Surprise! Half a million union workers get Obamacare waiver since June

This, despite the supposed "tightening" of rules made by HHS last summer.

The Daily Caller:

Labor unions continued to receive the overwhelming majority of waivers from the president's health care reform law since the Obama administration tightened application rules last summer.

Documents released in a classic Friday afternoon news dump show that labor unions representing 543,812 workers received waivers from President Barack Obama's signature legislation since June 17, 2011.

By contrast, private employers with a total of 69,813 employees, many of whom work for small businesses, were granted waivers.

The Department of Health and Human Services revised the rules governing applications for health reform waivers June 17, 2011, amid a steady stream of controversial news reports, including The Daily Caller's story that nearly 20 percent of last May's waivers went to businesses in House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi's district in California.

The labor unions receiving waivers include those that are monitored under the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and those that are not. The waivers granted since June 17 are valid until 2013, but recipients must make sure their employees understand the "limits of their coverage," according to HHS documents.

HHS granted waivers on a year-by-year basis under its initial application process, but waivers granted after June 17 are valid for a maximum of two-and-a-half years.

I don't know how you can argue with a straight face that the waiver process isn't rigged to benefit Obama political supporters. The real pain inflicted by the health care boondoggle will fall on small businesses - and yet they appear to be mostly frozen out of the process.

Will the entire issue be moot after the Supreme Court rules next July? We can only hope.

Source: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?r5717757240&f=378

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iOS 5.1 beta 3 reveals Siri dictation coming to iPad?

Siri dictation possibly coming to iPad

9to5 Mac has uncovered what could be Apple?s plan to bring Siri dictation to the iPad once iOS 5.1 is released.

Our own tipster Sonny Dickson was looking through the iOS 5.1 beta 3 settings application on the iPad and discovered a new section in the keyboard menu called ?About Privacy and Dictation.? When opened, as shown above, the iPad provides the user with the standard legal literature and feature information for Siri Dictation.

They also learned that, although present in the iOS 5.1 beta 3 code, Siri dictation isn?t actually functional on the iPad running the latest beta firmware. This doesn?t deter the possibility of Siri dictation becoming a launch feature for the iPad once it hits the public, however, and would help Apple take the first small step in expanding Siri to other iOS devices.

Indeed, this could be Apple?s presumtive intention on bringing full Siri functionality to the iPad, and possibly the iPod touch further down the road.

Source: 9to5Mac

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Source: http://www.imore.com/2012/01/10/ios-51-beta-3-reveals-siri-dictation-coming-ipad/

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Zimbabwe minister 'astonished' by poaching claims (AP)

HARARE, Zimbabwe ? A minister in Zimbabwe's shaky coalition government says he is "astonished" by police claims that his vehicle was used by rhinoceros poachers who are also accused of killing a wildlife ranger.

Sessel Zvidzai, deputy local government minister in the former opposition party, said Thursday that he sold the truck two years ago. He expressed surprise over headlines in state media controlled by President Robert Mugabe's party implicating him in poaching.

Three suspects appeared in court in Harare on Wednesday accused of murder and of possessing rhino horn worth $120,000 found in a vehicle still registered in the minister's name.

The former opposition has repeatedly accused Mugabe's media of hate speech and propaganda to smear the party.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/world/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120112/ap_on_re_af/af_zimbabwe

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Texas electoral maps at issue before Supreme Court

WASHINGTON (AP) ? A federal law says states and localities with a history of discrimination cannot change any voting procedures without first getting approval from the Justice Department or a federal court in Washington. Yet Texas is asking the Supreme Court to allow the use of new, unapproved electoral districts in this year's voting for Congress and the state Legislature.

The outcome of the high court case, to be argued Monday afternoon, could be another blow to a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. In 2009, the justices raised doubts about whether Southern states still should need approval in advance of voting changes more than 40 years after the law was enacted.

The case also might help determine the balance of power in the House of Representatives in 2013, with Republicans in a stronger position if the court allows Texas to use electoral districts drawn by the GOP-dominated Legislature.

The complicated legal fight over Texas' political maps arises from the state's population gain of more than 4 million people, most of them Latino or African-American, in the 2010 census, and involves federal district courts in Texas and Washington, as well as the Supreme Court. It has come to a head now because Texas needs to be able to use some maps to hold elections this year.

The state has so far failed to persuade three judges in Washington, including two appointees of Republican President George W. Bush, to sign off on new political maps adopted by the Legislature. The justices jumped into the case at Texas' request after judges in San Antonio who are hearing a lawsuit filed by minority groups drew their own political lines for use in the 2012 elections.

Texas Republicans were in complete control of the redistricting process that is required following the once-a-decade census. They faced the happy prospect of adding four new congressional seats by virtue of Texas' huge population gain since the last census in 2000. Texas will have 36 seats in the 435-member U.S. House next year.

