Friday, August 30, 2013

Would You Pay $12.00 For A Big Mac? Dem Solution To Joblessness: Raise Fast Food Wages To $15.00 Per Hour

Welcome to the Same Stupid that equates Insurance Rate Increases of up to 3 and 4 hundred percent with, . . . . making Healthcare Affordable for everyone.

weaselzippers.us;
Dem Rep Jan Schakowsky: Raising Fast Food Industry Wages To $15 An Hour Would Lead To "Millions of Jobs Created"
I think she’s dumb enough to believe this.
HAYES: What do you say to the people watching this and saying, “look, this is between the employees of Mcdonald’s and their employer? This is a private market encounter that happens between people seeking work and those who are looking to hire folks, and it’s not really any of your business, respectfully, Congresswoman, what they pay their workers”?
SCHAKOWSKY: Look, this is an entire industry that is paying poverty wages in this country, and thousands and tens of thousands, maybe millions of people who simply can’t make it on those kinds of wages. And i think that forming a union, getting $15 an hour, which makes a modest income of about $31,000 a year, if you get to work full time, is something that is a proper demand. And actually these workers are acting — are going to the employers, are going to these companies. I’m standing with them because i think we need it for our economy. If they got paid more, we’re going to see millions of jobs created because there are going to be consumers in the marketplace.

Pander much, Rep. Schakowsky?

Millions of jobs created by jacking the prices on fast food into the stratosphere.

What happened? Did the people who voted for you last time smarten up so you're now going after the Complete Idiot vote?

Thursday, August 29, 2013

Syria: Obama Pisses Off The Russians, They Send Warships.

Egypt, Libya, Syria. How many More pieces of foreign policy stupid can this Administration commit?

We do not have a dog in this fight. There are no good guys in the Syrian Civil War. Now he's Pissing Off the Russians too: the President who promised to bring the troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and close Gitmo.

weaselzippers;
Russia Sending Warships To The Mediterranean To Counter Buildup of U.S. Naval Forces Preparing For Attack On Syria:


So much for that reset button.
MOSCOW, Aug 29 (Reuters) – Russia is sending two warships to the east Mediterranean, Interfax news agency said on Thursday, but Moscow denied this meant it was beefing up its naval force there as Western powers prepare for military action against Syria.
Interfax quoted a source in the armed forces’ general staff as saying Russia, Syria’s most powerful ally, was deploying a missile cruiser from the Black Sea Fleet and a large anti-submarine ship from the Northern Fleet in the “coming days”.
Any strengthening of the navy’s presence could fuel tension, especially as the United States has said it is repositioning naval forces in the Mediterranean following an alleged chemical weapons attack which it blames on Syrian government forces.
“The well-known situation now in the eastern Mediterranean required us to make some adjustments to the naval force,” the source said in a reference to the events in Syria.
It was not clear when the vessels would arrive but Interfax said the Moskva missile cruiser was currently in the North Atlantic and would set sail in the next few days.
Thank You Reuters and Zip.

An absolute Master:

weaselzippers again:
Report: Putin "Infuriated" With Obama For Describing Him as A "Bored Kid"



No surprise.
Via NY Times:
President Vladimir V. Putin has conspicuously avoided public comment on reports of a chemical weapons attack on civilians outside of Damascus, the Syrian capital, on Aug. 21, which killed hundreds of people. Instead he has carried on, like many ordinary Russians, as if the civil war in Syria had not reached an ominous new phase. In the days after the attack, Mr. Putin attended a ceremony for the restoration of a fountain made famous in World War II, visited a breakaway province of neighboring Georgia and toured a mine and dam in Siberia. [...]
Suspicion of President Obama only intensified after his decision to scuttle a summit meeting next week in Moscow and to describe Mr. Putin in unusually personal terms at a news conference, saying his body language often made him look “like the bored kid in the back of the classroom.”
Though Mr. Obama went on to say that their interactions were often constructive, the comment infuriated Mr. Putin, according to one Russian official not authorized to be quoted by name.

