Diseases Cross Open Borders

townhall

Phyllis Schlafly

|

Posted: May 31, 2016 12:01 AM

The spread of the Zika virus has become so alarming that more than 150 health experts from over a dozen countries published an open letter urging the postponement or relocation of the Summer Olympics scheduled for August 5-21 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Never before in world history have the Olympics been cancelled due to a public health crisis.

“The Brazilian strain of Zika virus harms health in ways that science has not observed before,” the scientists warned. They added that an “unnecessary risk is posed when 500,000 foreign tourists from all countries attend the Games, potentially acquire that strain, and return home to places where it can become endemic.”

Imagine that! Global health experts are sounding alarm bells against the transmission of disease from one country to another, declaring that the risk is so great that the most famous international event of all should be called off to prevent it.

Yet our open southern border allows an even greater number of people from Zika-plagued countries to invade our country every year, and thereby spread their diseases in our communities. Most countries in Central and South America, not just Brazil, are beset by the Zika virus today.

Countries having a problem with the Zika virus include Mexico, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Venezuela. Those are the same countries that are flooding our Nation with illegal immigrants.

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President Obama demanded that Congress appropriate $1.9 billion to fight the Zika virus in other countries, but none of that money would be spent on securing our southern border against illegal immigration from Zika-plagued nations. Obama’s clueless Secretary of State, John Kerry, told the graduating class at Northeastern University, “You’re about to graduate into a complex and borderless world.”

Australia doesn’t have a wide-open border with adjacent countries, but an expert there expressed concern about the risk of a single Zika-infected person entering that nation. “A single person actually caused the epidemic that” Brazil is struggling with now, Australian Professor of Health Sciences Charles Watson observed.

In Britain, a professor of international public health, Jimmy Whitworth, warned pregnant women in that country to “think twice” before traveling to Texas and Florida, including Walt Disney World. Although Zika has not yet been found in American mosquitos, Professor Whitworth expects that to change “in two or three months’ time” because mosquito transmission is already occurring in Mexico and Cuba.

It is through mosquitos that the Zika virus can spread quickly from one infected person to others in the same community, causing terrible birth defects when pregnant women become infected. This transmission by mosquito is similar to that of dengue, an untreatable disease also being brought into the United States from Central and South America.

The Zika virus is not the only devastating disease that is brought into our Nation through illegal immigration. The Ebola virus with its 70% fatality rate has killed more than 11,000 people worldwide and caused a national panic in 2014 when it reached our shores through an African visitor who was not properly screened before he showed up in Dallas.

Among refugees from Somalia who have been resettled in Minnesota, a shocking 22% are infected with latent tuberculous (TB), which is more than five times the rate in the general American population. In addition to its harmful effects to health, TB is also very costly to treat: easier cases cost $17,000 per patient, while the most serious strains cost $430,000 per patient using treatments extending over three years.


Promoters of free trade insist that our economy can absorb these astronomical health care costs, but they drive up health insurance premiums for everyone. Illegal immigrants typically lack their own health insurance, and they show up at emergency rooms to demand medical care paid for by the American taxpayers.

Measles cases are also brought to us mostly by immigrants. Measles outbreaks in detention centers for illegal aliens are commonplace now.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has officially advised pregnant women to postpone visiting the many Central and South American countries having a Zika epidemic. But if it makes sense to tell Americans not to go there, then why does the Obama Administration welcome infected people from those countries to come here?

The World Health Organization concluded that canceling or moving the Olympics would not have a significant benefit in slowing the spread of the Zika virus. But their reasoning is due to the fact that the virus is already widespread in many countries in the Western Hemisphere, though not yet in the United States.

We have no control over whether the Olympics is canceled, but we do have control over our borders. Billions of taxpayer dollars are currently spent on disease control that could be more cheaply and more effectively used to halt the flow of illegal aliens over our southern border.

Thank You Ms Schlafly and Townhall.

Dishonoring Veterans, Honoring Terrorists

frontpagemag
May 30, 2016Daniel Greenfield

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

On Memorial Day, the flowers bloom. A dozen towns in a dozen states all claim that it began there when after the long weary struggle of the Civil War, the mothers and sisters of the lost and the fallen brought fresh cut flowers to bring a touch of life to the dead men entombed in the cold, gray stone.

“From the silence of sorrowful hours, The desolate mourners go, Lovingly laden with flowers, Alike for the friend and the foe,” reads the famous Francis Miles Finch poem which helped popularize the practice.

Today the wars are no longer fraternal. The First World War is the last war that had anything brotherly in it. It was a war where soldiers from both sides could observe a Christmas truce and hurl nothing deadlier than snowballs at each other. The end of that terrible war on the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month" became Armistice Day and then, when the “war to end all wars” did not end them, but instead gave way to wars fought against terrible evils, Nazism, Communism, Islam, it became Veteran’s Day to remember those who would go on sacrificing in this eternal struggle against evil.

But while wars are no longer fraternal, the flowers are laid now on the graves of foes, not friends.

The men and women who die fighting for the cause of freedom are not accorded a fraction of the tender affection from the press that it lavishes on a single imprisoned Al Qaeda terrorist. We live today in an America in which the butchers of the Jihad in Guantanamo Bay receive better medical care than veterans waiting endlessly at the VA. While Obama cut off hot meals for Marines in Afghanistan, Islamic terrorists in Guantanamo Bay were enjoying lemon baked fish, honey glazed chicken, lyonaise rice, tandouri chicken breast, okra, hummus, dates, honey and seasoned lentils.

