Firms with Obama ties profit from health push

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama's push for a national health care overhaul is providing a financial windfall in the election offseason to Democratic consulting firms that are closely connected to the president and two top advisers.

So when the press came out against President Bush for his ties and the Vice President's ties to oil companies they were quick to pull the trigger on corruption and dirty dealings. Where are they now that Obama's boys are doing the same thing with healthcare?

Canadian Health Officials: Our Universal Health Care Is 'Sick,' Private Insurance Should Be Welcomed

Dr. Anne Doig, the incoming president of the Canadian Medical Association, said her country’s health care system is “sick” and “imploding,” the Canadian Press reported.

“We know there must be change,” Doig said in a recent interview. “We’re all running flat out, we’re all just trying to stay ahead of the immediate day-to-day demands.”

Canada’s universal health care system is not giving patients optimal care, Doig added.

"(Canadians) have to understand that the system that we have right now — if it keeps on going without change — is not sustainable," Doig said.

AWESOME! And the liberals want us to adopt a similar system. How about we learn from the mistakes of others first?

Click the link for a more complete story.

Read this op-ed as well.

From Wikipedia
Canada's healthcare spending is expected to reach $171.9 billion, or $5,170 per person, in 2008.
Health expenditures are expected to be 10.7% of the gross domestic product.

Canada's population = 33,487,208 (July 2009 est.)
Canada's GDP = $1.307 trillion (2008 est.)

United States population = 307,212,123 (July 2009 est.)
United States GDP = $14.29 trillion (2008 est.)

Just for fun... if everything was equal and if we had Canada's wonderful system it would seemingly cost $1,588,286,675,910. Yes that's 1.5 trillion A YEAR to cover every American. And as the president of the Canadian Medical Association said it's unsustainable.

It costs 413 billion dollars to take care of the population on Medicare today.
43 million people were enrolled in Medicare in 2006, 36 million of whom were 65 and older.
$204 billion was the portion of federal contribution to Medicaid. This is not counting the portion the states have to contribute.
53 million people were enrolled in Medicaid. (date unknown)

I wish I had the numbers for how much of this spending is just overhead and bureaucracy. Perhaps that would give us a better number for what all this would cost. I think looking at the numbers I am not encouraged when I hear the numbers the White House is trying to pretend all this will cost.

Retired, unretired, retired, unretired, not playing, thinking about playing, shows up just to talk, suits up

EDEN PRAIRIE, Minn. – Brett Favre's latest retirement lasted all of three weeks.

The three-time MVP has done about-face for the second time in as many years and will play for the Vikings this season.

This saddens me deeply. Favre should stay retired. The man just doesn't know how to say something and stick to it. What, didn't HBO or Fox or CBS or NBC or ESPN offer him an analyst position? I'm embarrassed for him. And so help me if he effs up Adrian Peterson's year I'm gonna be royally pissed.

Because I know you are wondering, here is the time line.

God Bless America

God bless Miss America and good luck as the 2009 Miss Universe Pageant begins. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say God bless Great Britain
Brazil
Costa Rica
Belgium
and Miss America again for good measure.

Electrically conductive paint and girls in bikinis

What do you do with 5 gallons of electrically conductive paint and two dozen models?
Make a human synthesiser that's what. Duh.

Hacker used Twitter to control infected PCs

SAN JOSE, Calif. - Twitter's been having a rough couple of weeks.

A researcher looking into the attacks that knocked Twitter offline last week discovered another, unrelated security problem.

At least one criminal was using a Twitter account to control a network of a couple hundred infected personal computers, mostly in Brazil. Networks of infected PCs are referred to as "botnets" and are responsible for so much of the mayhem online, from identity theft to spamming to the types of attacks that crippled Twitter.

Jose Nazario with Arbor Networks said he found a Twitter account that was used to send out what looked like garbled messages. But they were actually commands for computers in a botnet to visit malicious Web sites, where they download programs that steal banking passwords.

