Know the law because very often the cops don't.
Thursday, October 17, 2019
Black Man Puts The Boots To Tyrannical Power Tripping Cop. Blue ISIS Loses Again
In the video below cops try to hem up a black man James Jones simply for being on his own property. Mr Jones brilliantly schools and shames the cops by teaching them the law. The cops were looking for a reason to arrest Mr Jones even though they knew no reason existed. A lawyer could not have done it any better.
Know the law because very often the cops don't.
Know the law because very often the cops don't.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Republicans Are Involved in Devil Worship
Ayn Rand-Acolyte Donald Trump Stacks His Cabinet With Fellow Objectivists
Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand And The Church Of Satan
Pax On Both Houses: Compendium Of Ayn Rand Posts
http://paxonbothhouses.Reprise: "Mediocre Philosophy Sells: It Makes The Half Literate... Feel Smart"
Monday, October 14, 2019
Trump's People Create Video Of Trump Stabbing and Shooting People
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House says President Donald Trump has yet to watch a graphically violent parody video that depicts a likeness of him shooting and stabbing opponents and members of the news media, but based on what he's heard, he "strongly condemns" it.
The parody was shown at a meeting of Trump supporters at his Miami resort.
The video portrays Trump's critics and media members as parishioners in a church fleeing his gruesome rampage. The fake Trump strikes the late Sen. John McCain in the neck, hits and stabs TV personality Rosie O'Donnell in the face, lights Sen. Bernie Sanders' head on fire and shoots or otherwise assaults people whose faces are replaced with news organization logos.
Trump's face is superimposed on a killer's body. Among the targets: former President Barack Obama, Black Lives Matter, Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Rep. Adam Schiff, who as Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is leading the impeachment inquiry of Trump.
White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham says in a tweet that Trump will see the video shortly and that, "based upon everything he has heard, he strongly condemns this video."
The video and its screening were first reported by The New York Times .
The "unauthorized video" was shown last week "in a side room" at an American Priority conference at Trump's Doral Miami resort, the event's organizer, Alex Phillips, said in a statement. Trump was not present for the event.
"This video was not approved, seen, or sanctioned" by the event's organizers, Phillips said.
The setting for the massacre depicted is the video is the "Church of Fake News," echoing Trump's familiar refrain about news stories and organizations that he deems unfair.
CNN, The Washington Post, BBC, PBS, NBC and Politico are among the news organizations depicted as victims of the fake Trump's violent fury.
The video also includes the logo for Trump's 2020 campaign, but spokesman Tim Murtaugh said the "video was not produced by the campaign, and we do not condone violence."
The White House Correspondents Association, which represents journalists covering the president, had issued a statement late Sunday saying it was "horrified" by the content and calling on Trump to offer his condemnation.
"All Americans should condemn this depiction of violence directed toward journalists and the President's political opponents," said Jonathan Karl, WHCA president. "We have previously told the President his rhetoric could incite violence. Now we call on him and everybody associated with this conference to denounce this video and affirm that violence has no place in our society."
The video appears to have first been posted to a YouTube page in July 2018, where it has been viewed more than 100,000 times since. The YouTube video uses a violent clip from the 2014 spy thriller "Kingsman: The Secret Service." In the original scene, actor Colin Firth is depicted shooting a crowd of churchgoers.
The channel frequently posts violent parody videos of Trump playing popular movie superheroes or assassins. An email account listed for the YouTube channel did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Phillips told the Times the video was played as part of a "meme exhibit" and was not associated with or endorsed by the conference "in any official capacity."
"American Priority rejects all political violence," he told the paper.
MY OP ED:
Trump's supporters are dangerous and they are hoping this video will incite others to do what is in the video. That is why they did it and I have little doubt that Trump knew all about and watched it. I have maintained since 2015 that Trump is merely a symptom of the depravity of the GOP base and here is more proof.
Sunday, October 13, 2019
Ted Cruz Shows Some Honor
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Sunday denounced President Donald Trump’s decision earlier this month to publicly urge China to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, a front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary race.
