The fact none of those open air parks were closed for any other shutdown and they still managed to survive then tells you all you need to know about the current administrations take on being a government 'for the people'.
They actively shut down parks (even those that were 100% privately funded) and even rest areas, which were literally just widened parts of the road where you could pull over to admire a view, to cause as much pain as possible.
In many, if not most cases, the cost of actively policing the parks to prevent 'recreating' was many times the normal operating costs of those same parks.
The GOP may have tried to make it a referendum on Obamacare but if you look at the actual news stories there was more of a focus on Romney's taxes (not that there was ever anything found to be off about them) his bank accounts (which are housed in many of the same banks as half the administrations top players) and his wife's horse. Very few Democrats ran on an "I helped pass Obamacare" platform and most just pretended it didn't even exist.
It was very much like Obama's last press conference; some questions about the shutdown and a few odd questions about random subjects but NOT ONE QUESTION about the ACA launch failure or even a question about why open air parks, which were never closed before and generally never even patrolled, were now being gated off and in some case put under armed guard.
You can only keep your current insurance IF it was already in full compliance with ACA regulations. A lot of people who opted for catastrophic coverage and chose to pay for regular expenses out of pocket could not keep their plan because they are now illegal under the ACA.
Even some the "current plans" are not quire the same as pre-ACA versions as in many cases the networks have drastically shrunk.
Infant mortality rates are one of the worst measures of health care success because the numbers are all highly adjusted.
The US is in fact one of the very few countries that counts infant moralities as suggest by the WHO (any child born alive, including from medical procedures, counts as an infant). Most other countries do not follow that standard and apply their own rules (which include NOT counting high risk births as infants until the child has survived a certain period of time).
Some countries also have systems where instead of providing care for higher risk pregnancies, doctor's are instructed to strongly push the abortion option.
As it stands, one of the leading causes of the current infant mortality rate of the US is that doctors there will try everything to help a child survive.
If you really want to use the SCOTUS as a defense of the bill, the actions taken by the Supreme court in fact invalidates the entire ACA.
The lack of a severability clause (which is present is almost all legislation except the ACA for some reason) means than if ANY part of the bill is removed outside of regular legislative means then the entirety of the bill must be invalidated.
The Supreme court decision in fact invalidated the portion forcing certain costs onto the individual states, and that in fact makes the entire bill no longer legal under normal legislative rules. I emphasize normal because NOTHING in the passing or administration of this bill falls under what any person would consider normal legislative rules.
My only question is why should the FEDERAL government be providing funding for a high school team to participate in a competition in the first place? Shouldn't that be the responsibility of the local government or at the highest, the State government (although private finding would be the most preferred)?
Not that a robotics competition isn't a good idea to get kids involved in but why should it be the Federal governments responsibility to pay for your team? Does the Saint Paul HS (MN) marching band not get to go to their chosen competition because the Fredericksburg HS (VA) debate team has already used up the allotted funds. Or should they both be screwed over because your robotics team made it to the trough first?
Making the Federal government pay for everyone's pets projects is what gets a country into this mess to begin with.
It is in fact the law of the land; if one part of a piece of legislation is struck down then the whole bill becomes null and void. It's also why most pieces of legislation are written with the severability clause the gp mentioned in their post.
The clause simply states that if any part of the bill is struck down for any reason than all other parts of the bill remain in effect. It's a very simple statement, usually tacked on at the end, to prevent large pieces of legislation from being thrown out because of some minor oversight. The ACA however, does not have any such clause and therefore, legally, cannot remain law if ANY part is removed outside of the normal legislative means. But when a court bends over backwards to redefine a forced product purchase as a tax, ignoring the fact that it was tacked on by the Senate (whereas taxes are suppose to originate in the House) then what's a little ignoring of other portions of legislative law.
There are so many legal grounds to challenge the ACA at this point (Obama's random changing/suspension of rules without any legislative backing plus the points above) I'd be surprised if this doesn't end up back in the Supreme's lap in the next couple of years. Now that the law is active and people are beginning to feel the results the one best defense it had, lack of standing, is gone. Now anyone who is impacted in anyway can potentially challenge the law in court.
