[UPDATE] Cancer, Obamacare Victim at Center of Political Storm

Gary Peters (AP)

 Julie Boonstra, a cancer patient who was kicked of off her health plan due to Obamacare, lashed out at Rep. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) on Saturday after lawyers for his campaign demanded that Michigan broadcasters cease airing ads featuring her story.

Boonstra, a Michigan resident, was diagnosed with leukemia five years ago. She was recently kicked off of her healthcare plan due to regulations passed as part of President Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which Peters voted in favor of.

After relating her story publicly in an ad produced by the advocacy group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), Peters dispatched lawyers to prevent the spot from running on local television stations.

Boonstra, who says she is now struggling to pay out of pocket for her rising healthcare costs, told the Washington Free Beacon she is stunned by Peters’ efforts to censor her story.

“I’m appalled. I’m appalled as a mom, as a woman, and as a cancer patient, as someone living with cancer … who has stood before this nation to say, ‘I cannot afford that out of pocket expense,’” said Boonstra, who said she was given a 20 percent chance of surviving her disease. “As a Michigan resident, to silence my voice, I’m absolutely appalled.”

Peters, who is running for a seat in the Senate, instructed his legal council earlier this week to demand that stations stop running the AFP ad until additional evidence of the cancer victim’s claims could be produced.

“For the sake of both FCC licensing requirements and the public interest, your station should immediately require AFP to provide the factual documentation for its claims if you are going to continue airing this advertising,” read the letter from Peters’ lawyers.

Via: WFB

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Young avoid coverage in Colorado, posing problem for health care law

Colorado Obamacare Director Says “More Socialization” Will Force Young People To Enroll…

Matt Leising spends about $3,600 a year on medication to treat asthma and sinus problems, so he was supportive when Washington politicians were debating the Affordable Care Act.

After the law passed and then began rolling out last fall, Leising went to Colorado's health care exchange website to look for coverage, but the 29-year-old Littleton resident quickly realized he couldn't afford any of the plans. He said he checked single plans and family plans because he is engaged.

The family plan with the lowest monthly premium had a deductible of $10,000, meaning he would still have to pay for his medication and other expenses, he said. He decided to just pay for his medication out of pocket and take the tax penalty.

"How could a young person nowadays afford it?" asked Leising, the manager of a small business that doesn't provide health insurance. "I don't see how anyone in my age group can afford insurance unless they have a really good job."

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 40 percent of people ages 18 to 34 need to sign up for health insurance to defray the costs of coverage for older, sicker people, but so far those figures in Colorado and nationally are half that number.

Obamacare proponents say they have several years to meet that goal. Both sides agree that if young people do not start signing up in greater numbers, premiums will increase for every insured person. However, it's unclear how large the increases would be.

About 30 percent of Colorado exchange users are 55 to 64 years old — the oldest group of people before Medicare kicks in. Census figures show that age group is about 12 percent of the Colorado population, so older people are signing up at nearly three times the size of their population.

Only 7 percent of Coloradans signing up are between 18 and 24 — below their population percentage — and 16 percent are 25 to 34, about equal to their population.

Exchange officials point out that a February U.S. Department of Health and Human Services study showed that the proportion of people age 18 to 34 signing up through exchanges increased 3 percent in the past five months.

Via: The Denver Post

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SCOTT WALKER RESPONDS TO ATTACKS BY CUTTING TAXES, AGAIN

By: Grover Norquist
2/21/2014 10:15 AM

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The establishment press first went for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s throat. The attacks may not be fatal, but they put Christie off his game and delayed and maybe ended his opportunity to become the prohibitive favorite for the 2016 Republican nomination.

Now they are coming for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

This week all the Republican governors are meeting in Washington D.C. for the Republican Governors Association annual meeting. But it might be best understood as the first caucus—two years before Iowa. Christie, Walker, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Sam Brownback and Mike Pence are all governors who could credibly run for President based on their policy and political successes in their respective states.

So how is Scott Walker responding to the establishment left’s coming attacks?

He is cutting taxes in Wisconsin. Again.

Walker announced a series of tax cuts totaling more than $800 million in this year’s budget: a $406 million cut in property taxes and $100 million in lower income taxes. The property tax cut will save the average homeowner $100 over last year. The personal income tax will be cut by reducing the lowest income tax bracket from 4.4 percent to 4.0 percent. Every family will receive a tax cut of about $58 per year.

In addition, the state will reduce its withholding tax for state income taxes saving taxpayers $322.6 million each year. This will save the average family of four about $58 each month.

Via: Human Events

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Polar Vortex to Once Again Grip Midwest, Northeast

Last week's thaw was a mere tease for the Midwest and Northeast with the polar vortex set to make an encore performance this week.

