Where Are My Keys?

Only in Tucson..

I understand that some students might be upset after a heartbreaking loss (one would think Arizona fans would be used to disappointment by now), but do you really need to take "selfies" during your riot?

Ironic, no?

Nothing like giving a talk on free speech, while denying Press coverage at the same time:

First lady Michelle Obama told students that freedom of speech should be a universal right during her extravagant, no-press-allowed tour of China — a hypocritical move that will surely draw the ire of critics, according to an expert.

“That is troublesome. That goes beyond hypocritical, and I think the American media and the international media has every right to call her and the Obama administration on that — that they permitted that to happen,” said Tom Whalen, a political history professor at Boston University. “It makes you shake your head, albeit sadly.”

The first lady stopped at Peking University in Beijing yesterday during a weeklong trip that was billed as cultural rather than political. She told students, accustomed to China’s tight Internet restrictions, that the free flow of information is crucial “because that’s how we discover truth, that’s how we learn what’s really happening in our communities and our country and our world.”

Meanwhile, the first lady’s camp has kept the press away from her vacation, a potential public relations misstep.

“You see that this administration is tone deaf when it comes to politics. They do not understand the political sentiment,” Whalen said. “It seems like it’s one disaster after another when it comes to PR. You don’t want to do this right now.”

Show your college hoop skillz..

The 2014 WAMK Bracket Buster Challenge is up and running.  Follow this link to get your picks in.  The password is "presto"!

Good luck!

Another rube self-identifies..

 

How many other young, lockstep Obama supporters feel the same way today?

Harry Reid thinks this guy is a liar..

Wasn't Obamacare supossed to fix situations like this?

The hospital bills are hitting Larry Basich’s mailbox.

That would be OK if Basich had health insurance. But he doesn’t.

Thing is, he should be covered. Basich, 62, bought a plan through the state’s Nevada Health Link insurance exchange in the fall. He’s been paying monthly premiums since November.

Yet the Las Vegan is stranded in a no-man’s-land where no carrier claims him, and his tab is mounting: Basich owes $407,000 for care received in January and February, when his policy was supposed to be in effect. Instead, he’s covered only for March and beyond.

Basich has begged for weeks for help from the exchange and its contractor, Xerox. But Basich’s insurance broker said Xerox seems more interested in lawyering up and covering its hide than in working out Basich’s problems. Nor is Basich the only client facing plan-selection errors through the exchange, she added.

Xerox, meanwhile, said it’s working every day to fix Basich’s problem, and its legal counsel is routine.

In the rollout of the Affordable Care Act and its insurance exchanges, you can find a success story for every failure. But Basich’s case is extreme.

Basich said he began trying to enroll on Oct. 1, the day the exchange website went live. Like many consumers, he fought technical flaws during multiple sign-up attempts. In mid-November he finally got through and chose his plan: UnitedHealthcare’s MyHPNSilver1.

“It was like reaching the third level of Doom,” Basich said of the torturous sign-up process.

Basich paid his first premium on Nov. 21, and within days the exchange withdrew the $160.77 payment from his money-market savings account. Because Basich paid a month before the Dec. 23 deadline, his coverage was to begin Jan. 1.

Weeks ticked by, but Basich received nothing to confirm he had insurance. Nevada Health Link kept telling him he was enrolled, but UnitedHealthcare said he wasn’t in their system.

Basich’s predicament went critical on Dec. 31, when he had a heart attack. His treatment, which included a triple bypass on Jan. 3, resulted in $407,000 in medical bills in January and February that no insurer is covering.

Basich and his insurance broker, Tamar Burch of Branch Benefits Consultants, said the issue appears to be confusion at the state exchange. Xerox’s system says Basich chose a plan from another insurer, Nevada Health CO-OP, even though Basich has paperwork that shows he selected MyHPNSilver1. In short, Xerox can’t seem to decide where Basich belongs, Burch said.

So the exchange is trying to compromise, putting Basich with Nevada Health CO-OP for January and February, when he incurred his bills, and with UnitedHealthcare from this month on. But CO-OP officials say Basich is not their member.

Nevada Health CO-OP CEO Tom Zumtobel told the exchange board on Feb. 27 that the nonprofit carrier spent seven days with Xerox determining Basich’s eligibility, only to find that Basich hadn’t chosen the group’s coverage.

“If he had picked our health plan, we would be advocating for a solution. But he didn’t pick us,” Zumtobel said. “We need someone on the board to advocate for him.”

Why have four months passed without a resolution?

“Xerox is truly out of their league. They need to understand they are an administrator, they are not an insurance company,” Burch said. “They need to understand their boundaries. They don’t understand this world. Everybody is at the mercy of Xerox, and they are not doing this right.”

Xerox representatives responded that they’re working hard to make it right.

“Mr. Basich’s issue is complex, and we’re working on it every day. We are in touch with Mr. Basich, his broker, the carriers, (Silver State Health Insurance Exchange) leadership, and the Division of Insurance to sort it out,” said spokeswoman Jennifer Wasmer.

The help didn’t come fast enough, said Basich, who blames his back-and-forth with the exchange in December at least in part for stress that caused his heart attack. That stress has turned up a few notches now that Basich is getting the bills. He fretted in the exchange board’s Thursday meeting about what will happen to his credit rating — and his ability to qualify for a mortgage — if the bills are not covered.