Asked during an interview Sunday with CBS’ “Face The Nation” whether he believes it’s appropriate for Trump to ask China to open such a probe, Cruz stammered for a few moments before saying “of course not.”
“Elections in the U.S. should be decided by Americans and it’s not the business of foreign countries ― any foreign countries ― to be interfering in our elections,” he said.
Trump drew heated backlash from Democrats and some Republicans on Oct. 3 when he told reporters on the White House lawn that China “should start an investigation into the Bidens” while discussing trade talks with the country.
His comments echoed remarks he made to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during a July phone call in which he urged the foreign leader to look into Biden and his son, Hunter, who served on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.
The call became the subject of a subsequent whistleblower complaint filed by a U.S. intelligence official and later the centerpiece of the House’s ongoing impeachment inquiry into Trump.
Many of Trump’s Republican defenders have claimed the president was only joking when he encouraged China to investigate the Bidens. But one of Trump’s China advisers, Michael Pillsbury, told the Financial Times that he received “quite a bit of background on Hunter Biden from the Chinese” following Trump’s remarks.
CBS’ Margaret Brennan continued to press Cruz on Sunday, asking whether it had been appropriate for Trump to ask Ukraine to get involved.
“Do you think that, say, the president’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who’s been talking about China, who’s been talking about Ukraine, do you want to hear him testify about this sort of shadow foreign policy?” she asked.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said last week that he wants Giuliani, who has been urging foreign officials to investigate the Bidens at the behest of Trump, to testify before his committee.
“Listen, foreign countries should stay out of American elections,” Cruz, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, told Brennan. “That’s true for Russia, that’s true for Ukraine, that’s true for China ― that’s true for all of them. It should be the American people deciding elections.”
He added that it would “make a lot of sense” for Giuliani to testify.
Watch Cruz’s full interview with “Face The Nation” below. His comments about Trump’s request to the Chinese begin around the 4:30 mark
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Lindsey Graham Puts The Boots To Cut & Run Trump
Lindsey Graham says Trump's 'shameless' abandonment of Kurds will revive ISIS terrorists
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been one of President Trump’s strongest allies in the Senate, on Wednesday said Kurdish fighters in Syria had been “shamelessly abandoned by the Trump Administration” in its sudden decision to pull U.S. troops from northern Syria, leaving America’s longtime allies in the fight against the Islamic State group exposed to an attack by Turkey.
“I hope he’s right — I don’t think so. I know that every military person has told him don’t do this,” Graham said in an appearance on “Fox & Friends.” “If he follows through with this, it’d be the biggest mistake of his presidency.”
Amid news that Turkish forces had launched a long-threatened military offensive into Kurdish-controlled parts of Syria, Trump on Wednesday continued to stand by his decision to pull out U.S. troops, tweeting Wednesday morning that Turkey should be responsible for guarding all ISIS fighters captured in the area and reiterating, in follow-up tweets, his belief that “going into the Middle East is the worst decision ever made in the history of our country!”
Graham, of South Carolina, reacted to Trump’s comments, characterizing them as “a pre-9/11 mentality that the Middle East is no concern to us” that “paved the way for 9/11.”
In an afternoon statement from the White House, Trump confirmed Turkey had invaded Syria Wednesday morning. He declared, “The United States does not endorse this attack and has made it clear to Turkey that this operation is a bad idea.
“There are no American soldiers in the area,” Trump added. “Turkey has committed to protecting civilians, protecting religious minorities, including Christians, and ensuring no humanitarian crisis takes place — and we will hold them to this commitment. In addition, Turkey is now responsible for ensuring all ISIS fighters being held captive remain in prison and that ISIS does not reconstitute in any way, shape, or form. We expect Turkey to abide by all of its commitments, and we continue to monitor the situation closely.”
