jarasan's Blog

Massachusetts has issues.

Massachusetts drivers are dangerous and I sincerely understand this crazy edict from the ruler of Massachusetts.  Lately I have been observing in the DC metro area, vehicles/drivers with Massachusetts license plates................ they should NOT possess drivers licenses,  these people are f'ing nutz.

click here: here is the edict.

Scared

Entry #501

The LA cop gone wild.

This Dorner nut case is a LIBTARD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He loves Obama, Moochelle, Chris Matthews, MSNBC, Joe Scarborough, he is a pi$$ed off leftist that couldn't find evidence of discrimination ANYWHERE so he made it up,  and got called out,  and now he is killing.  This is how the left works!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I hope a 30.06 finds it's way into his tiny brain cavity.   He is a DEMONCRAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bat

Entry #500

Nothing to see here...

From the washington Post:

Sen. Menendez contacted top officials in friend’s Medicare dispute

By Carol D. Leonnig and Jerry Markon,

Sen. Robert Menendez raised concerns with top federal health-care officials twice in recent years about their finding that a Florida eye doctor — a close friend and major campaign donor — had overbilled the government by $8.9 million for care at his clinic, Menendez aides said Wednesday.

Menendez (D-N.J.) initially contacted federal officials in 2009 about the government’s audit of Salomon Melgen, complaining to the director overseeing Medicare payments that it was unfair to penalize the doctor because the billing rules were ambiguous, the aides said.

Last year, in a meeting with the acting administrator of the agency in charge of Medicare and Medicaid, Menendez again questioned whether federal auditors had been fair in their assessment of Melgen’s billing for eye injections to treat macular degeneration, the senator’s aides said.

The agency had ordered Melgen to repay the $8.9 million, and at the time of both conversations, Melgen was disputing the agency’s conclusion. His appeal continues to this day.

Menendez’s office provided this account of his contacts with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services after The Washington Post asked about the role he had played in the long-standing dispute between Melgen and the agency over his billing practices.

Menendez, who became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee this month, is under scrutiny because of his close relationship with Melgen. The doctor donated more than $700,000 last year to Menendez’s reelection campaign and other Senate Democrats. And when Melgen needed help with a port security contract in the Dominican Republic last year, Menendez urged U.S. officials to press the country to carry out the multimillion-dollar agreement.

Menendez is facing a Senate ethics inquiry about two free trips he took in 2010 on Melgen’s private plane to the doctor’s seaside mansion in the Dominican Republic. Menendez acknowledged this month that he had not properly disclosed the trips. He wrote a personal check for $58,500 to reimburse Melgen.

Meanwhile, a federal investigation of what law enforcement officials say are allegations of health-care fraud by Melgen escalated last week when FBI agents and health-care investigators raided medical offices in West Palm Beach where he runs Vitreo-Retinal Consultants. The teams spent nearly 24 hours searching the premises and removing dozens of boxes containing billing and medical records and computer files.

Federal investigators and health-care auditors have had concerns about Melgen’s billing practices at various times over the past decade, two former federal officials said. In part, they have examined the volume of eye injections, surgeries and laser treatments performed at his West Palm Beach clinic.

But a Menendez aide said Wednesday that the senator did not know Melgen was under formal investigation for possible fraud until the well-publicized raid last week.

“Senator Menendez was never aware of and has not intervened in any Medicare fraud investigation on behalf of Vitreo Retinal Consultants,” his office said in a statement.

The senator’s conversation with federal officials about Melgen’s case was unrelated to the current investigation, Menendez aides said.

“On a separate issue regarding Medicare reimbursement, he has in the past raised concerns with CMS about conflicting guidelines and ambiguity in CMS rules that are difficult for providers to understand and can lead to judgments after the fact,” the statement said. “His interest was in making sure providers were not penalized if CMS clarified or changed the rules of the game retroactively.”

Alan Reider, Melgen’s attorney, said Wednesday that his client has returned the government money in dispute but is contesting the CMS audit finding so he can reclaim the money. Reider said Melgen believes he was following Medicare guidelines. Reider added that Melgen was not aware that his practice was under investigation until federal agents arrived at his clinic last week.

At issue in the reimbursement dispute is Melgen’s multiple use of individual vials for eye injections to treat macular degeneration. Federal auditors have said Melgen often billed the government three to four times for injections from a single vial, according to two federal officials and lawyers familiar with the case.