Republican lawmakers in Austin, the Texas capital, did what majority parties in statehouses across the country do when given such an opportunity: They made the most of it, drawing maps for the state House and Senate, and the U.S. House aimed at maximizing Republican gains.

To do this they carefully distributed Democratic voters, including Latinos and African-Americans.

But Latino and African-American groups, as well as the Texas Democratic Party, complained that the result ran afoul of the Voting Rights Act's prohibition against diluting the ability of minorities who had suffered under official discrimination from electing representatives of their choice.

The opponents of the new maps had a powerful piece of evidence because Latinos and African-Americans accounted for nearly all the growth in Texas' population.

A divided court in San Antonio drew maps that differed from the Legislature's efforts, giving Democrats a chance to prevail in three or four more congressional districts. Republicans now represents 23 of the 32 current districts.

The narrow legal question for the Supreme Court is whether the judges in Texas went too far in crafting their own plans, unwilling to use the state's maps as starting points. If the court agrees with the state on this point, it then would have to decide what maps to use.

Even without the Washington court's approval, Texas says it should be able to use its own maps just for this year because time is running short before primary elections, already delayed from March to April 3.

But the minority groups, as well as the Obama administration, say such an outcome is strictly forbidden by the Voting Rights Act and would, in essence, eviscerate the law's most potent weapon, its Section 5 requirement of advance approval, also known as preclearance.

Pamela Karlan, a Stanford University law professor who is working with Latino and other minority groups that oppose the state maps, said a court ruling allowing the Texas maps to be used "would be a major retreat from the way Section 5 has operated up till now."

The 1965 law has been the government's chief weapon against racial discrimination at polling places for nearly a half-century. Section 5 requires all or parts of 16 states ? mainly in the South and with a history of discrimination in voting ? to get Justice Department or court approval before making changes in the way elections are conducted.

According to the Justice Department Web site, Section 5 currently applies to the states of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia. It also covers certain counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, as well as some local jurisdictions in Michigan and New Hampshire. Preclearance coverage has been triggered by past discrimination not only against blacks, but also against American Indians, Asian-Americans, Alaskan Natives and Hispanics.

In the 2009 case, also from Texas, the court avoided deciding whether the advance approval requirement is constitutional in an era marked by dramatic civil rights gains and the election of the first African-American president. That larger issue, Chief Justice John Roberts said, "is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today."

The constitutional issue also is not directly raised in the current case, but lawsuits from Alabama and North Carolina that ask to strike down the provision could find their way to the Supreme Court. In the past four months, U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington threw out both challenges to the law after finding that discrimination in voting continues to this day and that Congress properly passed legislation to address the problem.

Both rulings have been appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has set a Jan. 19 argument for the Alabama case and Feb. 27 for the North Carolina case.

Source: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Texas-electoral-maps-at-issue-before-Supreme-Court-2448943.php

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FACT CHECK: Promising gain without pain (AP)

WASHINGTON ? Executing a classic Washington dodge, Newt Gingrich told Americans that Medicare and Medicaid could be kept solid merely by ending fraud in the system, a promise of gain without pain that ignores the aging population and other great forces pressing on the programs.

Mitt Romney told voters he's done the math supporting his claim that he created more than 100,000 jobs in the private sector, but didn't share it. And Ron Paul came up with a shocking figure on Fed "bailouts" that bears little resemblance to reality.

A look at some of the claims in a pair of weekend Republican presidential debates and how they compare with the facts:

___

GINGRICH: "The duty of the president is to find a way to manage the federal government so the primary pain is on changing the bureaucracy. On theft alone, we could save $100 billion a year in Medicaid and Medicare if the federal government were competent. That's a trillion dollars over 10 years. And the only people in pain would be crooks."

THE FACTS: Those who have crunched the numbers believe that squeezing every last penny of fraud from health care programs would not solve long-range problems that are at the heart of the federal government's budget woes and imperil Medicare and Medicaid.

Those problems are driven by an aging population, the cost of high-tech medicine and what some researchers see as a pattern of overtreatment ? the widespread use of medical tests, procedures, drugs and devices that wind up being of little or no benefit to patients.

If policymakers once viewed health care fraud as akin to a cost of doing business, that hasn't been the case for years. President Barack Obama's health care overhaul law toughened penalties and gave law enforcement agencies new tools to combat fraud. That built on earlier efforts by the administrations of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Health care fraud investigations are a major source of money recovered for taxpayers by the Justice Department, surpassing fines and penalties collected from defense contracting fraud.

Although cracking down on fraud and abuse will help to maintain Medicare and Medicaid, the administration and lawmakers are convinced it is not a magic elixir to restore the financial health of the programs. Knowing that has not stopped a succession of presidents and lawmakers of both parties from ducking tough choices and promising painless dividends by going after "waste, fraud and abuse" in government.