While veterans died at the VA, the men they had fought and helped capture were gifted with a $750,000 soccer field. This treatment is an obscene echo of the days of segregation when German POWs were allowed to sit inside at eateries while the African-American soldiers who guarded them had to wait outside. This segregation no longer occurs by race, but by patriotism and creed.

Obama denies that Islamic terrorism exists and suppresses any training materials about the role of Islam in Islamic terrorism while his administration warns of domestic terror threats from veterans. Muslim migrants from Syria receive lavish social benefits while health care for veterans is slashed. The Muslim migrants, many of whom support Islamic terrorists, benefit from job programs while veterans head for the unemployment line. This hatefully discriminatory attitude has become pervasive on the left.

Hollywood bends over backward to avoid accurately portraying Muslim terrorists, but depicts returning veterans as unstable killers and ticking time bombs. The media gushes over each petty Islamophobia grievance, like Tahera Ahmad, who claimed that she didn’t receive a Diet Coke can on a plane only because she was Muslim, while sweeping the sweeping the thousand veterans who died because of the VA scandal under the progressive prayer rug. A Muslim Diet Coke matters more than a thousand dead veterans.

When Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was slow to release Islamic Jihadists from Guantanamo Bay, Obama summoned him and personally chewed him out over the delays for his beloved terrorists. His predecessor, Secretary of Defense Hagel, said, “I’d get the hell beat out of me all the time on this at the White House.”

Does anyone imagine that Obama summoned the VA secretary to yell at him over the treatment of veterans? Instead he initially backed former VA Secretary Shinseki. And it’s doubtful that current VA Secretary Bob McDonald will be getting personally yelled at by Obama for comparing wait lines at the VA to Disneyland.

33% of veterans who have served since September 11 suffer from a disability. Their unemployment rates are higher and both poverty rates and food stamp use continue to rise. Behind these tragic facts is the tragic truth that we have forgotten how to honor our veterans. Worse still, the country’s leaders go out of their way to actively diminish the respect due to their courage and sacrifices.

On his visit to Vietnam, Obama referenced veterans only to praise John Kerry while insisting that “the courage to make peace” is more important than the courage “to fight.” The old-fashioned kind of veteran who fought in Vietnam, who earned his Purple Heart honestly and came home wounded in body and spirit, who is not interested in pretending that the Communist death squads he fought deserve his tribute is, according to Obama, lacking in courage. True courage is appeasement while the courage that stopped Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan is truly something closer to cowardice.

In his apology speech at Hiroshima, Obama cynically equated American and Japanese soldiers, as he had both sides in Vietnam, dismissing World War II as being fought out of a “base instinct for domination or conquest.” This is how the left sees war and soldiers. There are no good wars. Therefore the only good veterans are the ones who transcend it by recognizing that they made a mistake by fighting. That war is a misunderstanding to be resolved by the truly courageous diplomacy of men like John Kerry.

Is it any wonder that an administration which views the military as an evil to be abolished, which sees the war against Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany not as proof of our moral convictions, but as an outgrowth of our ancestors “having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood, used these tools not just for hunting, but against their own kind,” has such contempt and hostility for veterans?

And is it any wonder that this contempt trickles through the institutions of the left, from entertainment to academia, and that in the shadow of these institutions, the honor due to the men who fought for our freedom, those still living and the dead, from the birth of our nation to its present crisis, is lacking?

Is it any wonder that veterans go hungry while lavish feasts are thrown in the institutions of government? Once we remembered that our freedoms come from the willingness to fight for them. Not with campus activism or empty words, but on the battlefield against those totalitarian enemies, whether they wear the death’s head, the red star or the crescent, which come to deprive us of them.

But our enemies today are as likely to come from within as without. We are in the midst of a quiet civil war and our veterans have become its first casualties. The heroes of today’s ruling class are racist rabble-rousers who tear down the flag for which so many of our soldiers died and replace it with their own militant banners of identity politics. The privileged leftist activists who once chanted "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win", who even attempted to murder soldiers to aid the enemy, are in charge of the country, while Vietnam veterans sleep on the streets and groan in prisons.

Obama’s disrespect for veterans and the military is only a symptom of a deeper rot. Once again a civil war is underway between those of us who love this Union and those who seek to divide it. It is a conflict fought with words and laws, rather than bullets, but it has its casualties who are all around us. It is not only the veterans who have died at the VA who are its victims, but those who have long slept under green grass and gray stone, whose graves wait to be decorated, whose courage waits to be remembered and whose cause waits to be fought once again. 

Tags: Barack Obama, Hiroshima, Japan, Memorial Day, veterans, Vietnam

Thank You Mr Greenfield and FPM

see also
Honoring Our Fallen Soldiers

Obama and Ho Chi Min, Embracing Evil


The List: These Are The Veterans Groups Receiving Money From Trump's Fundraiser

Medical Errors: 5 System Wide Changes That Can Prevent Patient Harm

fiercehealthcare
May 13, 2016 | By Ilene MacDonald

[ED; here's one approach which would obviate a good 90% of the problem.]