The government’s Medicare program reimburses providers $2,000 for each vial, so Melgen was billing $6,000 to $8,000 for each vial.

Melgen’s attorneys said the doctor was properly billing for treating four patients with medical injections, albeit from one vial.

After CMS ruled in 2008 that Melgen would have to repay the government, he and his legal representatives contacted Menendez’s office, arguing that the finding was unfair, the senator’s aides said. Menendez’s staff members had several conversations with agency officials to learn more about the billing rules and the details of Melgen’s case in particular, the aides said.

In July 2009, Menendez called Jonathan Blum, the Medicare director at CMS, to express concern, the aides said. Menendez brought up Melgen’s case, they said, in the context of broader concerns about the guidelines.

Then, in June 2012, Menendez raised Melgen’s case again at a meeting with CMS Acting Administrator Marilyn Tavenner, aides recounted. They said the primary subject of the meeting was the implementation of President Obama’s health-care overhaul.

The aides said Menendez never urged the CMS to take specific action on Melgen’s case.

Blum and Tavenner declined to comment through a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services.

Melgen frequently cited his connection to Menendez, according to two former federal officials and doctors in South Florida.

When federal health-care fraud investigators were questioning him several years ago about his billing practices, he invoked the senator’s name, the former officials said.

“He used Menendez’s name all the time. He would say, “Menendez is a good friend of mine, and he knows I never did anything wrong,’ ” said a former senior federal official familiar with the investigation.

In Florida, it was more threatening, several doctors in the South Florida region recounted. After one local eye surgeon criticized Melgen’s treatment methods in discussions with other Florida doctors, Melgen warned that he had important friends in the Senate, including Menendez, said two doctors familiar with the exchange. They said Melgen cautioned that his Washington friends could arrange an intensive federal audit of the surgeon’s practice.

Reider, the attorney, said he had no knowledge of any comments Melgen may have made mentioning his friendship to Menendez.

Melgen came to the attention of fraud investigators amid complaints from other local eye doctors alleging that his treatments were often unnecessary, a waste of money and sometimes harmful to patients’ eyesight, the two former federal officials and several doctors said.

At the same time, investigators considered him an “outlier” compared with his peers because of the volume of his billing and the rate at which he administered eye injections and performed procedures on government-insured patients, the former officials said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is still ongoing.

Melgen “was somebody who consistently showed up on the radar and was being looked at quite a bit,” said a former senior health-care fraud investigator. “The sheer volume itself is going to keep him on the radar.’’

When federal investigators interviewed Melgen, he tried to exert pressure on them by mentioning the names of Menendez and other influential politicians, the former fraud investigator said. “We thought it was odd because Menendez was in New Jersey and this guy was in Florida,’’ the official said.

A second former federal official recounted that Menendez’s name came up repeatedly when Melgen was interviewed by investigators from the Justice Department and the inspector general’s office at the Department of Health and Human Services.

“He was using Menendez more as a character reference,” the official said. “He thought he was untouchable.”

The federal interest in Melgen stretches back 10 years, when investigators interviewed Philip Rosenfeld, a nationally known retina specialist, about the volume of treatments Melgen was performing, said several eye doctors in South Florida.

These doctors said Rosenfeld, who pioneered the use of Avastin injections for macular degeneration to stem eyesight loss, had long been troubled by Melgen’s methods.

FBI agents recently interviewed Rosenfeld again, this time two days before they raided Melgen’s clinic, the doctors said.

Reached at his home in Key Biscayne, Rosenfeld declined to comment.

Doctors in south Florida said that they have been fearful of criticizing Melgen publicly, and that his Washington connections may be protecting him.

In 2010, Melgen scolded eye surgeon Randy Katz for publicly criticizing the quality of his care. According to two fellow doctors, Melgen cited his Senate connections and told Katz that he could face a Medicare investigation.

Katz did not respond to requests for comment. Melgen’s attorney declined to discuss his client’s conversations with Katz or allegations that his client had threatened other doctors.

Soon after the encounter, according to a copy of a letter obtained by The Post, Katz wrote to Palm Beach doctors in praise of Melgen.

“It has come to my attention that certain statements I made have been misunderstood as criticisms of Dr. Melgen,” Katz wrote in the open letter. “To be clear, I know Dr. Salomon Melgen to be a capable and
highly-skilled vitreo-retinal surgeon. . . . If you hear any suggestion that I have said otherwise, you should disregard that suggestion as being false.”