“I hope President Trump’s right,” Graham told Fox News. “I hope we can turn the fight against ISIS over to Turkey. I hope that Turkey, when they go into Syria, they won’t slaughter the Kurds. And I would say this to the president: It would be hard to protect America without allies over there. ... The Kurds have been good allies. And when Turkey goes into Syria they’re not going to fight ISIS, they’re going in to kill the Kurds, because in their eyes they’re more of a threat to Turkey than ISIS.”
Graham added: “We can’t abandon the Kurds now. We can’t turn it over to Turkey. To think that would work is really delusional and dangerous.”
Graham, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one of a number of Trump’s allies who have condemned the decision to withdraw the troops, who had been serving as a buffer between Kurdish fighters and Turkey.
The Kurdish fighters had fought alongside Americans to defeat the Islamist terror army of ISIS. But their long-held dream of establishing a Kurdish state in territory that overlaps Turkey and Iraq makes them historical enemies of both countries.
The White House issued a statement Sunday evening saying it “will not support or be involved in the operation” and “will no longer be in the immediate area” of northern Syria.
The move came after months of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s threats of a military operation across the border to clear out the Kurdish forces. The White House said the decision to withdraw troops from Syria came after a call on Sunday between Trump and Erdogan, who views the Kurds as a threat to his ruling party. There are roughly 1,000 U.S. troops currently operating in northeastern Syria.
Following reports that American soldiers were leaving their positions in Syria, Trump on Monday offered a rambling defense of his stunning reversal of long-standing American policy, saying, “We’ve been there for many years, long, many, many, many years beyond what we were supposed to be. Not fighting, just there.”
Graham said that a U.S. presence in the region has yielded results in fighting ISIS and argued that Trump should continue with U.S. border patrols along the “safe zone” in northern Syria, otherwise his administration will be responsible for the return of the Islamic State group.
“I would argue for him to go back to the status quo,” Graham said. “The safe zones were working. Patrolling with Turkey and international forces to protect the Kurds and Turkey is the way to go. If we pull out, the Kurds are in a world of hurt and ISIS comes back, and President Trump will own it.”
Republican Quote Comes Back To Bite Republicans In The Ass
CNN’s Chris Cuomo reached into the Republican Party’s past to find a quote that could haunt GOP lawmakers today as the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump gets underway in Congress.
In 1950, Sen. Margaret Chase Smith (R-Maine) took on Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a member of her own party, in a speech she called a “Declaration of Conscience.” While Chase didn’t mention McCarthy by name, she urged her fellow Republicans to stand up for the basic American values being trampled by McCarthyism:
It is high time that we stop thinking politically as Republicans and Democrats about elections and started thinking patriotically as Americans about national security based on individual freedom. I don’t want to see the Republican Party ride to political victory on the four horsemen of calumny: fear, ignorance, bigotry, smear.
“Wow, did she resonate,” Cuomo said before noting that Chase’s words served as a reminder to her fellow politicians.
“She reminded them your duty was to the people,” he added. “Not to party alone.”
Then, Cuomo called on today’s lawmakers to follow Smith’s example.
“Please give the people a reason to believe again, Mr. and Mrs. Office Holder,” he said. “If you are not man or woman enough to say it out loud like Margaret Chase Smith, then listen to her words and let it guide your actions.”
See his full segment below:
CNN's @ChrisCuomo cites Sen. Margaret Chase Smith's 1950 speech, "Declaration of Conscience," for how to deal with the "tactics of division."
"She reminded them, your duty was to the people, not to party alone," Cuomo said. #ClosingArgument
"She reminded them, your duty was to the people, not to party alone," Cuomo said. #ClosingArgument
The Rich Really Do Pay Lower Taxes than You
Almost a decade ago, Warren Buffett made a claim that would become famous. He said that he paid a lower tax rate than his secretary, thanks to the many loopholes and deductions that benefit the wealthy.
His claim sparked a debate about the fairness of the tax system. In the end, the expert consensus was that, whatever Buffett’s specific situation, most wealthy Americans did not actually pay a lower tax rate than the middle class. “Is it the norm?” fact-checking outfit PolitiFact asked. “No.”