• Nursing (5)
• The Law (13)
• State Medical Boards (6)

Treat principles in the case as principles in the case.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/4

Despite controversy over the definition of medical errors used in a new study that finds these mistakes lead to 10 percent of deaths in the United States each year, it's clear that the industry has to do something to catch and prevent these errors.

As many as 250,000 deaths occur each year due to a medical mistake, according to The BMJ study, confirming previous research from 2013. That's roughly 685 people a day.

I can't imagine that we'd turn a blind eye to these statistics if that many people died each day in plane crashes.

But it looks like the industry and the media are finally paying attention.

In addition to the study findings, this week The New York Times reported that the family of comedian Joan Rivers settled a medical malpractice lawsuit against a New York City clinic after a federal investigation indicated her death was due to aseries of errors.

Fortunately, not all medical mistakes lead to death or serious injury. But many of these errors are preventable. For instance, a year-long investigation into medical errors involving cataract surgery in Massachusetts found cases where the wrong lens was implanted, procedures were performed on the wrong eye or wrong patient and anesthesia was incorrectly administered.

The report, released yesterday by the Betsy Lehman Center for Patient Safety and Medical Error Reduction, found that the surge in errors involved "never events" that are entirely preventable. And these are cases that involved the most common surgery performed in the country and a procedure that is also considered among the safest.

The investigators called on surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, technicians and administrators to examine their current practices and implement steps to prevent these adverse events from happening again.

The report found that these mistakes were due to system-wide errors, such as breakdowns in communication and failure to conduct an effective time out. The BMJ study also indicated that most medical errors were due to systemic problems, such as inadequate coordination of care and the absence of safety nets.

And while the study focused on cataract surgery, the panel's recommendation to prevent these errors from happening again are applicable for all procedures and to all healthcare institutions:
Foster a culture that makes the prevention of patient harm a top priority
Engage physicians and staff to develop and implement a patient safety program
Standardize and adhere to protocols and processes, including effective times outs
Conduct a meaningful, informed consent process that engages patients
Recognize that even the best systems require continuous improvement to address emerging risks

Perhaps these steps would have saved the life of Joan Rivers. Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, told CNN that she intends to ensure no one has to go through what her family endured, vowing to work toward "ensuring higher safety standards in outpatient surgical clinics." --Ilene (@FierceHealth)

Related Articles:
Medical errors officially the third leading cause of death in the US, study finds
Collaborative efforts key to medical error data collection
BMJ study on medical errors flawed, not 'innovative,' doctor writes
Medical errors officially the third leading cause of death in U.S., study finds


Thank You Ms MacDonald and FH.

Obama's Refugees And Surging Deadly Diseases In America

frontpagemag
May 26, 2016Matthew Vadum


An outbreak of deadly infectious tuberculosis among refugees President Obama sent to Indiana is a frightening reminder that the administration's dangerous immigration policies are putting American lives at risk.

In a frenzied rush to bring as many non-English-speaking Third World aliens to the country as possible before his presidency ends in a few months, Obama is allowing Syrian war migrants and refugees to be brought into the country without first undergoing proper medical examinations, a violation of the nation's most basic public health protocols.

“Tuberculosis is one of the most lethal infectious diseases in history,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and surgeons. “It is easily transmitted, say on a public bus [and] increasingly, it is becoming highly resistant to all our antibiotics,” she said.

It is clear that Obama doesn't care about the health and well-being of the American people. That was obvious when he began pushing to create the so-called death panels that Obamacare mandates. But now as a result of the president's recklessness, fatal diseases are surfacing or making a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.

Under Obama, immigration policy aims to import new Democratic voters -- the less skilled, less educated, less enamored with the norms and values of Western civilization, the better. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by Obama to expand and remake the American electorate.

Prior to the Obama era, tuberculosis was a rare diagnosis and many thought the disease had more or less been eradicated in the United States. Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.

Breitbart News reports that the four individuals in the Hoosier State with active tuberculosis (TB) were sent there by the federal Office of Refugee Resettlement in 2015. The origin countries of the quartet were not publicly available at time of writing but they're not the only refugees in that state with tuberculosis. Just 77 percent of the 1,885 refugees the feds sent to Indiana last year completed the post-arrival medical screenings that identified the four persons with active TB. No medical data is available for the remaining 420 who were not screened. Of the 1,885 refugees, 80 percent came Myanmar.

Last year close to 400 migrants with latent TB arrived in Indiana, according to state health authorities. Indiana's TB rate had been falling in the five decades up to 2010, but it is now rising as more migrants move to the state.

While latent TB itself is not infectious, 10 percent of those with latent TB later develop active infectious TB, a particularly nasty ancient disease.

"Tuberculosis (TB) ... bacteria usually attack the lungs," according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (CIS), "[b]ut TB bacteria can attack any part of the body, such as the kidney, spine, and brain."

The primer on the malady that used to be called the White Plague continues:

"If not treated properly, TB disease can be fatal. ... TB is spread through the air from one person to another. The bacteria are put into the air when a person with active TB disease of the lungs or throat coughs, sneezes, speaks, or sings. People nearby may breathe in these bacteria and become infected. ... In the early 1900s, TB disease killed one out of every seven people living in the United States and Europe. ...