Just be careful on the OS updates. I know 2 people that bricked their phones doing OS7 updates last week and 1 who was unlucky enough to brick 2 doing previous updates.
The only good news is of the 4 brickings, 3 were covered under warranty either through Apple or their providers.
I have an alternative explanation to the 8 record lows you cite over the last 30 years; the fact that accurate measurements only began 34 years ago. In such a new field of study it's not unusual for any given measurement to be record setting.
Without any long term baseline for comparison it's hard to judge what type of cycles affect ice formation and whether the current trends are normal or irregular.
According to a review by the New England Journal of Medicine most preventative care services cause an increase in medical expenditures NOT a savings (there are some exceptions). The reason is simple, if a preventative test for something that will only affect a small percentage of people is more widely used, for the few extra cases you catch there are far more cases where the tests were unnecessary.
Until such time that there is a general purpose catch-all test then preventative care cost savings is simply a myth.
And could you list off some of magical incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes? I know taxing device manufacturers who work on razor thin margins is probably not going to help in the development of cheaper, more efficient technologies. The addition of mandatory coverage in the baseline policies for selective medical procedures/devices probably isn't going to help lower costs much. The fact the penalty is so low in the first couple of years that there is little to no incentive for healthy young adults to bother getting a policy, thereby filling most pools with the higher risk and more expensive older clients (which companies are then allowed to adjust rates for). There are the policies that promote off-shoring of workers, the hiring of non-citizen immigrants and the reduction in workers hours which could greatly reduce business costs but I doubt that would help the individual much.
The ACA is simply a terrible train wreck of a piece of legislation (as says one of it's primary authors). It should never have been passed. The healthcare system would have been better fixed using a piecemeal process where each bill could have been properly evaluated and costs/benefits properly weighed (some parts of the ACA would have passed this way with bi-partisan support). As it stands entire sections are being unconstitutionally ignored by the administration because of the problems they are causing and deadlines for implementation are being pushed back because they simply do not have the ability to meet them.
Infant mortality rate is one of the most abused stats in arguments against the US healthcare system.
The biggest problem is that those rates are dictated by each countries own definition of an infant. In the US pretty much every live birth including births resulting from an emergency procedure where the baby has almost no chance of survival is considered and infant for the purposes of reporting. That is NOT the case in most countries including European countries such as Spain, France and even the UK to name a few. In many of those countries a infant must not only be born alive but also survive for at least a certain period of time. The US happens to be one of only a few countries that actually follows the WHO definition of infant for reporting death rates.
There are also issues related to high-risk births that are not factored in. Patients in the US are more likely to attempt top carry a high-risk baby to term, resulting in higher mortality rates when those infants do not survive. Also, in some countries abortion is strongly pushed as a 'treatment' for some birth defects to help keep their numbers low.
These issues, and many others, have been discussed in detail in various WHO reports about problems with reporting but most people tend to skip past the explanations and just look at the chart at the end.
'Gabe' over at Penny Arcade has talked about doing several of their comics on his Surface Pro. According to him it's a great alternative for when their having issues with systems at their offices or he's out of town and wants to still get some work done.
The whole point of this loose web of unintended consequences called the ACA was so that individuals could get health insurance if their employer chose not to provide it.
So for any company currently paying for their employees insurance (as in the GPs case) it's just common sense to remove the cost of health insurance from their books and pay the fine (which in a lot of cases is a lot more than the 4k from the example above) and let the employee get their own insurance on the exchanges. Of course how much of that savings is passed on to the employee is probably negligible and I don't believe individuals can claim the tax exemption so the employees will most likely end up with less insurance then before and have to incur the additional costs themselves or get taxed by the feds.
Any employer who already meets ACA standards who has a competitor who does not may sue in order to level the playing field and from the wording of the law it doesn't appear the Administration would have any defense, except political, as to why they choose to ignore a major aspect of a law passed by the legislative branch.
DOMA was not deemed unconstitutional, only the portion that allowed people who are recognized as married in their home state to not be recognized as married federally was overturned. The ruling basically says if the state recognizes a union as a legal marriage the Feds must too. All other parts of DOMA remain law and none of this decision had anything to do with mob rule, pro or con.