___

PAUL: "I don't see how we can do well against Obama if we have any candidate that, you know, endorsed, you know, single-payer systems and TARP bailouts and don't challenge the Federal Reserve's $15 trillion of injection bailing out their friends."

THE FACTS: First, there are no fans of government-run, single-payer health insurance in the Republican field, despite Paul's suggestion otherwise Sunday. Newt Gingrich once endorsed the idea of requiring everyone to have health insurance, and Romney introduced a mandate for health coverage as Massachusetts governor. But that's a far cry from a Canadian-style health system that makes government the primary payer of people's medical bills.

TARP is the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program that was proposed by President George W. Bush and passed by Congress in 2008 to help rescue imperiled financial institutions. Nearly all of the money has been paid back, with interest.

Paul's slam against the Fed ignores the fact that most of the $15 trillion he is talking about involved loans that were quickly repaid, sometimes the next day. And that's if these Fed transactions can even be considered loans in the conventional sense.

When the Fed lends money to banks, it creates the money out of thin air. When the banks pay it back, the money disappears from the system. If a bank borrows $5 billion from the Fed one day, then pays it back the next, and a week later borrows $5 billion more and quickly pays it back, the total would be listed as $10 billion, even though it's just the same money going back and forth and the treasury is in no sense being emptied.

That's how a federal report counted a running total of about $15 trillion in emergency Fed loans to domestic banks and their foreign subsidiaries between 2007 and 2010. The actual loan total, once paybacks are accounted for, is estimated at $1.1 trillion.

___

ROMNEY: "In the business I had, we invested in over 100 different businesses and net-net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs.... I'm a good enough numbers guy to make sure I got both sides of that."

THE FACTS: Romney has never substantiated his frequent claim that he was a creator of more than 100,000 jobs while leading the Bain Capital private equity company. His campaign merely cites success stories without laying out the other side of the ledger ? jobs lost at Bain-acquired or Bain-supported firms that closed, trimmed their workforce or shifted employment overseas.

Moreover, his campaign bases its claims on recent employment figures at three companies ? Staples, Domino's and Sports Authority ? even though Romney's involvement with them ceased years ago.

By that sort of charitable math, President Barack Obama could be credited with creating over 1 million jobs even though employment overall is down about 2 million since he came to office. But Romney accuses Obama of destroying jobs while using a different standard to judge his own performance ? cherry-picked examples that leave everything else out.

By its nature, venture capitalism often results in lost jobs because profitability and efficiency are key to investors, not how many people are on the payroll. Bain Capital profited in cases where employment went both up and down.

Staples, now with close to 90,000 employees, and Sports Authority, with about 15,000, were startups supported by Romney. The direct workforce at Domino's has grown by nearly 8,000 since Romney's intervention. But Romney got out of the game in 1999, which has not stopped his campaign from crediting him with jobs created at those companies since then.

Romney toned down the braggadocio in the Saturday debate, saying that of the Bain-supported companies that grew, "we're only a small part of that, by the way." But he mentioned a few more successful companies, again without giving voters a breakdown of his "net-net" calculations.

No one has been able to produce a full accounting of job gains and losses from the scores of companies Romney dealt with at Bain. But a Los Angeles Times review of Bain's 10 largest investments under Romney found that four of the big companies declared bankruptcy within a few years, costing thousands of jobs and often pension and severance benefits.

__

GINGRICH: "Under Obama, 2011 was the highest price of gasoline in history. It is a direct result of his policies, which kill jobs, raise the price of heating oil and gasoline, weaken the United States, increase our dependence on foreign countries and weaken our national security in the face of Iran trying to close the Straits of Hormuz."

FACT CHECK: It's true that the average price of gas last year was a record: $3.52 per gallon. Tying that completely to Obama is a stretch because some of the reasons for expensive fuel have nothing to do with him or the United States.

Oil and gas prices jumped early last year due to the political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. The revolt in Libya, for example, cut off about 1.5 million barrels of daily oil exports. While that's only a small part of what the world uses, global demand was rising at the same time as fast-growing economies in the developing world, such as China and India, needed more oil.

The Republican candidates almost uniformly blame Obama for hindering U.S. energy development, taking their cue from his moratorium on oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a ban now lifted. Oil and gas companies have been ramping up extraction of oil and gas from shale rock deposits in states such as North Dakota and Texas.

All told, there is now a boom in oil drilling and extraction of natural gas in the U.S. Active U.S. oil rigs increased 22.5 percent in 2011, and the oil and gas extraction industry added 25,000 jobs, up 12 percent.

___

ROMNEY: "I cut programs, a whole series of programs. By the way, the number one to cut is Obamacare. That saves $95 billion a year."