"[R]acial and ethnic minority populations and foreign-born individuals continue to account for a large number of TB cases in the United States. This is why the initial screening for TB and the appropriate treatment of TB for individuals coming to the United States and living here permanently is an important tool to help eradicate the disease in the United States and worldwide."

The Obama administration doesn't even follow its own advice on screening because resettling refugees is more important to the Obama administration than protecting people who are already here in the country.

Dr. Orient blasted the Obama administration for letting refugees in without testing for latent TB.
What's This?

“Admitting people who might cause an epidemic makes no sense whatsoever from a public health standpoint,” Orient said. “It suggests that those who favor it do not care about the cost in suffering, death, and expense to Americans.”

“If for humanitarian reasons we wish to help people fleeing persecution, there is still no need to release them into the general population of susceptible individuals," she explained. "Officials who place politics above the health of Americans need to be held accountable and removed from positions of authority."

And the Zika virus from Latin America, which causes microcephaly, i.e. severe fetal brain defects, has immigrated to the United States under President Obama's watch. Cases have been found in 11 states and in the District of Columbia.

"People from Central and South America, ground zero for Zika and other infectious diseases including tuberculosis, dengue, Chagas, Chikungunya and schistosomiasis, make up nearly 15 percent of the illegal-immigrant population in the U.S.," notes Michelle Malkin.

The ongoing invasion at the border with Mexico is exposing Americans to numerous health risks.

"What's coming over into the U.S. could harm everyone," said Southern Texas Border Patrol agent Chris Cabrera. "We are starting to see scabies, chicken pox, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus infections, and different viruses."

Syrian refugees have brought leishmaniasis, a terrifying parasitic flesh-eating disease prevalent in Syria, to Turkey and Lebanon. In the 18th century a British physician called the illness the "Aleppo boil and Aleppo evil." U.S. immigration screenings would likely miss the difficult-to-treat disease which spreads to humans through sandflies because its victims can be asymptomatic for a long time.

It is important to bear in mind that contrary to what left-wingers say, it is not nutty or racist to be concerned about foreigners importing diseases; population movement is how diseases spread.

Aliens and even some citizens may unwittingly bring in pathogens for which Americans have not developed immunity. Sometimes these maladies cause death on an epic scale. For example, centuries ago Europeans brought pathogens like the smallpox virus on their bodies to the new world. Indigenous Indian communities were wiped out because they had never encountered it before.

Fortunately, not everyone in Washington, D.C. has been asleep at the wheel on public health issues.

Two public health experts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) sounded the alarm last year about the Obama administration's appalling disregard for the safety of Americans.

In an email exchange between Logistics Management Specialist George Roark and Public Health Advisor William Adams, Roark wrote that “no country in the world would allow” Obama's massive influx of unwanted foreigners.

Adams answers in the correspondence released under the Freedom of Information Act that “in ten years or less, they’ll all be voting ... Commander’s intent ... ” Roark characterizes Obama as “the worst pres[ident] we have ever had ... he truly is ‘the amateur’ but a Marxist too.”

The year before CDC Intelligence Analyst Daniel Bubacz mockingly referred to Obama's border policy as a “Leave No Child on the other Side of the Border Policy.”

So far no one in the Obama White House is listening.

Tags: disease, Obama, refugees

Thank You Mr Vadum and FPM.

Govt. Mind Control Tops U.S. Healthcare Spending

It's a lot closer to 1939 Munich than you think.
madinamerica
In The News May 24, 2016

According to new research, the United States spends over 200 billion annually on treatment and hospitalization for mental health issues, exceeding spending on heart conditions and cancer. Previous estimates of total healthcare spending by condition failed to account for costs associated with institutionalization but when this was factored into the latest research, the category of “mental disorders” moved to the top of the list by a substantial margin. More than 40% of spending on mental health issues are associated with institutionalization, the researchers found.

Open Access →


Ten medical conditions with the highest estimated spending in 2013
SOURCE Roehrig, 2016 NOTES Institutionalized populations include nursing home residents, long-term patients in psychiatric hospitals, and prisoners. Trauma is fractures and wounds. Pulmonary conditions include chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, and other pulmonary diseases.

Roehrig, C., 2016. Mental Disorders Top The List Of The Most Costly Conditions In The United States: $201 Billion. Health Affairs, pp.10-1377. (Full Text)


--Justin Karter , News Editor

Thank You Mr Karter and MIA.

Memorial Day, Bill Whittle, The Assault On Civilizational Structures

What we have today did not come gift wrapped. It is ours at an absolutely horrific price and it is being eaten and destroyed in huge gulps by the amoral and blasphemously ignorant.

As Bill points out, the world has not seen America truly angry since 1945.

See the series The Pacific. Buy it, Period. Get a good look at the awesome price our forefathers paid for what we have today.



HBO The Pacific

Freedom is never more than a single generation away from extinction.

Loch Ness Socialism

Contrast it with this.

The Fall of Sweden: Multiculturalism, The Muslim Invasion And Sacking of Sweden

The unfortunate Swedes believed themselves into the oxymoron of a Benevolent Socialism. And now their Benevolent Socialist Govt is feeding them into a meat grinder and Ms Carlqvist, among others, can't understand why.

Proponents of Govt./Socialized Healthcare (or anything else) cite the European models. If those countries can provide it, why can't we?