The Prop 8 ruling also had nothing to do with civil rights. They merely stated that since the state itself was not challenging the lower courts decision on the law and none of the parties involved could show any harm to themselves because of the law then there was no one with standing in the eyes of the court to present a case.
Just to clarify, the Prop 8 decision has little to do with states rights or the SCOTUS deciding they didn't have jurisdiction and more to do with the fact the plaintiffs could not show the required legal standing to present the case. They basically said all the arguments for why same sex marriage harmed traditional marriage were not valid and did not constitute harm therefore there was no one left to legally argue the case.
If you can't prove a law specifically harmed you or someone you're representing then it's very hard to actually contest the law. This is the same grounds the courts used to pass on the federal wiretapping program a few years back. Since no one could prove they were the targets of the secret wiretapping then no one had standing to actually challenge the program.
It's also why the current IRS and NSA scandals have a much higher chance of leading to some kind of court case than previous federal screw-ups/surveillance programs; both have identifiable aggrieved parties.
The President proposes a federal budget but it is the Senate and House (both controlled by Dems at the time) who actually write and finalized the actual budget. In the case of 2009, Bush was threatening to veto certain Democrat proposals so they delayed the vote until Obama was in office to ensure their budget passed.
The end result is the 2009 budget wasn't actually passed until 5 months into the fiscal year. Little did we know that would be considered speedy for the Senate Dems.
When Obama took Office at the beginning of 2009, federal employment was at 4,206,000. As of 2011 (the last year available) Federal workers sits at 4,403,000.
Even using the end of 2009 as your base the number of Federal workers continued increasing month to month until sometime around Sept. 2011 (when numbers finally began to decline) which led to the final number of Federal employees to be only 197,000 more than when Bush left office by the end of 2011.
So while yes, the number of federal employees is slightly less today than it was after Obama's first complete year in office (a year Dem's controlled both the Executive and Legislative branches), it is still significantly larger than when he first entered office and with all the 'obstruction' by House and Senate Republican to prevent many of the Dems plans from being implemented it's debatable who exactly is responsible for that slight decrease.
the size of the government has been going down every year since FY 2009.
I'm sure you meant to point out this is only true when you include state and local governments (the majority of States currently have Republican governors BTW). The Federal government, on the other hand, has increased in sized pretty much every month since the 2009 inauguration (not including the temporary census workers which were required regardless of who is in office).
I'm sure you didn't mean to mislead by including all the offices not under Obama and congressional Dem's direct control in your numbers even though they had the benefit of actually making you claim appear true.
The article seems more to do with HTTPS STS and Apples lack thereof then anything specific about open WiFi. So even if you end up on a malicious network, with Android phones, your browsing is a little more secure (although first time visits to websites can be just as insecure because of HTTPS STS limitations).
The WiFi component is just about 'spoofing' a know SSID to trick your iPhone into connecting to your network and not the actual trusted one; this part of the problem should apply to any phone or device with a list of trusted SSIDs and not just Apple.
Yes, but the problem being reported by the AP is that while these accounts are still official government email addresses they are not linked to the people using them so no FOIA request will actually be able to retrieve these hidden emails.
The administration is claiming they are searching these 'secret' emails when receiving FOIA requests but the AP has already shown that to only be true in a single case, and only because they caught it, not because the account was disclosed.
In the case of the EPA head, her 'secret' account was so secret the system thought the email belonged to a real live employee and required them to do online training; which would of not been the case if it was set up as a simple alternate address.
Some are official alternate mailboxes, and while sometimes suspect, at least are registered and subject to FOIA requests but not all.
Lisa Jackson's secret email address was 'Richard Windsor', a fictitious employee that was not disclosed on FOIA requests until someone managed to make the connection.
So it's not like you have LJackson@EPA.gov for the public and LJ774@EPA.Gov for private; in these cases you have completely hidden and unregistered aliases which are being used to perform official business and to skirt FOIA requests.
'Richard Windsor' was so hidden that he was actually required to take mandatory courses online (and passed them every year).
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The fact none of those open air parks were closed for any other shutdown and they still managed to survive then tells you all you need to know about the current administrations take on being a government 'for the people'.