Hey Vladimir; don't take it too personally. He feels that way about the American people too.



IRS Hindered Efforts To Stop Illegals From Misusing Social Security Numbers

CNSNews;
IRS Hindered Efforts To Stop Illegals From Misusing Social Security Numbers

But Don't worry about it. Your Govt. has Pills and High Voltage Electrical Tranformers to make you either Not Give a Damn, or function at so low an intellectual level that you won't even Know This or anything else the Oily Rascals are up to is even happening.


(CNSNews.com) - An audit report published this month by the inspector general for the Social Security Administration says that the Internal Revenue Service's reluctance to penalize employers who consistently file W-2s on which the Social Security Number and name do not match has "hindered" the SSA’s efforts to stop “unauthorized noncitizens” from using Social Security Numbers that are fake or belong to someone else.
The audit report looked at “inaccurate wage reporting”—or the filing of W-2 forms on which the name and the Social Security Number do not match. The SSA has long said these no-match W-2s are frequently filed on behalf of illegal aliens. According to the IG audit report released earlier this month, a senior IRS official admitted to the IG that the service knows this is the case.
“Furthermore,” said the report, “a senior employment tax official at the IRS acknowledged that unauthorized noncitizens accounted for a high percentage of inaccurate wage reporting.”
The audit looked at the U.S. employers who in tax years 2007-2009 (the latest for which all data was available) had the worst records for filing W-2s on which the names and Social Security Numbers did not match
The IG determined the 100 employers who filed the the largest raw numbers of no-match W-2s in those three years and the 100 employers (with at least 100 employees a piece) who filed the most as a percentage of their payrolls.
The audit discovered that the employer with the very worst record for filing no-match W-2s had filed 117,792 over the three years—an average of 39,246 no-match W-2s per year.
The employer with the highest percentage of no-match W-2s had filed them at a 98-percent rate.
The 100 employers who filed the most no-match W-2s and the 100 employers who the highest percentage of no-match W-2s together filed 2,477,546 no-match W-2s over three years. The auditors determined that 20 percent of the Social Security Numbers used on these W-2s were not real Social Security Numbers. In fact, 42,164 of the W-2s had Social Security Numbers that were all zeros. 358 were filed with 666 as the first three digits.
But, the audit determined, no-match W-2s were more likely to be filed using a real Social Security Number that belonged to someone other than the person on whose behalf the W-2 was filed. “SSA had assigned the remaining 2 million (80 percent) SSNs to someone else,” said the report. “About 380,000 of these belonged to young children, and about 258,000 belonged to deceased individuals.”
When the SSA is unable to identify the actual person on whose behalf a no-match W-2 was filed, the credit for the Social Security taxes paid on that W-2 is put into what SSA calls the “Earnings Suspense File” (ESF). In 2007, according to the report, SSA credited 11.0 million W-2s to the ESF, reflecting $90.7 billion in wages paid to people using an inaccuragte, fake or misused Social Security Number. In 2008, 9.5 million W-2s went into the ESF, reflecting $87.5 billion in wages. And, in 2009, 7.8 million W-2s went into the ESF, reflecting $73.4 billion in wages.
The report said the one reason the ESF is growing at such a rapid pace because of the “intentional misuse” of  Social Security Numbers by “unauthorized noncitizens.”
The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has pointed out that the intentional misuse of a Social Security Number is a felony. “The Social Security Act provides that whoever, with the intent to deceive, falsely represents a number to be his or her SSN when, in fact, that number was not assigned to that person, shall be guilty of a felony and subject to a fine,” said TIGTA.