1: Those countries are not providing it and never were. The Capitalist, U.S. Taxpayer was providing it, . . . Because,

2: The United States Military has been providing 'Those Countries' with their real defense at U.S. expense since the end of WWII.

Thank You Mr Whittle and Truth Revolt.

No Retreat From Hillary's Village

frontpagemag
Mary Grabar
May 26, 2016

A campaign ad that Hillary Clinton used against Barack Obama in 2008 featured images of sleeping children, with a voice asking who would answer the phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m., “someone who already knows the world leaders . . . the military,” someone “tested and ready to lead”—or (by implication) a first-term U.S. Senator/community organizer?

Hillary Clinton is running for president again, and of course is ignoring her failure as secretary of state to answer the late-night phone call coming from Benghazi on September 11, 2012. Instead, she is advertising how she wants to send federal emissaries into the homes of parents with newborn infants to teach them how to handle 3 a.m. feedings and baby talk. It’s an extension of her agenda as first lady in the Arkansas governor’s mansion and in the White House. Her political career, after graduating and having written a thesis on friend Saul Alinsky, was launched with the Children’s Defense Fund under the direction of Marian Wright Edelman, agitator for increased welfare “for the children,” including federally funded childcare workers.

As president, Hillary Clinton would implement the Edelman/Alinsky domestic vision she put forward, in more palatable terms, in her 1996 book, It Takes a Village to Raise a Child. Of course, it takes someone like Clinton to see the federal government as a “village.”

In that book Clinton wrote, “government is not something outside us—something irrelevant or even alien to us—but is us. To acknowledge this is to acknowledge that government has a responsibility not only to provide essential services but to bring individuals and communities together.” This is the backwards notion of the community organizer.

Recently, in a May 21, 2016, Washington Post op-ed, Clinton revealed her totalizing domestic plans by reiterating her commitment to paid family leave legislation and to the “big idea” of “increasing federal investments and incentivizing states so that no family ever has to pay more than 10 percent of its income for child care.”

She also proposed doubling the investment in programs that she helped develop as first lady: Early Head Start and the Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership program. Parroting bureaucrats, Clinton claimed, “These programs bring an evidenced-based curriculum to child care and make sure kids get the best possible start in life. . . . .”

She, however, ignores the studies, including one by the agency administering the program, that show that when Head Start does have a positive impact, it is slight and disappears by third grade.

Even so, Clinton wants to expand federal daycare, and also to send government agents into homes, following her efforts as first lady of Arkansas when she introduced the “Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters,” or “HIPPY.” Her campaign website boasts of a more recent feat, “As a leader at the Clinton Foundation,” when she “started a national public awareness campaign called ‘Too Small to Fail’ or ‘Pequeños y Valiosos’ aimed at closing the ‘word gap.’”

The Clinton Foundation, a purported charity (in reality a campaign slush fund with contributions helping friends’ business pursuits), is using the latest “gap” as the basis for the programs she hopes to enact as president. The campaign site explains: “This gap refers to the 30 million fewer words heard by lower-income children by the time they are 4 years old, which leads to disparities in language development and school readiness.” Low-income students already receive free breakfasts and lunches, even in the summer. Under the recently passed Every Student Succeeds Act they can look forward to attending “community schools,” where they will receive homework help, family dinners, and health and dental services.

Under Clinton’s plan, the federal government would provide childcare subsidies to families, raise the wages of childcare workers, and provide “home visiting services”—the latter to teach parents to talk to their children. In It Takes a Village,Clinton celebrated England’s tradition of providing home visits through its national health service. (She also bragged about her work on Goals 2000, the precursor to Common Core.)

Initiatives, like the one to end the “word gap” may sound head-scratching-ly bizarre to people who have been around babies, and made idiots of themselves by cooing and lapsing into inane talk.

But the studies that show that many low-income (i.e., single and government-dependent) parents do not speak to their young children are borne out by observation.

It is an uncomfortable subject for many leftists. Anyone who has taken public transportation in cities like Atlanta, where it is mostly used by those who cannot afford cars, knows this--including one of my leftist friends. In traffic-choked Atlanta it made sense for her to commute to her job downtown via the rail line, a straight shot from her apartment. She would save on time, car wear-and-tear, gas, and parking—not to mention “The Environment.”

But she stopped, explaining in an agonized voice that she couldn’t bear to watch how young mothers treated their children, with slaps and pulls, screaming abuses at them, at the train station.

Of course, no one would dare reprimand such parents.

So my friend retreated. Leftist parents retreat by sending their children to private schools, while arguing for more funding for public schools.

The reaction is to retreat, to one’s car, and to vote for and advocate more government social programs so that “experts” can deal with such parents. Leftists refuse to acknowledge that government programs that incentivize family breakdown and interfere with natural communities are the problem.

Conservatives, frustrated by the inability of political representatives to cut back on detrimental government programs and despairing at the takeover of education by radicals, retreat to far-flung suburbs, where they undertake the dual tasks of parenting and teaching. No one can or should blame them. In fact, they are to be commended. When I taught college I could count on homeschooled students to be better educated and more motivated than students from public schools.

But with the retreat of such parents, public schools suffer. It’s a vicious cycle, but the progressive’s solution (or opportunity) is to use the deterioration as an entrée to more government meddling.