They actively shut down parks (even those that were 100% privately funded) and even rest areas, which were literally just widened parts of the road where you could pull over to admire a view, to cause as much pain as possible.
In many, if not most cases, the cost of actively policing the parks to prevent 'recreating' was many times the normal operating costs of those same parks.
The GOP may have tried to make it a referendum on Obamacare but if you look at the actual news stories there was more of a focus on Romney's taxes (not that there was ever anything found to be off about them) his bank accounts (which are housed in many of the same banks as half the administrations top players) and his wife's horse. Very few Democrats ran on an "I helped pass Obamacare" platform and most just pretended it didn't even exist.
It was very much like Obama's last press conference; some questions about the shutdown and a few odd questions about random subjects but NOT ONE QUESTION about the ACA launch failure or even a question about why open air parks, which were never closed before and generally never even patrolled, were now being gated off and in some case put under armed guard.
You can only keep your current insurance IF it was already in full compliance with ACA regulations. A lot of people who opted for catastrophic coverage and chose to pay for regular expenses out of pocket could not keep their plan because they are now illegal under the ACA.
Even some the "current plans" are not quire the same as pre-ACA versions as in many cases the networks have drastically shrunk.
Infant mortality rates are one of the worst measures of health care success because the numbers are all highly adjusted.
The US is in fact one of the very few countries that counts infant moralities as suggest by the WHO (any child born alive, including from medical procedures, counts as an infant). Most other countries do not follow that standard and apply their own rules (which include NOT counting high risk births as infants until the child has survived a certain period of time).
Some countries also have systems where instead of providing care for higher risk pregnancies, doctor's are instructed to strongly push the abortion option.
As it stands, one of the leading causes of the current infant mortality rate of the US is that doctors there will try everything to help a child survive.
and species.
If you really want to use the SCOTUS as a defense of the bill, the actions taken by the Supreme court in fact invalidates the entire ACA.
The lack of a severability clause (which is present is almost all legislation except the ACA for some reason) means than if ANY part of the bill is removed outside of regular legislative means then the entirety of the bill must be invalidated.
The Supreme court decision in fact invalidated the portion forcing certain costs onto the individual states, and that in fact makes the entire bill no longer legal under normal legislative rules. I emphasize normal because NOTHING in the passing or administration of this bill falls under what any person would consider normal legislative rules.
My only question is why should the FEDERAL government be providing funding for a high school team to participate in a competition in the first place? Shouldn't that be the responsibility of the local government or at the highest, the State government (although private finding would be the most preferred)?
Not that a robotics competition isn't a good idea to get kids involved in but why should it be the Federal governments responsibility to pay for your team? Does the Saint Paul HS (MN) marching band not get to go to their chosen competition because the Fredericksburg HS (VA) debate team has already used up the allotted funds. Or should they both be screwed over because your robotics team made it to the trough first?
Making the Federal government pay for everyone's pets projects is what gets a country into this mess to begin with.
They tried but the Barrycades kept floating off.
It is in fact the law of the land; if one part of a piece of legislation is struck down then the whole bill becomes null and void. It's also why most pieces of legislation are written with the severability clause the gp mentioned in their post.
The clause simply states that if any part of the bill is struck down for any reason than all other parts of the bill remain in effect. It's a very simple statement, usually tacked on at the end, to prevent large pieces of legislation from being thrown out because of some minor oversight. The ACA however, does not have any such clause and therefore, legally, cannot remain law if ANY part is removed outside of the normal legislative means. But when a court bends over backwards to redefine a forced product purchase as a tax, ignoring the fact that it was tacked on by the Senate (whereas taxes are suppose to originate in the House) then what's a little ignoring of other portions of legislative law.
There are so many legal grounds to challenge the ACA at this point (Obama's random changing/suspension of rules without any legislative backing plus the points above) I'd be surprised if this doesn't end up back in the Supreme's lap in the next couple of years. Now that the law is active and people are beginning to feel the results the one best defense it had, lack of standing, is gone. Now anyone who is impacted in anyway can potentially challenge the law in court.
