Category: News

More relying on state health care programs: Growing enrollment poses funding challenges:

Enrollment in state health care programs such as BadgerCare Plus has increased by about 238,000 people – or 35% – in the past six years and is expected to rise as the economy continues to struggle.

Medicaid programs provide some level of health care to about 1 in 6 Wisconsin residents.

The state-federal program provides care to low-income families with children younger than 21, and to people who are elderly, or disabled and impoverished. It is one of the biggest programs in state government.

Enrollment reached 926,600 people last month, up from 688,500 in January 2003, when Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle took office.

How to fund the $5 billion-a-year program – which faces a deficit of about $1.4 billion through the next two-year budget – is one of the biggest long-term questions looming for the state.

Economics, she is a harsh mistress, is she not?

Allow me to propose the solution Wisconsin, and the United States, will pursue anyway: Legislative Magick. Don’t ask how it works; unless your a legislator/magician 14th/13th level, you wouldn’t understand.

It’s a MAD, MAD, MAD world. Or it would be, if only mutual destruction between two opponents in a nuclear war was assured. Also, if both opponents were rational. In our new world, neither is a given.

North Korea Scraps Military Accords With South Korea:

North Korea said it is scrapping all military and political agreements with South Korea, accusing the government in Seoul of pushing inter-Korean relations to “the brink of war.”

“All the agreed points concerning the issue of putting an end to the political and military confrontation between the north and south will be nullified,” the reunification committee in Pyongyang said in a statement carried by the official Korean Central News Agency today.

The announcement comes less than two weeks after Kim Jong Il’s regime threatened “strong military steps” in response to South Korea’s confrontational policies and about two months after North Korea imposed border restrictions with South Korea.

The regime has repeatedly called South Korean President Lee Myung Bak a “traitor” and a “sycophant to the U.S.” It has demanded South Korea stop civic groups from launching balloons loaded with so-called propaganda leaflets criticizing Kim.

Sounds like a good on-the-job learning opportunity for President Obama, and perhaps a good chance for Hillary Clinton to dance and sip champagne with Kim Jong Il. No preconditions.

(Link seen on Ed Driscoll. Well, his site. Not literally on him.)

More bicyclist violence:

Three people were critically injured when a bicyclist rode by and opened fire, Kansas City police said.

How soon until we can just inter the two-wheeled menaces?

OPINION SHAPER: Health-care industry better as private enterprise

UPDATE: Another article lost to time.

Consider it a sequel of sorts to this post, but KSDK reports, with a basic understanding of the possessive form of it:

Metro could eliminate 28 of it’s 60 existing MetroBus routes. The transit company has listed 22 routes on it’s website that may be eliminated next spring.

The second phase of likely cuts, including all service outside Interstate 270, will take place in the summer of 2010.

What does that really mean?

We’ll have to vote down the tax increase that we already voted down in November on the Spring ballot and maybe one more time before Metro does whatever it deems necessary, noting that cutting highly paid consultants or senior admin staff won’t be necessary.

A good tax proposal doesn’t stay defeated for long:

The tax would finance an $80 million system which would allow members of police, fire and other emergency service agencies to talk to each other. The tax would raise about $15 million a year, Tim Fischesser, executive director of the St. Louis County Municipal League, estimated today. Currently, the county has a patchwork of radio systems using different frequencies. Often personnel from different agencies at an emergency site cannot talk to each other by radio.

On Nov. 4, voters defeated a 1.85-cent county use tax that included money for the radio system. The communications commission made its request for the 0.1-cent sales tax on Nov. 21. The county’s Blue Ribbon Commission on facilities needs discussed it this morning.

The shamble of bureaucracies is only slowed by the will of the people.

Commentary in the Washington Times entitled “Nostradamus Redux“:

Mr. Celente’s accurate forecasts include the 1987 stock market crash, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the 1997 Asian currency crash, the 2007 subprime mortgage scandal that he said would soon engulf the world at a time when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, a macroeconomist and expert on the Great Depression, told us, “the worst is behind us.” In November 2007, Mr. Celente also told UPI a massive devaluation of the dollar was coming and that some Wall Street giants were headed for total collapse. He called it “The Panic of 2008.”

“Worse than the Great Depression,” Mr. Celente opined. Beginning with a sharp drop in standards of living, and continuing with an angry urban underclass that threatens a social order that allowed the mega-rich to continue living behind gated communities with summer escapades to luxurious homes on the French and Italian Rivieras or to bigger and better and more expensive boats from year to year.

This time, Mr. Celente’s Trends Research Institute, which the Los Angeles Times described as the Standard & Poor’s of pop culture, can see a tax rebellion in America by 2012, food riots, squatter rebellions, job marches and a culture that puts a higher premium on food on the table than gifts under the Christmas tree.

I really ought to stop talking about loading up on guns and liquor and start doing it.

Speaks on the economy:

(Link seen on Hot Air.)

You put money on the Iran/Israeli conflict as the next nuclear wars? Pakistan/India’s odds are increasing even as we speak.

MUMBAI DAY 3
Mumbai Attacks Highlight the Cancer That Is Pakistan

Given potential for inflation coupled with the way Congress is dropping hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money into any industry it thinks of like tourists dropping their last pocket change into the slots at the airport on the way out of Vegas, you will learn that the next order of magnitude beyond trillion is actually quadrillion.