Time for an update: It’s the norm now.
For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate — spanning federal, state and local taxes — than any other income group, according to newly released data.
The overall tax rate on the richest 400 households last year was only 23%, meaning that their combined tax payments equaled less than one quarter of their total income. That was down from 70% in 1950 and 47% in 1980.
For middle-class and poor families, the picture is different. Federal income taxes have also declined modestly, but these families haven’t benefited much, if at all, from the decline in the corporate tax or estate tax. And they now pay more in payroll taxes (which finance Medicare and Social Security) than in the past. Overall, their taxes have remained fairly flat.
The combined result is that over the last 75 years the U.S. tax system has become radically less progressive.
The data here come from the most important book on government policy that I’ve read in a long time — called “The Triumph of Injustice,” to be released next week. The authors are Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, both professors at the University of California, Berkeley, who have done pathbreaking work on taxes. Saez has won the award that goes to the top academic economist under age 40, and Zucman was recently profiled on the cover of BusinessWeek magazine as “the wealth detective.”
They have constructed a historical database that shows how much households at different points along the income spectrum have paid in taxes going back to 1913, when the federal income tax began. The story they tell is maddening — and yet ultimately energizing.
“Many people have the view that nothing can be done,” Zucman told me. “Our case is, ‘No, that’s wrong. Look at history.’ ” As they write in the book: “Societies can choose whatever level of tax progressivity they want.” When the United States has raised tax rates on the wealthy and made rigorous efforts to collect taxes, it has succeeded in doing so. And it can succeed again.
Saez and Zucman portray the history of U.S. taxes as a struggle between people who want to tax the rich and those who want to protect the fortunes of the rich. The story starts in the 17th century, when northern colonies created more progressive tax systems than Europe had. Massachusetts even enacted a wealth tax, which covered land, ships, jewelry livestock and more.
The southern colonies, by contrast, were hostile to taxation. Southern plantation owners worried that taxes could undermine slavery, as historian Robin Einhorn has explained, and made sure to keep tax rates low and tax collection ineffective. (The hostility to taxes ultimately hampered the Confederacy’s ability to raise money and fight the Civil War.)
By the middle of the 20th century, the high-tax advocates had prevailed. The United States had arguably the world’s most progressive tax code, with a top income-tax rate of 91% and a corporate tax rate above 50%.
But the second half of the 20th century was mostly a victory for the low-tax side. Companies found ways to take more deductions and dodge taxes. Politicians cut every tax that fell mostly on the wealthy: high-end income taxes, investment taxes, the estate tax and the corporate tax. The justification for doing so was usually that the economy as a whole would benefit.
The justification turned out to be wrong. The U.S. economy has not fared better when tax rates are lower. Lower taxes on the wealthy instead end up benefiting the wealthy, not society as a whole. The great decline in high-end taxation has happened over the same period that economic growth has been disappointing and middle-class income growth even worse.
That’s the maddening part of the story. The energizing part are the solutions that Saez and Zucman propose. They call for a set of policies that would raise the overall tax rate on the wealthiest Americans to about 60% (still not as high as in 1950). Doing so would bring in about $750 billion a year, or 4% of GDP, enough to pay for universal pre-K, an infrastructure program, medical research, clean energy and more. Those are the kinds of policies that really do lift economic growth.
One crucial part of the agenda is a minimum global corporate tax of at least 25%. A company would have to pay the tax on its U.S. operations even if it set up headquarters in Ireland or Bermuda. Saez and Zucman also favor a wealth tax; Elizabeth Warren’s version is based on their work. And they call for the creation of a Public Protection Bureau, to help the IRS crack down on tax dodging.
I already know what the critics will say about these arguments — that the rich will always figure out a way to avoid taxes. That’s simply not the case. True, they will always be able to avoid some taxes. But history shows that serious attempts to collect more taxes usually succeed.