The end of this weekend will coincide with the end of the mild stretch of weather across the Northeast that sent temperatures into the 60s northward to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia and the 50s in New York City and Boston.

Highs on Monday will be 10 to 20 degrees colder throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic following the passage of a band of rain and nuisance snow on Sunday night.

Colder air has already erased the mild spell across the Midwest, and Sunday should prove to be one of the "warmest" days of this week.

@rleduc123 tweeted: "Polar Vortex 3 - The Saga Continues!"

Additional Relevant Tweets and Social Media Reaction

Waves of even colder air will pour down from the depths of the Arctic to the northern Rockies, Midwest and Northeast as this week progresses and the polar vortex plunges southward.

Each cold blast will dip into the southern Plains and South, leading to a brief drop in temperatures. However, the core of the polar vortex will have a firm grip on the northern tier of the U.S.

Via: AccuWeather.com

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Winter Games Conclude in Sochi

The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, come to an end today with the closing ceremony, set to begin  -- symbolically -- at 20:14 (8:14 p.m.) local time.  (See a preview of the proceedings, live, beginning at 8 a.m. PST, below.)

The host country has much to celebrate as the Games wrap. Russia ends as the overall champ, with 33 medals. The U.S. is second with 28.

What can we expect? Creative director Konstantin Ernst says the event will be less blockbuster, as was the goal with the opening ceremony, and more "art house." It will be orchestrated by Italian director Daniele Finzi Pasca.

The festivities include the official passing of the torch to 2018’s host, Pyeongchang, South Korea.

The ceremony will be broadcast on the West Coast at 8:30 p.m. Sunday. (Here's a version of our real-time coverage for mobile users.)

Via: LA Times

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Plan To Split California Into Six States Gains Ground

Los Angeles (United States) (AFP) - A plan to divide California into six separate US states is closer to making it on to a November ballot, with organizers gaining approval to collect signatures.

The seemingly far-fetched initiative, sponsored by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper, claims "political representation of California's diverse population and economies has rendered the state nearly ungovernable."

And on Tuesday, the California Secretary of State's office gave the movement a boost, saying that proponents "may begin collecting petition signatures."

At least 807,615 voters -- representing eight percent of the total ballots cast for governor in the 2010 election -- will need to sign the petition by July 18 to make it on to the ballot.

The proposal aims to split the state -- America's most populous with around 38 million inhabitants -- into "six smaller state governments, while preserving the historical boundaries of the various counties, cities and towns."

In 2012, California was tied with Russia and Italy -- all with a GDP of approximately $2.0 trillion -- for eighth place in world GDP rankings, according to the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

The proposal would create a state out of Silicon Valley, home to tech giants Google, Facebook and Apple. It would also create South California, which would include Hollywood and the US entertainment industry.

West California, Central California, North California, and Jefferson in the most northern part of the state, would also go it alone.

According to the proposal, voters overwhelming approved dividing California in two in 1859, but Congress did not act due to the Civil War.

Draper, who has funded more than 400 companies including Skype and Baidu, is founder of venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson in Menlo Park, California.

Via: Yahoo News

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Mundane Truths About the Decline of Los Angeles

The L.A. 2020 Commission diagnoses problems its members helped cause.

The Los Angeles 2020 Commission (LA2020) was established “to study and report on fiscal stability and growth in Los Angeles.” Its 43-page report, “A Time for Truth,” is notable for how its strident content clashes with the distinguished backgrounds of its authors. Despite boasting a long list of high-powered signatories—including former Clinton administration Commerce secretary Mickey Kantor, former L.A. “jobs czar” and sometime mayoral hopeful Austin Beutner, and former Obama administration Labor secretary Hilda Solis—the report reads like a jeremiad.

“Los Angeles is barely treading water while the rest of the world is moving forward,” the report begins. “We risk falling further behind in adapting to the realities of the 21st century and becoming a City in decline.” The prolix document then details the city’s descent in 17 bullet points—three more than Woodrow Wilson needed to describe U.S. aims after World War I. It’s even more than Cicero thought to include in his series of orations against Antony. The list is padded out with non-problems—underinvestment in projects of interest to the report’s authors, “community plans” that are “decades old and hopelessly out of date.” At least one of its putative discoveries hardly needed all the research LA2020 claims to have done—traffic is often irritating!

“A Time for Truth” does offer some striking perspectives on L.A.’s troubles, however. Businesses are fleeing Los Angeles, which now hosts only four Fortune 500 companies (down from 12 in the 1980s). Poverty and unemployment rates are far above the average for both California and the United States. The city’s “barbell” economy—with jobs only at the top and bottom ends of the income scale—is “more typical of developing world cities, like São Paulo, than a major American urban area.” (The comparison brings to mind a scene in Robert Aldrich’s 1975 film Hustle, where Burt Reynolds describes L.A. as “Guatemala with color television.” Some of the city’s problems are older than even the commission may realize.)