Now, especially in Obama’s final year, we are witnessing the Washington overlords hounding the middle-class citizens into their retreats. They are forcing “individuals and communities together” under Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing regulation of 2015. The suburbs are being forced to build housing for the poor, who will bring their dysfunction to everything from the playground to the shopping mall. As the feds impose their diktats on public spaces and private businesses, the homeschooling family will find fewer and fewer places where they are comfortable. Under Obama’s Department of Education, they have found themselves forced to adhere to crazy Common Core standards if they want to pass GED tests, college entrance exams, and AP exams. They find that many colleges now use Common Core test scores for placement in classes. This overreach inspired many conservatives into activism and made Common Core part of the presidential campaign.

But as the presidential election approaches, many of the same conservatives are retreating--from the voting booth. Morally repulsed by the profligate past, rhetoric, and impure ideology of presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, they vow to back a third-party candidate, write in a name, or just stay home and pray. They are impervious to arguments that their retreat makes a Hillary Clinton (Obama.2) presidency likely.

Surprisingly, the anti-Trump super PAC, Our Principles, as part of their attacks on Trump’s sexism, has been using statements about fatherhood that he made on the Howard Stern show in 2005. Like the leftists, these Republicans take umbrage at Trump’s comments about husbands who relent to pressures and “act like the wife.”

Trump expressed traditional sentiments and said he believed in supplying “funds,” but not changing diapers or pushing a stroller through Central Park. In contrast, I am reminded of one of many absurd helpful hints about fatherhood coming from the Obama administration. Early on, a Father’s Day campaign that encouraged fathers’ involvement showed a picture of a burly father with his young daughter. They were both painting their fingernails.

Voters should be asking themselves if they want the Big-Nanny-in-Chief sending government agents into homes. Or do they want to become breadwinners again? 

Thank You Ms Grabar and FPM.

Tags: 2016 Presidential Election, Children, family, Hillary Clinton

VA Admits To Wrongly Declaring Over 4000 Veterans Dead

weaselzippers

VA crazy train continues…

Via Free Beacon:

The Department of Veterans Affairs admitted it wrongly declared more than 4,000 veterans dead over the past five years, cutting off benefits for them and their dependents.

The agency disclosed that it wrongly terminated benefits for 4,201 veterans between 2011 and 2015 in a letter to Rep. David Jolly (R., Fla.) this month. The admission came more than six months after Jolly initially requested information on veterans whose VA benefits had been erroneously cut off following a series of mistaken death cases by the VA in the Tampa Bay area.

More than 1,000 veterans had their benefits disrupted in 2015 alone when the VA erroneously declared them deceased.

“During calendar years 2011 through 2015, VA terminated 2,057,790 awards due to the death of the beneficiary. During the same period, VA resumed awards for 4,201 of these beneficiaries after receiving information indicating the beneficiary was not deceased,” Danny Pummill, the VA undersecretary for benefits, wrote in the May 6 letter.

Keep reading…

Thank You Free Beacon and Nick.

DOJ Documents Reveal Widespread Use of Fast And Furious Weapons By Major Mexican Drug Cartels

weaselzippers

Nothing to see here folks, move along.

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today released Justice Department documents showing that weapons sent from the U.S. into Mexico as part of the Obama administration’s Operation Fast and Furious gunrunning program have been widely used by major Mexican drug cartels. According to the new records, over the past three years, a total of 94 Fast and Furious firearms have been recovered in Mexico City and 12 Mexican states, with the majority being seized in Sonora, Chihuahua and Sinaloa. Of the weapons recovered, 82 were rifles and 12 were pistols identified as having been part of the Fast and Furious program. Reports suggest the Fast and Furious guns are tied to at least 69 killings.

Fast and Furious was a Department of Justice Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “gunrunning” operation in which the Obama administration allowed guns to be sold to Mexican drug cartels in the hope the weapons would be recovered at crime scenes. Fast and Furious weapons have been implicated in the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry and hundreds of other innocents in Mexico. Prior reports tie Fast and Furious weapons to at least 200 deaths in Mexico alone.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents last month in response to a March 17, 2016, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seeking the following:

All records identifying the locations (including, but not limited to, crime scenes and the locations of seizures) at which firearms – that were identified during the course of or due to Operation Fast and Furious – have been recovered by law enforcement personnel.

The documents show 94 Fast and Furious firearms were seized, 20 were identified as being involved in “violent recoveries.” The “violent recoveries” involved several mass killings:

Keep reading…

Thanks Zip. If you missed it, scroll down to the UC President Janet vids at the end of this previous post.

http://psychroaches.blogspot.com/2016/05/anti-israel-group-chases-intimidates.html

Anyone want to venture a guess as to what she's doing there?

Gun Grabbers Set Their Sights On Lego 'Weaponry'

Where were these '"Save The Children" types when Lego was whoring JNJ's Risperdal?



It was fine to use Lego toys to sell lobotomies to very young children, but not toy guns and light sabers?

weaselzippers

It’s come to this.

Via HuffPo:

In what may be a sad reflection of society as a whole, a new study has found Legos have become increasingly more violent in the last 30 years.

The study, conducted by the University of Canterbury, looked at the numberweapons included in Lego kits produced since 1978 (the first year weapons were available) and the perceived violence in imagery created by the company. It found an “exponential increases of violence over time” in both categories.