THE FACTS: That math looks like it doesn't add up. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that House Republicans' legislation to repeal Obama's health care law would have actually increased federal deficits by $210 billion from 2012 to 2021.

Romney's statistic approximates how much the government expects to be spending annually once the law's provisions are fully rolling. But it appears to ignore the law's revenue-generating provisions, such as a tax on the most generous insurance plans and fees imposed on parts of the health care industry.

___

Associated Press writers Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Tom Raum, Christopher S. Rugaber, Nancy Benac, Charles Babington and Jim Drinkard contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/gop/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120109/ap_on_el_pr/us_republicans_debate_fact_check

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China 2011 insurance premiums up 10 percent: report

Xiang Junbo, the chairman of the China Insurance Regulatory Commission said assets in the industry totaled 5.9 trillion yuan, without giving a year-ago comparison, according to a report by state news agency Xinhua.

In a speech at the end of a key financial conference, Xiang, who took on the job last October, said many insurance companies have not kept up with "the profound changes in the external environment."

"A number of insurance companies do not attach importance to strengthening internal management and innovating their products and services, leading to the deterioration of their abilities to compete in the industry," he said. "Some companies even flout the law, with no regard for cost effectiveness, in blind pursuit of...market share."

At the same conference, China's Premier Wen Jiabao urged the country to reduce risks stemming from local government debt and called for better regulation to manage the risks, although he described the debt situation as "still under control."

Previous such conferences have led to significant policy changes, such as the reform of the People's Bank of China, the central bank, and the establishment of the CIRC, the CBRC and the China Investment Corporation, the country's sovereign wealth fund.

(Reporting by Sui-Lee Wee)

Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20120107/china-2011-insurance-premiums-up-10-percent-report.htm

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Hawks players fully support union on realignment

Article updated: 1/8/2012 9:40 PM

John Scott, the Blackhawks? union representative, said he and his teammates are fully behind the decision by the NHL Players Association to withhold its consent for realignment.

The league on Friday scrapped its four-conference realignment plan for the 2012-13 season after the NHLPA refused to go along without any input.

Scott and other Hawks agreed they are concerned with the fact there would be eight teams in two conferences and seven in the other two, making it harder for the teams with eight clubs to make the playoffs.

The players also want the issue of travel addressed, particularly for those teams in the east who would have worse schedules.

?We?re willing to talk with them and work with them, but it was one of those things where (the NHL) made a decision and put out a headline like it was a done deal and we really had no input in the whole discussion,? Scott said.

?We just wanted to have a few talks with them to go through it about, obviously, the eight teams in one conference, seven in the other, all the travel and playoff systems. We weren?t really part of that discussion.?

Scott took part in a conference call with union executive director Donald Fehr after polling his Hawks teammates.

?It was a unanimous decision that we can?t accept it at this time,? Scott said. ?There are so many unknowns.?

You would think playing in the Western Conference, where travel can be brutal, would have the Hawks in favor of the new realignment plan.

The Hawks were scheduled to be in one of the eight-team conferences with Detroit, St. Louis, Nashville, Columbus, Minnesota, Winnipeg and Dallas.

?We?re the NHLPA, we?re a group, and who knows if you?re going to be on the East Coast one year or the West Coast,? Scott said. ?You have to look at it as a whole and make the best decision for everybody.?

Hawks defenseman Steve Montador, a former union rep with Buffalo, said the key for the players is the unbalanced conference format.

?The big thing is the playoffs and how a player wants to be able to make it into the playoffs,? Montador said. ?To give yourself a disadvantage based on where you play is not something that seems that fair.?

Scott doesn?t agree that this is the first salvo being fired by the union in what is expected to be a difficult negotiating process when the current collective bargaining agreement expires in September.

?It?s kind of two separate issues,? Scott said. ?Realignment will happen, it?s just that we need to be a part of the negotiations. The CBA is a completely different animal.?

Scott doesn?t anticipate another work stoppage in the fall.

?I think the game is in a good spot. We?re growing,? he said. ?I can?t see any reason why we can?t get something done.?

Source: http://dailyherald.com/article/20120108/sports/701089781/

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Charles Addams "The Addams Family" Google Logo

Charles Addams Google Logo

Today would be the 100th birthday of Charles Addams, best well known for his The Addams Family characters.

He was born today, a 100 years ago Westfield, New Jersey and died at the age of 76 on September 29, 1988.

He was a cartoonist who created many of the characters of The Addams Family. That became a couple TV shows, movies, cartoons and even more. I personally remember growing up watching a couple versions of The Addams Family on TV.

Google today featured a special logo to remember his work and contributions to America.

To learn more about Charles Addams, see Wikipedia.

Forum discussion at Google Blogoscoped Forums.

Source: http://feeds.seroundtable.com/~r/SearchEngineRoundtable1/~3/eAwiBw11Ofw/charles-addams-14555.html

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