The troubles go on. The city’s revenues have been flat since 2009—mostly because the local economy is moribund, though the report hints at a possible new revenue stream. “L.A. has no income tax,” the commissioners note. “Other taxes, including sales, hotel, parking and residential development, do not offer a solution to the City’s current budget gap. They have narrow bases and grow slowly.” Are LA2020’s members proposing a new city income tax? The report-by-committee doesn’t say.

The report also highlights employment stagnation, noting that Los Angeles is “the only one of the seven largest U.S. cities where the number of jobs has actually declined since 1990.” Though it goes unmentioned, L.A. County’s sleepy economy has made it less desirable for newcomers. The place Americans once thought of as a paradise has seen essentially flat population growth over the past decade, growing less than 2 percent since 2004, according to the Census Bureau. For a considerable period during the administration of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, L.A. actually lost population.

Via: California Political Review

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[CARTOON] Hope and Change

Via: California Political Review

Drag a Hundred Dollar Bill through a School of Journalism

James Carville once shockingly demonstrated the left's disdain for the morals of the poor, saying, "Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find." In truth, you can buy whatever you want much more easily if you drag that bill through a School of Journalism.

CNS reports that George Soros has seeded such schools at the University of Southern California and the University of Wisconsin to create shock troops for the now shelved FCC plan to monitor (bully) the media into acting as even bigger megaphones for the administration and Democratic Party than they already are:

 Two schools were working with FCC on the project, according to Byron York of The Washington Examiner. The University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Center for Communication and Democracy, were tasked by the FCC with coming up with criteria for what information is "critical" for Americans to have. The FCC study would have covered newspapers, websites, radio and television, according to The Washington Post.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison got a whopping $1,672,397 from Soros between 2000 and 2012. The university also offers OSI-sponsored grants, scholarships and fellowships. Friedland also heads Madison Commons, a liberal journalism group "powered by" the university's School of Journalism. Madison Commons, in turn, is a project of the university but supported in part by American University's J-Lab. AU, including its Cairo campus, has received $588,395 from OSF since 2008.

On top of the 1st Amendment problems with this proposal, the schools involved have strong ties to liberal billionaire George Soros' Open Society Foundations and have gotten more than $1.8 million from the organization since 2000.

The journalism programs at these schools have even more ties to Soros besides their funding, including faculty members writing for university-based publications allied with Soros-funded outlets.

The schools have collaborated on this project going back at least to 2012. Lewis A. Friedland, who was a "principle investigator" for the FCC on this project, also directs the Center for Communication and Democracy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He gave a presentation at Annenberg in Feb. 2012, on "communication ecology." This was just four months before the schools presented their findings to the FCC.

Via: American Thinker
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Extolling the Faults of Minimum Wage Makes Liberals More Dense

I have no idea how many columns I have written exposing the down sides to enacting and constantly increasing the minimum wage; but it has only created more density in the gray matter of Liberals, that is, if in fact, Liberals actually do have some gray matter.

A raise in minimum wage has proven to be a huge albatross around the necks of young workers trying to get a foothold on the ground floor of industry. Just when they are beginning to show signs of improved performance at the entry wage level of employment some dunderheaded politicians who are struggling to make an impression on some of the lesser-learned voters cry poor-mouth and pity for those “lowly paid hard working novice employees”. 

Actually this is a lot akin to the also dunderheaded politicians who cry and bleat about the global temperature’s fluctuations which cause excessive warming, but when these weather gyrations start to cause global cooling these same know-nothings change gears and start calling it “climate change”, comically and foolishly and accidentally getting the term more precise and in agreement with normally intelligent people but they still don’t really know what in the h-e-2-sticks they’re talking about.

But one thing rarely ever changes and that is these trolls of society are always politically Liberal and can’t wait to get started spending your taxpayer monies to worsen any harebrained scheme that strikes their feeble mental acuity regions.

Via: Canada Free Press

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Detroit Homeowner shoots and kills armed robbery suspect

DETROIT, Mich. (WJBK) -
A Detroit woman surprises an armed robbery suspect in her home. He pointed a gun at her head, but the woman was armed. Bullets started flying and the suspected ended up dead.

Click on the video player to watch Robin Murdoch's report.

Police were called to the 67-hundred block of Abington Ave. after a the suspect was shot to death. We're told it happened around 12:30 Saturday morning when the homeowner parked the car in her garage. She was walking to the front of the house when out of nowhere the suspect appeared and held a gun to her head. Sources say the woman, who is licensed to carry a concealed weapon, shot the suspect seven times. He fired one shot before he died.