 

Menendez should step down,  and face the music.  This DEMONCRAT is a bad apple!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One of many!!!!!!!!

Entry #499

Us vs. them

Shame it has come to this,  we have become subjects in a serfdom,  it must end.

Then and now

Entry #497

Brazil Fire.

245+ dead in a Brazil nightclub fire, may God bless those people and their families.

Now for my commentary:

The security guards would not let people leave because of the custom of running up bar tabs & paying later.  A flare started the fire by the band.  Brazil is gearing up for festival.

We need to outlaw nightclubs, mardi gras, fireworks, bands, security guards, and bar tabs before it is too late and could happen here.

Oh wait it already did:

The Station nightclub fire was the fourth deadliest nightclub fire in American history, killing 100 people. The fire began at 11:07 PM EST, on Thursday, February 20, 2003, at The Station, a glam metal and rock and roll themed nightclub located at 211 Cowesett Avenue in West Warwick, Rhode Island.

The fire was caused by pyrotechnics set off by the tour manager of the evening's headlining band, Great White, which ignited flammable sound insulation foam in the walls and ceilings surrounding the stage. A fast-moving fire engulfed the club in 5½ minutes. Some 230 people were injured and another 132 escaped uninjured. Video footage of the fire shows its initial growth, billowing smoke that quickly made escape impossible, and the exit blockage that further hindered evacuation.

We need to act now.

Entry #493

Straw Men.

Rhetoric study was a requirement for college English courses,  rhetorical techniques are important to understand and detect when they are being used.   Most importantly when a teleprompter is using those techniques.  The straw men set up arguments  were all up in the teleprompter's speech today.

from Mytheos Holt posted on The Blaze:

President Obama has an, at times, well-deserved reputation for delivering his speeches well. Certainly, the president made an impression today when he delivered his second inaugural address calling for a bolder, more expansive government that would be committed increasingly to the principles of liberalism, with characteristic soaring rhetoric.

Unfortunately, another characteristic was also in evidence in Obama’s speech: namely, his tendency to argue against positions that nobody holds (and by extension, to mischaracterize his opponents’ views so as to make them easier to argue against). In logic, this unfortunate tendency is referred to as a “straw man fallacy” and it was well-worn in President Obama’s speech today – so well-worn that at times, he seemed to cough up a new straw man fallacy with every sentence. How many of these arguments in bad faith did the President use? Read on as we list each one and explain their fallacious nature.

Straw Man #1:

“For the American people can no more meet the demands of today’s world by acting alone than American soldiers could have met the forces of fascism or communism with muskets and militias.”

The President’s line about muskets and militias is a rhetorical flourish more than an argument, but the first part of this line is an obvious straw man. No one in the current political climate is arguing for a complete dissolution of government power such that only the American people as a collective would be responsible for defending the country or performing any other task. Rather, the question is how much responsibility should be left to private citizens. Saying “private citizens cannot handle all responsibilities” is not the same as saying “private citizens cannot handle any responsibility at all.”

Straw Man #2: 

“No single person can train all the math and science teachers we’ll need to equip our children for the future, or build the roads and networks and research labs that will bring new jobs and businesses to our shores.”

Like the first straw man, this one argues against something which is obviously false, and which no one believes. A single, individual person obviously cannot do all of this alone, but again, that does not imply that if someone cannot do something alone, the government must step in and do it for them. For instance, an architect cannot build a skyscraper alone. He needs laborers, engineers, and other people. But saying he can’t do this alone is not the same thing as saying that private citizens cannot cooperatively agree to do this without help from the government.

Straw Man #3: 

“We reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.  For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.”

No one is proposing completely giving up caring for older generations, nor is anyone proposing completely ignoring young people’s needs. The question is how much government can afford to spend on each. More to the point, no one on either side is proposing complete abolition of programs that help the elderly or the disabled.

Straw Man #4:

“We do not believe that in this country freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few.”

This particular straw man presumably is meant to apply to income inequality. At least, that’s the only public policy issue that this author can see it relating to. However, as with the others, it is a misreading of people who argue against greater income equality. For one thing, freedom and happiness are not necessarily the same as money, and luck is not the only thing that makes a person wealthy. Moreover, people who argue that income inequality is not necessarily a problem are not defending the idea that only a few can be wealthy, which is a question of income mobility, not equality.

Straw Man #5: 

“Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.”