While the iconic, brightly colored toy blocks have existed since 1949, the first weapons weren’t introduced until 1978, when a castle kit included “a sword, a halberd, and a lance.”

The number of Lego weapons overall has increased greatly since then. Researchers found that nearly 30 percent of all Lego sets sold today now include at least one weapon. In 1978, that figure was under 5 percent.

The researchers only looked at smaller, pre-manufactured weapons that are one brick large (guns, cannons, swords, etc.) and excluded larger weapons that have to be assembled.

That means the Death Star — which by conventional standards is “certainly a weapon,” the study concedes — isn’t included in the total weapons count. The light saber introduced in the “Star Wars” kit, however, is considered a weapon.

The study also looked at imagery produced by Lego that accompanies the sets, and found it has become more violent as well.

Today, close to 40 percent of all the images in the Lego catalog contain some sort of violence, the study found, with the fastest growth occurring in cases of shooting.

HT: Michelle Malkin

Thank You HuffPo, Ms Malkin, and Zip.



As for the psychological linkers, take your asinine, humanist, collectivist theories up with Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Roger Rabbit.

Anti Israel Group Chases, Intimidates Jewish Students At UC. Irvine & Pres Janet Napolitano Talks Gun Running

Townhall

Cortney O'Brien|
Posted: May 22, 2016 8:00 PM
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Unfortunately, we have another example of anti-Semitism on an American college campus. This past Wednesday at University of California-Irvine, a Jewish sophomore named Eliana Kopley was on her way to an event to watch a documentary about the Israeli Defense Forces, but an angry anti-Israel mob had other plans.

As she arrived at the event hosted by Students Supporting Israel, Ms. Kopley was met by an angry crowd pounding on the doors and windows—engaged in violent chants targeting the Jewish state.

They weren’t done. Soon, the group started chanting anti-Semitic messages.

With the crowd physically forbidding Ms. Kopley from attending the event and chants inciting violence against Jews and Israel such as “Intifada, Intifada—Long live the Intifada!” and “F**k Israel!” Ms. Kopley walked away from the scene.

Kopley was “terrified” during the episode, she said.

Kopley is just one of many pro-Israel students who have had to fear for their safety on their respective campuses. A group called Students for Justice in Palestine is often the common denominator for these incidents of threats and intimidation. At Northeastern University in 2011, they interrupted a Holocaust remembrance event. At Temple University, one SJP member punched a Jewish student in the face. At Loyola University, they verbally assaulted their Jewish peers.

Other students have been joining the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, an effort to place economic pressure on Israel, at an alarming rate.

Where is this anti-Israel hatred coming from? Some would argue the media is to blame for stoking the fire. For far too long, the press has defined Israel as an aggressor who has treated her Palestinian neighbors unfairly. The Obama administration has helped to bolster this narrative. In October, the White House accused Israel of using “excessive force” in its response to Palestinian violence.

The more we hear rhetoric like this from our national leaders, the more ammunition anti-Israel groups will have to try to justify their intimidating acts on campus.

College campuses are supposed to be “safe spaces?” Tell that to the Jewish students who are routinely bullied and ostracized.

Thank You Ms O'Brien and Townhall.

But don't worry, UC President Janet DHS Napolitano is in the President's office. 

With her track record? It'll get straightened out in no time. 

VA Secretary Compares Wait Times For Hospitals To Wait Times At Disney

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Townhall

Christine Rousselle
Posted: May 23, 2016 12:30 PM
It's no secret that wait times at the VA's hospitals have been out of control, to the point where people have died as a result of the delays. To VA Secretary Robert McDonald, however, this is no big deal. After all, Disney doesn't judge its success by wait times at its parks, so why should lifesaving hospitals?

From the Washington Examiner:

"When you got to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what's important? What's important is, what's your satisfaction with the experience?" McDonald said Monday during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast with reporters. "And what I would like to move to, eventually, is that kind of measure."

First off, this is absolutely insane. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has died from waiting in line for the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train or to get Anna or Elsa's autograph. Those things aren't necessities--healthcare is. A person can deal with a long wait to see Mickey Mouse. For a lifesaving surgery or mental health care? Not so much.

Further, Disney absolutely cares about how long its guests wait in line for attractions--that's why programs like FastPass+ exist--to help people combat wait times. There's also an app that will display waits in real time. (The VA, to the best of my knowledge, has neither of these things.) If guests aren't satisfied with their park experience, they won't return--so Disney has a vested interest in keeping waits short at its parks. Unlike the VA, however, a theme park attendee has several choices about where to go: SeaWorld, Knott's Berry Farm, and Universal Studios exist, for instance. The VA is the only option for veterans.

This is disturbing and out-of-touch rhetoric from someone who should know better. The VA isn't Disney. There's no comparing the two.

Thank You Ms Rousselle and Townhall.

Obama's Latest Overreach In Medicine

CNSNews
By Robert E. Moffit | May 23, 2016 | 2:07 PM EDT

The Obama administration has proposed regulatory changes in payment for Medicare Part B drugs. They’re looking to impose a broad, multi-year change through ademonstration project.

Medicare demonstrations routinely test payment or delivery models in pilot programs, make a report to Congress, and the lawmakers either enact or reject the model as a statutory basis for Medicare payment.

But Obama’s proposal goes well beyond a normal pilot program, testing to see what does and doesn’t work among a relatively small, randomly selected, group of providers.