The woman's husband did not want to talk on camera but he tells Fox 2 his wife made it out alive "by the grace of God." He says she bought a gun to protect herself and that's exactly what she did in this case.

This is the second story this week that we have done of people using the Second Amendment to protect themselves in Detroit. Thankfully, the Detroit Police Chief is very supportive of concealed carry, and recognizes, particularly given Detroit’s limited resources, how important it is to be able to protect oneself.

Craig said he started believing that legal gun owners can deter crime when he became police chief in Portland, Maine, in 2009.

“Coming from California (Craig was on the Los Angeles police force for 28 years), where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs (carrying concealed weapon permits), and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation.

“I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.”

Via: Weasel Zippers

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Wasserman Schultz Welcomes Ted Cruz To Florida With A Big "Extremist" Hug

Florida Democrat Congresswoman and head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Debbie Wasserman Schultz, is once again showing America how much fun it is for Democrats to sound divisive, as she has once again pulled out her “extremist” card in describing conservative elected officials, specifically Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who was in Florida for a few events.

In an interview with the Sun-Sentinel, Wasserman Schultz took issue with the Republican Party of Sarasota naming Cruz their “Statesman of the Year.” “We’re talking about a guy who just in his brief time in Washington – he hasn’t even been there but a year and a half – and he orchestrated the government shutdown that cost our economy $24 billion.

He opposed common-sense immigration reform, and that’s obviously important to many voters in Florida, and across the country.

 He supported the House Republicans’ goal of refusing to even take a vote on the legislation. Last week he voted not to pay our nation’s bills and forced a filibuster, more gridlock more obstructionism in the Senate and potentially brought us to the brink of default. He even voted against the Violence Against Women Act.-Rep. Wasserman Schultz (D) Wasserman Schultz

Here is the Sun Sentinel Q & A with Wasserman Schultz:

Q: There are plenty of conservative Republicans in our area, but it seems as if he might be out of touch with Republicans in southeast Florida?

Wasserman Schultz: Apparently not out of touch with Marco Rubio, our senator, our tea party senator. If you remember he told Politico last year that he thinks Cruz is going to be a superstar.

Marco Rubio himself has a tough time figuring out exactly where he is. He’s been pretty much a weather vane when he runs into controversy in his own party, on immigration reform especially. The Republican Party continues clearly to be engaged in a civil war.

They can’t future out who they are, where they are, how they want to define themselves. There’s a ton of finger pointing. I think that they’ve lost a bunch of races as a result, and I think that going into the 2014 election, that’s going to cause them more problems, particularly as they highlight a guy like Ted Cruz and allow Ted Cruz to be their leader who already forced a government shutdown and was willing to default and refused to pay our nation’s bills again just last week. I mean this is the person that they are lifting up as the statesman of the year.

Q: Do you think he’s the kind of Republican that voters in southeast Florida could cotton up to, warm up to?

Wasserman Schultz: The most extreme tea-partiers certainly could. And that seems to be who is dominating and leading the Republican Party of today…. Florida is a purple state … and they’ve repeatedly rejected extremism.

The Republicans keep lifting up leaders like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio who embrace that extremism, so I think as voters take a look at the choices they have leading into the 2014 election, it’s going to bode well for our Democratic candidates.

Via: Brietbart

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California Sen. Ronald S. Calderon, brother charged in FBI probe

State Sen. Ronald S. Calderon (D-Montebello) faces charges of bribery, fraud, money laundering and related offenses.(Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press / January 6, 2014)

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• But the appointment at the Bellagio hotel took an immediate unexpected turn for the Southern California lawmaker, according to court records. The businessmen Calderon expected to meet were actually FBI agents with an unsettling message: He was under investigation for public corruption, and he could either cooperate with authorities or face the consequences.

Calderon (D-Montebello) initially agreed to wear a wire in an effort to implicate other politicians, authorities said. That arrangement eventually fell apart, and on Friday prosecutors announced a sweeping indictment against Calderon charging him with bribery, fraud, money laundering and related offenses. Calderon's brother, Thomas, a former member of the California Assembly, is also charged with money laundering.

The charges stem from a scheme in which Ronald Calderon allegedly solicited and accepted nearly $100,000 in cash bribes, as well as gourmet meals and golf outings, in exchange for his influence as a lawmaker. His actions, prosecutors say, helped facilitate a half-billion-dollar healthcare fraud — one of the largest such scams in the state's history.

The mastermind of the healthcare fraud was Michael Drobot, who had owned Pacific Hospital in Long Beach. Drobot has admitted to bribing Calderon to use his influence to keep a state law on the books that allowed Drobot to pass on inflated expenses from spinal surgeries to workers' compensation insurers. The surgeries were performed on patients referred by doctors and chiropractors who were paid illegal kickbacks financed by the inflated billings, authorities allege.

Via: LA Times

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