Assuming that the Chinese and Middle Eastern royalty allow our national debt to hit that level circa 2017.

In a brief programming note, posting will be light as I am tending to grim family matters. Prayers and small animal sacrifices will be accepted in the spirit in which they’re received.

50 at Normandy High face HIV risk:

The HIV threat at Normandy High School has widened to include up to 50 students, health officials said Tuesday.

Health officials last week said “some” students may have been exposed to the virus that causes AIDS but recently refined their estimate to 50.

The local news has been running this story pretty hard, with dramatic meetings between school administrators and whatnot. Of course, just using the words “exposed to” spices it up. One might think a cafeteria worked didn’t wash her hands before returning to work or a lab experiment went awry. Um, still, no.

The most likely scenario for HIV exposure among teenagers would be sexual relations, but health experts say sharing contaminated needles for steroids, tattoos or drugs could also be the source.

The story’s only commenter gets to the meat in the sandwich:

I would like to know how those children were exposed to the HIV virus. It would benefit all the schools, and for that matter, any gathering of people in one place, to know how this happened. Of course, if it was something like a gang bang, then I am not worried because my community does not practice those sort of behaviors.

Indeed, by not elucidating on the mechanism of exposure, the media is really trying to gin up the panic without reminding the public that these young men and women acted in a way to expose themselves.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Washington “editor” weighs in on ACORN’s fraud problems by calling them something else: GOP attacking ACORN’s voter registration efforts:

Trailing badly in new-voter registration, Republicans are waging an aggressive campaign in Missouri and around the country against a group that claims to have added 1.3 million people to voter rolls since last year.

Let’s play a new game: whenever the Post-Dispatch identifies something as fraud, let’s see how they would spin it if it involved/indicted the Democratic Party.

Like this: GOP attacks Nevadan’s fundraising efforts

Or this: Republicans assail investor efforts.

I guess I am just naive; I didn’t think that Republicans were upset with voter registration efforts. I thought they were upset that ACORN people were systemically and nationally caught making things up out of whole cloth:

I guess that explains why I didn’t go into journalism; I don’t want to “help” people see the “truth” through my creative writing and pretending it was something other than a fictional narrative.

A rising bailout bill raises all boats:

The Senate substitute now runs over 450 pages. And tucked away in the tax provisions is a landmark health care provision demanding that insurance companies provide coverage for mental health treatment—such as hospitalization—on parity with physical illnesses.

Really a bill onto itself, the mental health parity measure has been a bipartisan priority for top lawmakers in both chambers but has stalled because of disagreements again over how to pay for its estimated $3.8 billion five-year cost. In the current climate, that seems to be no longer a stumbling block, and if the Treasury plan becomes law, it will also.

I’m just spitballing here, but won’t imposing new services on insurance companies sort of make the insurance companies raise rates to cover them?

Leading to a din about the higher costs of health care, leading to more shrieks for government to do something, such as national health care plan?

Geez Louise, it’s almost like that was “our” legislators’ goal or something.

Vladimir Putin lashes US for economic failures:

The Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lashed out at the United States today for what he said was its inability to deal with the financial crisis affecting the global economy.

In remarks unlikely to go down well in Washington, Mr Putin was especially critical of Congress’s rejection of a $700 billion bank bailout – a rejection that hit Russian financial markets particularly hard.

“Everything that is happening in the economic and financial sphere has started in the United States. This is a real crisis that all of us are facing,” the former president told a government meeting in Moscow.

“And what is really sad is that we see an inability to take appropriate decisions. This is no longer irresponsibility on the part of some individuals, but irresponsibility of the whole system, which as you know had pretensions to (global) leadership.”

Sadly, Putin cannot vote for Obama this year.

Ha, just kidding! Thanks to the tireless efforts of ACORN, Mr. Putin will vote for Obama six times in Columbus, Ohio, alone.

(Link seen on The Other Side of Kim.)

For airing anti-Obama advertisements:

The Obama campaign has written radio stations in Pennsylvania and Ohio, pressing them to refuse to air an ad from the National Rifle Association.

“This advertisement knowingly misleads your viewing audience about Senator Obama’s position on the Second Amendment,” says the letter from Obama general counsel Bob Bauer. “For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should refuse to continue to air this advertisement.”

More at Snowflakes in Hell, Bitch Girls, and a roundup at Instapundit.

First, the Obama campaign wanted Justice Department investigations and charges for an opposing political group. Then, the Obama campaign warned broadcasters their licenses were in jeopardy for running anti-Obama ads. Then Missouri prosecutors said opposing viewpoints would be prosecuted.

Is this 21st Century America? Is this the Change Happens on November 4 we were waiting/hoping for?

Whatever you imagine the Bush administration’s civil liberties failings were, get ready to be prosecuted for your speech under the Obama administration.

Chavez says Bush is his comrade:

“I nationalize strategic companies and get criticized, but when Bush does it, it’s OK,” Chavez said on weekly television program Sept. 21. “Bush is turning socialist. How are you, comrade Bush?”

(Link seen on The Volokh Conspiracy.)