases in which this worked, but on balance, the NVA had a huge advantage in the length of time it had spent penetrating the ARVN versus U.S. and ARVN counteractions. The intelligence war on the whole went to the North Vietnamese. The United States won almost all engagements, but the NVA made certain that it avoided most engagements until it was ready.
In the case of Afghanistan, the United States has far more sophisticated intelligence-gathering tools than it did in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the basic principle remains: An intelligence tool can be understood, taken into account and evaded. By contrast, deep penetration on multiple levels by human intelligence cannot be avoided.

By STRATAFOR
Complete Post at The Market Oracle