Just be careful on the OS updates. I know 2 people that bricked their phones doing OS7 updates last week and 1 who was unlucky enough to brick 2 doing previous updates.
The only good news is of the 4 brickings, 3 were covered under warranty either through Apple or their providers.
I have an alternative explanation to the 8 record lows you cite over the last 30 years; the fact that accurate measurements only began 34 years ago. In such a new field of study it's not unusual for any given measurement to be record setting.
Without any long term baseline for comparison it's hard to judge what type of cycles affect ice formation and whether the current trends are normal or irregular.
According to a review by the New England Journal of Medicine most preventative care services cause an increase in medical expenditures NOT a savings (there are some exceptions). The reason is simple, if a preventative test for something that will only affect a small percentage of people is more widely used, for the few extra cases you catch there are far more cases where the tests were unnecessary.
Until such time that there is a general purpose catch-all test then preventative care cost savings is simply a myth.
And could you list off some of magical incentives to lower costs and improve outcomes?
I know taxing device manufacturers who work on razor thin margins is probably not going to help in the development of cheaper, more efficient technologies. The addition of mandatory coverage in the baseline policies for selective medical procedures/devices probably isn't going to help lower costs much. The fact the penalty is so low in the first couple of years that there is little to no incentive for healthy young adults to bother getting a policy, thereby filling most pools with the higher risk and more expensive older clients (which companies are then allowed to adjust rates for). There are the policies that promote off-shoring of workers, the hiring of non-citizen immigrants and the reduction in workers hours which could greatly reduce business costs but I doubt that would help the individual much.
The ACA is simply a terrible train wreck of a piece of legislation (as says one of it's primary authors). It should never have been passed. The healthcare system would have been better fixed using a piecemeal process where each bill could have been properly evaluated and costs/benefits properly weighed (some parts of the ACA would have passed this way with bi-partisan support). As it stands entire sections are being unconstitutionally ignored by the administration because of the problems they are causing and deadlines for implementation are being pushed back because they simply do not have the ability to meet them.
Infant mortality rate is one of the most abused stats in arguments against the US healthcare system.
The biggest problem is that those rates are dictated by each countries own definition of an infant. In the US pretty much every live birth including births resulting from an emergency procedure where the baby has almost no chance of survival is considered and infant for the purposes of reporting. That is NOT the case in most countries including European countries such as Spain, France and even the UK to name a few. In many of those countries a infant must not only be born alive but also survive for at least a certain period of time. The US happens to be one of only a few countries that actually follows the WHO definition of infant for reporting death rates.
There are also issues related to high-risk births that are not factored in. Patients in the US are more likely to attempt top carry a high-risk baby to term, resulting in higher mortality rates when those infants do not survive. Also, in some countries abortion is strongly pushed as a 'treatment' for some birth defects to help keep their numbers low.
These issues, and many others, have been discussed in detail in various WHO reports about problems with reporting but most people tend to skip past the explanations and just look at the chart at the end.
'Gabe' over at Penny Arcade has talked about doing several of their comics on his Surface Pro. According to him it's a great alternative for when their having issues with systems at their offices or he's out of town and wants to still get some work done.
The whole point of this loose web of unintended consequences called the ACA was so that individuals could get health insurance if their employer chose not to provide it.
So for any company currently paying for their employees insurance (as in the GPs case) it's just common sense to remove the cost of health insurance from their books and pay the fine (which in a lot of cases is a lot more than the 4k from the example above) and let the employee get their own insurance on the exchanges. Of course how much of that savings is passed on to the employee is probably negligible and I don't believe individuals can claim the tax exemption so the employees will most likely end up with less insurance then before and have to incur the additional costs themselves or get taxed by the feds.
Any employer who already meets ACA standards who has a competitor who does not may sue in order to level the playing field and from the wording of the law it doesn't appear the Administration would have any defense, except political, as to why they choose to ignore a major aspect of a law passed by the legislative branch.
DOMA was not deemed unconstitutional, only the portion that allowed people who are recognized as married in their home state to not be recognized as married federally was overturned. The ruling basically says if the state recognizes a union as a legal marriage the Feds must too. All other parts of DOMA remain law and none of this decision had anything to do with mob rule, pro or con.