Ask yourself this: If efforts to tax the superrich were really doomed to fail, why would so many of the superrich be fighting so hard to defeat those efforts?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Monday, October 7, 2019
People Who Support Trump...
....Are no damn good.
They are ignorant.
They hate.
They're dishonest.
They're traitorous.
Most of them are immoral.
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Greedy Hospitals Fleece the Poor
How Greedy Hospitals Fleece the Poor
The most vulnerable Americans are being dunned into destitution through surprise fees and fraudulent practices.
By LIBBY WATSON
Americans face rapidly ballooning health-care costs; get pursued into financial ruin for the crime of getting sick; and get sicker and die because the price of health care is too high to pursue it at all. The precise number of people who go bankrupt because of a medical bill matters far less than the fact that medical bankruptcy is a real danger in the United States in a way that it simply isn’t in other developed countries. You don’t have to have a degree in economics to figure that out; you just have to have ever looked at a hospital bill.
On Monday, a Kaiser Health News report detailed the University of Virginia hospital system’s heartless pursuit of poor patients who owe them money. The hospital has sued its patients 36,000 times over six years, for as little as $13.91, with devastating consequences. The hospital has garnished wages and put liens on houses, levying high interest on delinquent patients. It sued its own employees for unpaid bills around 100 times a year.
It’s not just happening at UVA, though they are particularly aggressive. Last week, The New York Times reported on Carlsbad Medical Center in New Mexico, which has sued many more of its patients for unpaid medical bills than nearby hospitals; even the county judge who hears the cases was sued. In June, ProPublica published a story on Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare Hospital in Memphis, which filed 8,300 lawsuits against patients in five years.
These hospitals are outliers in their communities, pursuing cases more aggressively than other hospitals do; some don’t file lawsuits against patients at all. These particularly aggressive hospitals are only known about because reporters have highlighted their practices. How many more of the 6,210 American hospitals are suing their patients? And, in turn, how many Americans have been sued by their hospitals? We don’t know, but it’s at least thousands.
We are, however, learning some of the stomach-churning details about these hospitals’ practices. The primary case documented in the UVA article involved Heather Waldron, who was sued over a $164,000 bill she received for emergency intestinal surgery. The article notes that figure is “more than twice what a commercial insurer would have paid for her care.” What relationship, then, does that charge have to what it actually cost UVA to provide Waldron’s care? We don’t know. The hospital probably doesn’t even know. It doesn’t have to tell anyone anything about how they came to this dollar amount in order to pursue her to the point where she has to sell her house and go on food stamps.
Last year, The Wall Street Journal reported on the case of a Wisconsin hospital that had actually attempted to determine the real cost of a knee surgery at its facility, for which the list price was more than $50,000. It turned out the answer was $10,500. The hospital had set the price nearly five times higher “using a combination of educated guesswork and a canny assessment of market opportunity,” according to the Journal.
Mere days after that report, Kaiser Health News reported on the case of Drew Calver, an Austin, Texas, man whose heart attack resulted in a bill of $164,941, which the billing experts at WellRithms told the reporter should have only cost around $26,985. No one is stopping this—except for Kaiser Health News reporters, whose efforts got Calver’s bill lowered to $332.
Though Medicare and Medicaid will only reimburse a set amount for each procedure, a hospital can charge private insurance—and patients—whatever it can get away with. The Congressional Budget Office found in 2017 that private insurance paid hospitals an average of 200 percent of what Medicare would pay, which is why the hospital lobby is so desperate to prevent any expansion of government-provided health insurance.
The Affordable Care Act protected more patients from this desperate situation insofar as it increased the number of people with insurance, and mandated coverage for preexisting conditions. But people with insurance routinely end up with massive medical bills, most horribly through the practice of “surprise billing,” where a patient goes to an in-network facility but sees an out-of-network doctor. (The expectation that patients in the middle of medical emergencies are supposed to diligently look up whether the emergency room is in-network is absurd enough, but there is almost nothing a patient can do to prevent an out-of-network doctor from treating them when they arrive.) Hospital groups are currently fighting legislation that would end this practice.