“All I wanted to do when I moved here was buy a house, get a dog and go to some spring training games for the Dodgers,” said Basich, who moved to Las Vegas from Hawaii in 2012.

Meanwhile, the exchange sent Basich premium invoices for January and February. He paid them both.

Some help for your bracket..

For the first time in a long time, I'm not doing a March Madness bracket.  Haven't had time to pay much attention to college hoops, and I want to enjoy the games fro what they are, not based on who I guessed would win.

If you are still scratching your head over whom to pick, Nate Silver offers some help.

For what it's worth, Nate likes Florida, Michigan State, Arizona, and Louisville in the Final Four, with Louisville, Florida, and Arizona all within a percentage point or two of winning the whole thing.

I am looking forward to a really good tournament this year.  No claer-cut favorite, some new faces in the Big Dance, and there are always lots of early upsets to keep things interesting.  I'm flying to Louisville on Thursday, so I'll have something to keep me occupied on the plane for that long flight.

Let the games begin!

Now that she has been impacted, she wants changes..

DiFi doesn't like drones invading her privacy:

“When is a drone picture a benefit to society? When does it become stalking? When does it invade privacy? How close to a home can a drone go?” Feinstein said, listing questions she would like to see answered in the complex regulation process.

“I’m in my home and there’s a demonstration out front, and I go to peek out the window and there’s a drone facing me,” she recalled.

Demonstrators from Code Pink who were protesting government surveillance at the time, said the device was merely a toy helicopter, but Feinstein used the instance to sound off about the importance of controlling the technology through government regulation.

“It’s going to have to come through regulation— perhaps regulation of size and type for private use,” she said. “Some certification of the person that’s going to operate it … some specific regulation on the kinds of uses it can be put to.”

Too bad she hasn't been forced into Obamacare, like many of her constituents.  Maybe she'd have a change of heart there, too.

You know how you can tell if your signature legislation is working as intended?

You don't have to hide exceptions to it in other pieces of legislation:

ObamaCare's implementers continue to roam the battlefield and shoot their own wounded, and the latest casualty is the core of the Affordable Care Act—the individual mandate. To wit, last week the Administration quietly excused millions of people from the requirement to purchase health insurance or else pay a tax penalty.

This latest political reconstruction has received zero media notice, and the Health and Human Services Department didn't think the details were worth discussing in a conference call, press materials or fact sheet. Instead, the mandate suspension was buried in an unrelated rule that was meant to preserve some health plans that don't comply with ObamaCare benefit and redistribution mandates. Our sources only noticed the change this week.

That seven-page technical bulletin includes a paragraph and footnote that casually mention that a rule in a separate December 2013 bulletin would be extended for two more years, until 2016. Lo and behold, it turns out this second rule, which was supposed to last for only a year, allows Americans whose coverage was cancelled to opt out of the mandate altogether.

In 2013, HHS decided that ObamaCare's wave of policy terminations qualified as a "hardship" that entitled people to a special type of coverage designed for people under age 30 or a mandate exemption. HHS originally defined and reserved hardship exemptions for the truly down and out such as battered women, the evicted and bankrupts.

But amid the post-rollout political backlash, last week the agency created a new category: Now all you need to do is fill out a form attesting that your plan was cancelled and that you "believe that the plan options available in the [ObamaCare] Marketplace in your area are more expensive than your cancelled health insurance policy" or "you consider other available policies unaffordable."

This lax standard—no formula or hard test beyond a person's belief—at least ostensibly requires proof such as an insurer termination notice. But people can also qualify for hardships for the unspecified nonreason that "you experienced another hardship in obtaining health insurance," which only requires "documentation if possible." And yet another waiver is available to those who say they are merely unable to afford coverage, regardless of their prior insurance. In a word, these shifting legal benchmarks offer an exemption to everyone who conceivably wants one.

Keep in mind that the White House argued at the Supreme Court that the individual mandate to buy insurance was indispensable to the law's success, and President Obama continues to say he'd veto the bipartisan bills that would delay or repeal it.

It's a piece of crap, and everyone knows it.

Shocking, that a Liberal prediction hasn't come to pass..

"Legalize pot", they said.  "Regulate it, tax it, and make a fortune of it", they said.  "Use the proceeds to fund schools, and programs, and cops", they said.  "Whatever costs arise, the revenue from making it legal will offset it", they said.

They were wrong.

But in January of 2014, Colorado only brought in $2 million from recreational pot shop sales, far short of what would lead to a successful prognosis from Hickenlooper’s budget office.

When the sum from recreational pot sales was combined with taxes and fees from medicinal marijuana in January, the total was still only $3.5 million. At the end of last year, the Legislative Council of the Colorado General Assembly projected a total of $578.1 million a year in combined wholesale and retail marijuana sales.

The state’s first $40 million in pot revenue must go toward school construction – but at this rate, the entire sum of that revenue won’t even hit the mark. As a percentage of Colorado’s general tax revenue, the projected revenue won’t chart; the state will likely collect $9.7 billion overall. Just last week, Colorado police chiefs asked the state for significant funding in order to enforce the new pot laws. They say they require new funding for training officers in spotting drivers who are high, as well as buying better testing equipment. Just about $3 million has been designated for law enforcement, out of the $134 million projected by Hickenlooper, although Hickenlooper wants to spend $5 million.

 

What this road needs is a snow plow or two... GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!