The IG’s audit report said SSA staff believed employers had an incentive to file bad W-2s because they were not worried about the IRS doing anything about it.
“In previous reports, SSA acknowledged unauthorized noncitizens’ intentional misuse of SSNs has been a major contributor to the ESF’s growth,” said the report. “SSA staff told us employers hired unauthorized workers because nothing prevented them from doing so. That is, employers know SSA had no legal authority to levy fines and penalties, and they were not concerned about potential IRS sanctions.”
Some employers admitted to the IG they hired "unauthorized noncitizens" who misused Social Security Numbers.
“Several of the employers and industry associations we contacted acknowledged that unauthorized noncitizens contributed to SSN misuse,” said the report. “For example, one employer told us his and many restaurants would close if they did not hire unauthorized noncitizens. A temporary labor service employer acknowledged that some of his former employees were unauthorized noncitizens who used invalid, unassigned, and deceased individuals’ SSNs. Furthermore, the president of a large growers’ association stated that farm labor contractors employed a large number of unauthorized noncitizens.”
“In addition, one large restaurant employer we contacted acknowledged that unauthorized noncitizens accounted for about half of its wage items that went into the ESF,” said the report.
One section of the report focused on "obstacles" that "continued hindering SSA's ability to combat SSN misuse." These included that employers resisted using the federal government's cost-free systems for verifyng SSNs, that the IRS was reluctant to fine employers for regularly filing no-match W-2s, and the section of the Internal Revenue Code that protects the confidentiality of tax returns, which is understood to prevent the SSA from giving information to the Department of Homeland Security about no-match W-2s.
"Our 2005 report discussed several obstacles that hindered SSA’s ability to reduce SSN misuse," said the report. "Although SSA continued working with the IRS and DHS and educating employers about the importance of accurate wage reporting, obstacles remained. Employers’ resistance to routinely using SSNVS or E-Verify hindered SSA’s ability to combat SSN misuse. In addition, the IRS was reluctant to impose existing fines or penalties against employers who consistently submitted erroneous or inaccurate wage reports. Furthermore, the Agency informed us that privacy and disclosure issues limited SSA’s ability to share information with DHS regarding employers who filed large numbers or percentages of wage statements with inaccurate SSNs"
The IG said that although the IRS had the legal authority to penalize employers who filed large numbers of inaccurate W-2s, the IRS could not tell the IG how many employers it had actually penalized. At the same time, a number of SSA Employer Service Liaison Officers (ESLOs)--who deal with employers through regional SSA offices--told the IG they "were not aware" of the IRS penalizing any employers who had habitually filed inaccurate W-2s.
"Although the IRS periodically conducts compliance audits, which may identify wage reporting issues, it could not provide data on the number of employers it had penalized because of inaccurate wage reporting," said the report.
“In addition,” said the report, “several ESLOs told us they were not aware of any fines/penalties the IRS had levied against employers who consistently submit erroneous name and/or SSN information.”
“SSA senior staff did not believe employers had an incentive to submit accurate annual wage reports because the IRS rarely enforced existing penalties,” said the report. “SSA staff believed applying penalties would deter SSN misuse. Furthermore, SSA senior staff believed the Agency could provide the IRS with sufficient evidence to show an employer knew or should have known its employees’ SSNs were incorrect. For example, a reasonable person should recognize that hundreds of workers could not have the same or consecutively numbered SSNs.
Thank You CNSNews.
"358 were filed with 666 as the first three digits."
Someone's got a sense of humor, or not.