Because of this system, where hospitals set a potentially bogus list price and then negotiate from there with each insurance provider they accept, uninsured patients or those who get surprise bills get screwed. Those without insurance are expected to pay a lot more than their insurance would if they were insured, or if their insurance covered it. Patients are mere pawns in the games that hospitals play with insurance. (UVA offers a 20 percent discount for uninsured patients, but clearly prices can be inflated by much more than that discount would provide.) If a hospital has to pretend that a knee surgery costs five times what it does to get insurance to pay twice what it actually does, who cares if the odd patient gets sued into financial oblivion?
If you’re a poor patient who lied about having a preexisting condition when you signed up for your short-term health insurance plan—which, because short-term plans are not covered by the Affordable Care Act’s rules about what particular means of price-gouging insurance companies can engage in, is allowed to discriminate and charge more on the basis of preexisting conditions—you could be charged with fraud. Would UVA ever be charged with fraud for telling Heather Waldron she owed them $164,000 when the hospital would have accepted half that from insurance? Would anyone in the legal system that allowed them to garnish thousands of paychecks and seize people’s tax refunds ask them to prove that the charges themselves were not fraudulent?
We can keep letting hospitals use the state to immiserate its own citizens. But it will not stop uninsured people from needing care; American livers and lungs will keep resolutely ignoring their owners’ financial shortcomings. And when you have uninsured people seeking care, you will have to spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to pay for it.
A much simpler way would be to have the government pay for all health care—a “single payer” that covered everyone. That would help hospitals that don’t benefit from having large numbers of privately insured patients, like rural hospitals. But hospital CEOs who currently make a lot of money (even those at nonprofits; many large nonprofit hospital executives make multimillion dollar salaries) would not be helped. They would make a lot less money.
In America, corporations are warmly encouraged to put their foot in the state’s boot to stand on the neck of the poor, whenever that might be profitable. Landlords get judges to sign off on the civil arrest of tenants in pursuit of unpaid rent, plus that juicy lawyer’s fee and accumulated interest (for whatever reason interest must always accumulate). Stores like Walmart pursue shoppers who they have falsely accused of shoplifting for the value of the goods they didn’t steal. Debt collectors trick people into reviving their old debts that have fallen out of the statute of limitations, then sue them again.
There is a thread connecting stories like this with UVA’s outrageous pursuit of its indebted patients. Any arm of the state—the law, courts, Congress, the police—can act as a tool of any corporation organized and rich enough to use them. One patient in the UVA story, Zann Nelson, had entered the hospital “bleeding and in pain” with “newly diagnosed uterine cancer,” according to the story. She lost her court battle against UVA over its pursuit of her $23,849 bill, when a judge ruled that she had “the ability to decline the surgery.” What chance does the average person have against a system like this?
FAT BASTARD'S OP ED:
I was watching an episode of family guy when the question was asked, 'You are in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and a doctor. You have a gun and only two bullets. Who do you shoot? The family guy answered, "I'd shoot the doctor twice."
Hitler and his Nazis killed over 10 million. Stalin killed even more. America's Medical Mafia kill more Americans each year than were killed in all of the combat deaths in all of America's wars combined.
University Of Virginia's Hospital pays it employee shit wages.
FAT BASTARD'S OP ED:
I was watching an episode of family guy when the question was asked, 'You are in a room with Hitler, Stalin, and a doctor. You have a gun and only two bullets. Who do you shoot? The family guy answered, "I'd shoot the doctor twice."
Hitler and his Nazis killed over 10 million. Stalin killed even more. America's Medical Mafia kill more Americans each year than were killed in all of the combat deaths in all of America's wars combined.
University Of Virginia's Hospital pays it employee shit wages.
The piece of shit CEO Pamela Sutton Wallace get a salary of around $600,000 per year. This doesn't include her perks, kickbacks, bribes, and other compensation. This pig makes 15 times more than her employees.
Hospitals, drug companies, and doctors make money hand over fist.