The Prop 8 ruling also had nothing to do with civil rights. They merely stated that since the state itself was not challenging the lower courts decision on the law and none of the parties involved could show any harm to themselves because of the law then there was no one with standing in the eyes of the court to present a case.
Just to clarify, the Prop 8 decision has little to do with states rights or the SCOTUS deciding they didn't have jurisdiction and more to do with the fact the plaintiffs could not show the required legal standing to present the case. They basically said all the arguments for why same sex marriage harmed traditional marriage were not valid and did not constitute harm therefore there was no one left to legally argue the case.
If you can't prove a law specifically harmed you or someone you're representing then it's very hard to actually contest the law. This is the same grounds the courts used to pass on the federal wiretapping program a few years back. Since no one could prove they were the targets of the secret wiretapping then no one had standing to actually challenge the program.
It's also why the current IRS and NSA scandals have a much higher chance of leading to some kind of court case than previous federal screw-ups/surveillance programs; both have identifiable aggrieved parties.
The President proposes a federal budget but it is the Senate and House (both controlled by Dems at the time) who actually write and finalized the actual budget. In the case of 2009, Bush was threatening to veto certain Democrat proposals so they delayed the vote until Obama was in office to ensure their budget passed.
The end result is the 2009 budget wasn't actually passed until 5 months into the fiscal year. Little did we know that would be considered speedy for the Senate Dems.
When Obama took Office at the beginning of 2009, federal employment was at 4,206,000. As of 2011 (the last year available) Federal workers sits at 4,403,000.
Even using the end of 2009 as your base the number of Federal workers continued increasing month to month until sometime around Sept. 2011 (when numbers finally began to decline) which led to the final number of Federal employees to be only 197,000 more than when Bush left office by the end of 2011.
So while yes, the number of federal employees is slightly less today than it was after Obama's first complete year in office (a year Dem's controlled both the Executive and Legislative branches), it is still significantly larger than when he first entered office and with all the 'obstruction' by House and Senate Republican to prevent many of the Dems plans from being implemented it's debatable who exactly is responsible for that slight decrease.
Just a small clarification:
the size of the government has been going down every year since FY 2009.
I'm sure you meant to point out this is only true when you include state and local governments (the majority of States currently have Republican governors BTW). The Federal government, on the other hand, has increased in sized pretty much every month since the 2009 inauguration (not including the temporary census workers which were required regardless of who is in office).
I'm sure you didn't mean to mislead by including all the offices not under Obama and congressional Dem's direct control in your numbers even though they had the benefit of actually making you claim appear true.
The article seems more to do with HTTPS STS and Apples lack thereof then anything specific about open WiFi. So even if you end up on a malicious network, with Android phones, your browsing is a little more secure (although first time visits to websites can be just as insecure because of HTTPS STS limitations).
The WiFi component is just about 'spoofing' a know SSID to trick your iPhone into connecting to your network and not the actual trusted one; this part of the problem should apply to any phone or device with a list of trusted SSIDs and not just Apple.
Yes, but the problem being reported by the AP is that while these accounts are still official government email addresses they are not linked to the people using them so no FOIA request will actually be able to retrieve these hidden emails.
The administration is claiming they are searching these 'secret' emails when receiving FOIA requests but the AP has already shown that to only be true in a single case, and only because they caught it, not because the account was disclosed.
In the case of the EPA head, her 'secret' account was so secret the system thought the email belonged to a real live employee and required them to do online training; which would of not been the case if it was set up as a simple alternate address.
From most reports the current administration has one of the worse records on responding to FOIA request in decades.
Just Google "obama record on foia"
Some are official alternate mailboxes, and while sometimes suspect, at least are registered and subject to FOIA requests but not all.
Lisa Jackson's secret email address was 'Richard Windsor', a fictitious employee that was not disclosed on FOIA requests until someone managed to make the connection.
So it's not like you have LJackson@EPA.gov for the public and LJ774@EPA.Gov for private; in these cases you have completely hidden and unregistered aliases which are being used to perform official business and to skirt FOIA requests.
'Richard Windsor' was so hidden that he was actually required to take mandatory courses online (and passed them every year).