HealthCare Execs Call For Action On Climate Change: OR, Why So Many People Are The Victims of Manslaughter In Hospitals

With Execs like these two it's no wonder Hospitals have become Abattoirs.

from Fierce Healthcare;
HealthCare Execs Call For Action On Climate Change
August 29, 2013 | By 


The healthcare industry must take action against climate change, "a health issue that will affect everyone in the world," according to Healthcare Without Harm President Gary Cohen and Gundersen Health System CEO Jeffrey Thompson in an editorial for LiveScience.

Cohen and Thompson cite the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as Dengue fever to new regions and the increase in respiratory problems in communities downwind of coal-power plants as just two examples of how climate change has already begun to affect public health.

"The world is learning that it is not possible to support the population when the planet is sick," they wrote.

Healthcare, the authors said, "occupies a unique position in society to admit its contribution to the problem, and to lead the fight against climate change." For example, they call for hospitals, which use far more energy than schools or offices, to take steps to increase sustainability. This action, they said, will "simultaneously ... reduce the rising disease burden and reduce the globe's spiraling healthcare costs."

Cohen and Thompson also urge hospitals and clinics to have contingency plans in place for the fallout from climate change, saying they should be "the last buildings standing in a hurricane."

They are not the only ones thinking along these lines. In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has developed a strategy to design new hospitals that are better equipped to deal with the effects of climate change and make similar adjustments to existing hospitals. These strategies include increasing the flood-resistance requirements for new facilities and ensuring power backups in the case of flooding or extreme temperatures.

But Cohen and Thompson believe the call to action should extend throughout the country. They call for healthcare professionals to take the lead in communicating the reality of climate change to the public at large, citing doctors and nurses' successful messaging regarding the health hazards posed by tobacco products. Healthcare, they wrote, must "clean up its own system, and live its mission of addressing the environmental and social conditions that are making people sick in the first place."

For more:
- here's Cohen and Thompson's 
editorial
- here's Bloomberg's 
plan (.pdf)

Related Articles:
Hospital rebuilding vital to protect NYC from climate change
4 ways for hospitals to address climate change
Sustainability efforts save hospitals millions
Hospital leadership support crucial in going green
HHS gives millions to improve hospital disaster planning

Thank You Mr Budryk and Fierce Healthcare



Healthcare, they wrote, must "clean up its own system, and live its mission of addressing the environmental and social conditions that are making people sick in the first place."
No, Healthcare must keep it's nose Out of Social Engineering and stick to Science that isn't turned inside out to peddle Collectivist Hogwash. 


"environmental and social conditions that are making people sick in the first place"

Uhh, yeah: like Mind and Mood control/Political Re-Education.




From Climate Depot.com;

Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons Report: Global Warming Scientists 'Adjust Both Data And Even Theory To Accomodate Politically Correct Positions'


By:  - Climate DepotAugust 29, 2013 9:14 AM
Climate Science Exploited for Political Agenda, According to Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons – PR Newswire – The Sacramento Bee
By Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)
Published: Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2013 – 7:00 am
TUCSON, Ariz., Aug. 28, 2013 — /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – Climatism or global warming alarmism is the most prominent recent example of science being coopted to serve a political agenda, writes Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the in the fall 2013 issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. He compares it to past examples: Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, and the eugenics movement.
Lindzen describes the Iron Triangle and the Iron Rice Bowl, in which ambiguous statements by scientists are translated into alarmist statements by media and advocacy groups, influencing politicians to feed more money to the acquiescent scientists.
In consequence, he writes, “A profound dumbing down of the discussion…interacts with the ascendancy of incompetents.” Prizes and accolades are awarded for politically correct statements, even if they defy logic. “Unfortunately, this also often induces better scientists to join the pack in order to preserve their status,” Lindzen adds.
Lindzen discusses key aspects of the global warming models, including their dependence on the “globally averaged mean temperature anomaly”—that is the average of the differences between the average temperature for the year at each weather station and the 1961-1990 average for that station. This metric is used to create an influential graph that resembles the daily chart of stock indices, but is of dubious significance. The change in the anomaly is tiny against the perspective of the temperature variations we experience daily, Lindzen demonstrates.
In normal science, models are judged by how well they agree with nature, Lindzen explains. In the climate “debate,” however, the models are given a claim to validity independent of agreement with real observations.
The highly oversimplified terms of the discussion in the policy arena “largely exclude the most interesting examples of historical climate change. The heavy intellectual price of the politicization of science is rarely addressed,” writes Lindzen.
Lindzen writes: “Global climate alarmism has been costly to society, and it has the potential to be vastly more costly. It has also been damaging to science, as scientists adjust both data and even theory to accommodate politically correct positions. How can one escape from the Iron Triangle when it produces flawed science that is immensely influential and is forcing catastrophic public policy?”
Escape from climate alarmism will be more difficult than from Lysenkoism, in Lindzen’s view, because Global Warming has become a religion. It has a global constituency and has coopted almost all institutional science. Nevertheless, he believes “the cracks in the scientific claims for catastrophic warming are…becoming much harder for the supporters to defend.”
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) is a national organization representing physicians in all specialties, founded in 1943.
www.aapsonline.org
SOURCE Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS)