The “test program” would be a nationwide project, imposing major payment changes that would run for several years. It would, in effect, create an administratively imposed Medicare payment for an entire class of medical professionals, mostly physicians.

Medicare Reimbursement

Beginning this year, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI), an agency created by the Affordable Care Act (ACA), will change Medicare reimbursement for cancer drugs and certain other injectable therapies, mostly dispensed in doctors’ offices or in outpatient hospital settings.

While testing different payment systems and encouraging cost-effective drug therapies is obviously good policy, the radically broad use of demonstration authority in this instance amounts to executive overreach.

It will apply to all Medicare Part B providers and will cover almost allMedicare drugs and biologicals.

The program would be another mandate, and one that exceeds statutory authority. The Federation of American Hospitals notes that:

We find nothing in the law or legislative history that supports such a delegation of authority, and in fact the limited legislative history on this provision indicates the exact opposite. Notably, nowhere does the law expressly state that CMS can make models mandatory.

Part B Drugs

In 2015, Part B drug costs amounted to $22 billion, and increased on average 8.6 percent since 2007. Medicare Part B drug payment today is based on the average sales price of a drug, plus 6 percent.

In the first phase of this change, the administration proposes to change Part B drug payment to a flat fee of $16.80 per day and to reduce the “add on” percentage from 6 percent to 2.5 percent.

(The 2.5 percentage metric appears to be arbitrary.)

The assumption, in any case, is that this will incentivize physicians to use lower cost drugs that are as equally or more effective in improving patient outcomes than higher cost drugs.

In short, the new drug payment model is designed to improve medical outcomes and save taxpayers’ money. Beyond this basic payment change, the rule authorizes widespread testing of different payment models.

Beginning in 2017, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation will test different administrative payment models or “value-based” reimbursement strategies.


The Risks For Those Seeking Cancer Drugs

Experimentation in Medicare health care financing and delivery is sound. But, given its scope and duration, the proposed model also amounts to another significant Medicare payment cut, on top of the hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare payment cuts already authorized by the Affordable Care Act, as well as the 2 percent Medicare cut authorized by the Budget Control Act.

Critics are thus rightly concerned that it will threaten access to patient care in Medicare Part B, particularly for already beleaguered cancer patients, just as Obamacare’s projected payment cuts will certainly “jeopardize” access to patient care in Medicare Part A, as Medicare’s own Office of the Actuary has repeatedly warned.

The patient access problem is worrisome, particularly for residents in rural areas who depend on local physicians for the administration of cancer drugs.

As a general rule, Medicare payment is almost always lower than private payment for most medical services. Smaller private medical practices would doubtless be disproportionately damaged by reimbursement reductions.

The American Cancer Society reports that small oncology practices have already declined from 64 percent in 2014 to 41 percent in 2015, and cancer patients, particularly in rural America, already suffer serious access problems. If such physicians limit their practices, or worse, withdraw from the field, these patients will have to travel even greater distances to get vital therapies to combat this deadly disease.

Medicare’s administrative payments are plagued with problems inherent in bureaucratic formulas. Unlike real market payment, compliance with a general Medicare regulation rather than a particular response to patient demand is the condition of reimbursement.

While the proposed rule could encourage doctors to use more effective but less expensive drugs, it could also encourage doctors to use less expensive but also less effective drugs.

Unintended Consequences

In any case, payment reductions will hurt smaller practices the most, encouraging patients to seek hospital-based therapy.

A shift of patients from less expensive physicians’ offices to more expensive hospital outpatient providers would be another classic “unintended” consequence, hurting patients and taxpayers alike.

The U.S. Oncology Network, a national organization of doctors treating cancer patients, reports that patient costs for cancer drugs are “generally $134 less per dose” if the patient is treated in the doctor’s office rather than an outpatient hospital setting.

Moreover, delivering quality care through “value-based” payment—securing value for Medicare dollars through administrative payment systems, suffers from the same vagueness as other initiatives in this regulatory agenda, such as Medicare physician payment.

It seems that the underlying assumption is that Americans will secure higher quality care through better central planning.

It is still not clear, for example, how exactly the Medicare bureaucracy will measure quality.

The Pew Charitable Trusts’ thus commented, “CMS has not identified the measures that would be used to evaluate changes in provider practice patterns or to assess quality of care.”

This would argue for a surgical approach, careful and targeted testing, rather than the blunt instrument of a national mandate.

Congressional Reaction

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is considering legislation(H.R. 5122), sponsored by Rep. Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., to block the demonstration project.

As evident from the May 17th House Energy and Commerce hearing, an increasing number of Congressmen, patient advocates and medical organizations are lining up in opposition to the Medicare Part B drug rule, mostly out of concern over the scope, the design and an anticipated negative impact on patient care and related unintended consequences.

A total of 242 members of Congress, including some Democrats, signed a letter to the administration requesting withdrawal of its Medicare Part B drug rule. There are substantive policy problems with the administration’s latest health policy initiative, but beyond that, Congress has a duty (once again) to repudiate and repel administration overreach.

Robert E. Moffit, a seasoned veteran of more than three decades in Washington policymaking, is a senior fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Center for Health Policy Studies.

Editor's Note: This piece was originally published by The Daily Signal.

Thank You Mr Moffit and CNS.