It was just a matter of time before Twitter was added into the tools of hackers. I just don't get it. I've studied hackers. I've read a few books on their exploits. And I just don't understand why they are like they are. Look at some of the other sub-cultures.
Gear Heads - yeah they love their cars or motorcycles, they love working on their machines, and is there any doubt they love women?
Dancers - You know the guys, they can dance, country and western, disco, ball room whatever, is there any doubt they love women?
Gym Rats - at the weight lifting machines 4 or 5 times a week. They eat sleep and breathe modifying their bodies, you know they are doing it for the ladies.
Nerds - yeah they are all about learning. But is there any doubt they crave the ladies?

I could do this all day with another dozen sub-groups. And I may be making wide assumptions but I don't see any correlation between hackers and women. With all the women out in the universe that are "into computers" why do these hackers spend their time hacking computers? I think sociologists will someday categorize people who prefer machine interfaces to human interfaces. This will probably get my blog hacked but I just don't see it.

There is an entire sub-culture of Twitter...life.

I wonder how long a run Twitter will have? MySpace was king for what 2 years before Facebook became the dominant site for social networking? How long will Twitter ride the wave?
What kind of life do you live if all you do is surf twitter for hot babes to post? I don't know but thank you.

http://www.twitterbabes.com/

This Twitter stalking is not hard. Go to your Twitter site. Click one of your followers or someone you are following and look through their followers. Now you can't use any Twitter account that some dumbass is using to get clicks to a website.

I have one I blocked today.
beteasta1
Wow what a great pic...but all their Tweets are like this one...
www.points2shop.com/index.php?ref=beteasta1 GET FREE STUFF HERE PLAY GAMES AND TAKE SURVEYS FREE AND LEGIT no credit cards or anythin

You get the idea. That is not a "true twitter babe".

You should see an attractive Tweeter pretty quickly. For added success pick a Tweeter that is informational.

I'm picking....Norman_News
Boom there you go...
heatherhotpants





There were a couple others on there as well but I posted the first one I saw.

So what did we learn today kids? Hackers are low lifes and Tweet stalking is a big part of some guy's life and we learned the world is a strange place.

We're all gonna die

WASHINGTON – NASA is charged with spotting most of the asteroids that pose a threat to Earth but doesn't have the money to complete the job, a federal report says.

That's because even though Congress assigned the space agency that mission four years ago, it never gave NASA the money to build the necessary telescopes, according to the report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences.

Specifically, the mission calls for NASA, by the year 2020, to locate 90 percent of the potentially deadly rocks hurtling through space. The agency says it's been able to complete about one-third of its assignment with the current telescope system.

NASA estimates that there are about 20,000 asteroids and comets in our solar system that are potential threats. They are larger than 460 feet in diameter — slightly smaller than the Superdome in New Orleans. So far, scientists know where about 6,000 of these objects are.

The space rocks astronomers are keeping a closest eye on are a 430-foot diameter object that has a 1-in-3,000 chance of hitting Earth in 2048 and a much-talked about asteroid, Apophis, which is twice that size and has a one-in-43,000 chance of hitting in 2036, 2037 or 2069.

Okay maybe we are going to die, but it will probably not be from an asteroid hit. And even if one was about to hit us...there isn't anything ANYONE can do about it.

Well maybe there is....More after the jump.


Considering we are retiring our fleet of space shuttles and we don't have one to replace it how would we ever get to the asteroid? We have dropped the ball on space exploration.

Tax dodgers scramble to come clean amid crackdown

WASHINGTON – A deal with Switzerland settling U.S. demands for the names of suspected tax dodgers from a Swiss bank has a lot of wealthy Americans with offshore accounts nervously running to their tax advisers — and the Internal Revenue Service.

Even before the settlement, the high-profile case — coupled with other U.S. efforts to go after Americans hiding undeclared assets — has scared hundreds of tax dodgers to turn themselves in. Boggs said his firm has been taking on 100 new cases a month, a big increase over previous years.

The IRS long has had a policy that certain tax evaders who come forward before they are contacted by the agency usually can avoid jail time as long as they agree to pay back taxes, interest and hefty penalties. Drug dealers and money launderers need not apply. But if the money was earned legally, tax evaders can usually avoid criminal prosecution.

In March, the IRS began a six-month amnesty program that sweetened the offer with reduced penalties for people with undeclared assets. IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said the response has been unprecedented.

Time to pay your fair share. As much as I'm against the government hosing down the rich to pay for these expensive programs, I'm against the Super Rich hiding money in countries to avoid paying taxes.