Doctors Are Worst Hand-Hygiene Offenders

from Fierce Healthcare;
Doctors Are Worst Hand-Hygiene Offenders

International study finds nurses more likely to comply with handwashing
In the war to prevent hospital-acquired infections, nurses are better about washing their hands than doctors, a new study found.
Despite widespread evidence that alcohol-based hand rub is the cheapest and most effective way to prevent infection, the World Health Organization says poor hand hygiene remains the cause of millions of infections every year and leads to hundreds of thousands of deaths.

"As resistance to antibiotics and other key medicines becomes more common, it is more essential than ever to reduce the number of avoidable infections in hospital," said Edward Kelley, coordinator of the patient safety program at WHO. "The best way of reducing the number of people contracting antimicrobial resistant infections is to protect them from cross-transmission of germs through healthcare workers' hands in the first place."

The study, published this week in the The Lancet Infectious Diseases, examined the effectiveness of the educational initiative of the WHO's hand-hygiene program. So far the five-step strategy has been implemented at more than 15,700 healthcare settings in 168 countries worldwide and more than 50 governments have based their national hand-hygiene campaigns on it. Researchers looked at 43 hospitals in Costa Rica, Italy, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Africa and found the program helped improve compliance with handwashing by 16 percent. Among the findings:
  • Nurses had the highest compliance rates (71 percent) across all sties before the intervention and doctors had the lowest (60 percent)
  • Nurses continued to have a higher compliance rate after the intervention across almost all the test sites, except Mali in Africa
  • Compliance improved across the board after the intervention, from 51 percent to 67 percent
  • Knowledge about the importance of handwashing increased by a third after the intervention
  • Alcohol-based hand rubs have been a key factor in practice improvement
  • The program has a greater effect in low- and middle-income countries than those with high-incomes
  • Two years after the intervention, all sites reported ongoing hand-hygiene activities with sustained or further improvement, including national scale-up.
"Before the launch, healthcare workers missed around half of the appropriate hand-hygiene opportunities and after the program they missed a third," said Australian author, UNSW Professor Mary-Louise McLaws, who co-authored the study and helped draft the WHO Hand-Hygiene Guidelines.

"The launch is just the first step," she said. "The next phase will be harder--changing entrenched poor hand-hygiene behavior in some healthcare workers who have yet to respond to the program."
The WHO's strategy is based on five steps:
  • Ensure healthcare workers have access to alcohol-based handrub at the point of patient care;
  • Train and educate healthcare workers on the most important times in patient care for hand hygiene (before touching a patient, before clean and aseptic procedures, after contact with body fluids, after touching a patient and after touching a patient's surroundings;
  • Monitor compliance and provide feedback;
  • Post visual reminders at the point of care in the workplace;
  • Create a culture of attention to patient and healthcare worker safety within the institution.
She noted that in Australia, doctors only comply about 65 percent of the time. "As a group they have universally poor hand-hygiene practices. Yet hand hygiene is a fundamental clinical practice that must be practiced without excuses," McLaws said.

The study authors recommended worldwide acceptance of the WHO's hand-hygiene strategy based on their findings. They conclude the strategies are feasible and sustainable across a range of settings in different countries and lead to significant compliance and knowledge improvement in healthcare workers.

For more:
- here's the 
announcement about the study
- read the 
study (subscription required)
- check out the WHO's 
statement
- see the WHO's 
statistics

Related Articles
Patient education may be key to reducing hospital-acquired infections
Hospitals get tough with hand-washing offenders
4 awesome infection-prevention videos
Special report: How one hospital system changed hand hygiene compliance
Wrist-band technology helps ensure docs are washing their hands
Touch screen tech tracks doc handwashing

Thank You Ms MacDonald and Fierce Healthcare.


Right, and these Doctors never heard of Joseph Lister in Med School.