This straw man, which deals with global warming, is actually two fallacies in one. It is a straw man because no one believes they can avoid the impact of natural disasters completely, and it also begs the question by assuming that solving global warming will solve the problem of fires, drought and storms, while simultaneously trying to prove that by solving global warming, natural disasters will be lessened.

Straw Man #6:

“We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war.”

The President’s critics on national security do not believe in perpetual war. They may believe in seeing some wars through to their conclusion, or starting other wars out of necessity, but none of them believes in perpetual war for its own sake.

Straw Man #7:

“For our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.”

People arguing against bills such as the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which claim to be devoted to ensuring equal pay for women, often do so because they are concerned that these laws give trial lawyers too much of an excuse to sue, not because they believe women should be underpaid.

Straw Man #8:

“Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law, for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

Again, there are no mainstream political figures who believe that gays should be unequal before the law. In fact, gays enjoy all the same constitutional protections as straight people. The question of whether the right to marriage is one of those constitutional protections, however, is an unresolved question, though the Supreme Court may resolve it later this year. This straw man also assumes that the only function of marriage is to facilitate love. That is certainly one view, but it is not one that all critics of gay marriage subscribe to, and thus assuming that they oppose gay marriage out of opposition to love is a straw man.

Straw Man #9:

Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity.”

Shutting off immigration completely is not a policy proposal being offered. What is being argued about is the question of what to do with people who immigrated to the US in contradiction to its laws.

Straw Man #10:

“Being true to our founding documents does not require us to agree on every contour of life. It does not mean we all define liberty in exactly the same way or follow the same precise path to happiness.”

This is obviously true, but is also a straw man because no one believes that following a blueprint for governance requires the people following that blueprint to make all the same lifestyle choices. This is not even an argument that constitutional originalists on the Supreme Court advance. The President is arguing against a position that is not held by his critics.

That’s ten straw men in slightly under 20 minutes. In other words, one logical fallacy every 2 minutes, on average.

Entry #491

Thinking outside the box.

You are driving down the road in your car on a wild, stormy night,
when you pass by a bus stop and you see three people waiting for the
bus:

1. An old lady who looks as if she is about to die.
2. An old friend who once saved  your life.
3. The perfect partner you have been dreaming about.

Which one would you choose to offer a ride to, knowing that there
could only be one passenger in your car? Think before you continue
reading.
This is a moral/ethical dilemma that was once actually used as part
of a job application. You could pick up the old lady, because she is
going to die, and thus you should save her first. Or you could take
the old friend because he once saved your life, and this would be
the perfect chance to pay him back. However, you may never be able
to find your perfect mate again.
YOU WON'T BELIEVE THIS.....................

The candidate who was hired (out of 200 applicants) had no trouble
coming up with his answer. He simply answered: 'I would give the car
keys to my old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I
would stay behind and wait for the bus with the partner of my dreams.'

Sometimes, we gain more if we are able to give up our stubborn
thought limitations.

Never forget to 'Think Outside of the Box.'
HOWEVER...., The correct answer is to run the old lady over and put
her out of her misery because Obama's health care won't pay for her hospital visit anyway, have sex with the perfect partner on the hood of the car,
then drive off with the old friend for a few beers.

God, I just love happy endings!

Entry #490

Seen this before?

Don't forget stalin mao idi amin polpot  chavez castro all these fascists disarmed the people.

Obamas inspiration

Entry #489

Dear Abby,

Dear Abby,
 
My husband has a long record of money problems. He runs up huge credit-card
bills and at the end of the month, if I try to pay them off, he shouts at
me, saying I am stealing his money. He says pay the minimum and let our kids
worry about the rest, but already we can hardly keep up with the interest.
Also he has been so arrogant and abusive toward our neighbors that most of
them no longer speak to us. The few that do are an odd bunch, to whom he has
been giving a lot of expensive gifts, running up our bills even more. Also,
he has gotten religious. One week he hangs out with Catholics and the next
with people who say the Pope is the Anti-Christ, and the next he's with
Muslims.. Finally, the last straw. He's demanding that before anyone can be
in the same room with him, they must sign a loyalty oath. It's just so
horribly creepy! Can you help?
 
Signed, Lost
 
 
 
Dear Lost,
 
Suck it up and stop whining, Michelle. You're getting to live in the White
House for free, travel the world, and have others pay for everything for
you. You can divorce the jerk any time you want. The rest of us are stuck
with the idiot for 4 more years.
 
Signed, Abby
Entry #487