independentsforkerry.org

Russian-born comedian Yakov Smirnoff describes a furniture ad guaranteeing the company would stand behind their product for six months. Smirnoff says “that’s why I left Russia, I don’t want people standing behind my furniture.”

Right here in the USA, the 2,300 page Dodd-Frank financial reform bill has citizens reporting citizens to the government.

The Securities and Exchange Commission – SEC is “bracing for a flood of tips about alleged corporate fraud coming from people seeking large new bounties created by the law,” according to the Wall Street Journal. The Securities and Exchange Commission bounties start at a “minimum reward of 0,000,” although staffing for the program is not yet funded.

The Journal reports that the Securities and Exchange Commission expects to get 30,000 tips a year, with half leading to “formal money claims.”

The Securities and Exchange Commission whistleblower program follows a similar IRS program started four years ago, which resulted in 5,700 tips and 468 “qualifying” claims in the last fiscal year.

Just as Enron led to the massive Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, imposing onerous and costly burdens on every public company in the country, the Bernard Madoff Ponzi scheme led to the Dodd-Frank whistleblower regulations. As the Journal notes,

The Securities and Exchange Commission was harshly criticized by lawmakers for failing to detect the long-running Ponzi scheme run by Bernard Madoff before it collapsed two years ago. Agency officials ignored or brushed aside numerous tips about Mr. Madoff. [emphasis added]

So rather than tighten up a system that allowed “numerous tips” about Madoff to be overlooked, Congress has created a new program to overwhelm the regulators with all manner of tips, in the process undermining “internal compliance programs already in place at companies,” as the Journal writes.

The Journal reports today that 260 companies, including many industry giants, have written to the Securities and Exchange Commission warning that “plans to pay bounties to whistleblowers will turn financial fraud into a ‘gold mine’ for employees.”

The article quotes from the letter and its organizer:

The proposed rules “disincent employees from looking for ways to improve or correct corporate behaviors, and incent them to find ways to profit from corporate wrongdoing… Fraudulent misconduct, the bane of good compliance systems, then becomes the gold mine.”

…the whistleblower rules have fueled more concern than any other issue during her 22 years at the Washington group.

“The proposals cut to the very core of what it is that every responsible U.S. company has been trying to do for the last couple of decades, which is to create effective, robust compliance reporting systems,”she said in an interview.” This just pulls the legs off the stool.”

The Democrats’ legislation encourages employees to “turn a blind eye to early signs of fraud” in order to maximize their own rewards.

For those reported on wrongly, what government department returns their reputation? Where will citizen reporting arise next? Is the limitless reach of the state in the hands of overzealous or vengeful citizens pursuing their own agenda?

We are a long way from Mr. Smirnoff’s Russia, but citizen bounty hunting is a disturbing turn in the crush of big government under the Obama Democrats.

Written by: Joseph Smith
Source: American Thinker

Democratic Party News – The News of the Democratic Party.

Justin at US Pirate Party:

Last week, YouTube.com had pulled down a video that had 13 million views in 48 hours. This action not only showed us how YouTube favors their partners, and how we need to reform Copyright laws. This video was all over the internet and the news. The video was of a homeless man who has a great voice. He speaks with his radio voice in the video (on the right). People have called his voice “The Golden Voice”. In 48 hours, along with 13 million views, the man in the video, Ted Williams, was hired as an announcer for the Cleveland Cavaliers, a NBA team. We are glad he has been given a second chance, and can use his voice.

However, in that 48 hours, the original video uploaded, the one with 13,000,000 views, has been pulled off of YouTube. Why?

After that video exploded on the internet, news organizations, like the Associated Press (AP), had re-uploaded to their channels, and claimed that the video with 13 million views was “copyright infringement.”

Copyright laws were originally made to protect people’s creations. Now, it is doing the exact opposite. It is not promoting creativity, but limiting those who are creative. It is time YouTube stops censoring, and Copyright laws and policies need to be reformed.

Independent Political Report

Conservation groups are girding for battle in what they claim is a coming assault on the Clean Air Act by U.S. House Republicans, including Colorado congressmen Cory Gardner, Mike Coffman and Doug Lamborn.

Environment Colorado today issued a release ahead of the State of the Union address urging President Barack Obama “to protect the nation’s public health against threats from dirty energy lobbyists and their allies in Congress.”

“While laws like the Clean Air Act have helped to reduce emissions of many of the most dangerous pollutants, the job is far from done,” Environment Colorado field organizer Scott Wozencraft said. “Air pollution continues to cut short the lives of thousands of Americans each year, trigger tens of thousands of asthma attacks, poison our waterways with mercury and other toxins, and fuel global warming.”

Monday, Fort Collins-based Clean Water Action launched a door-to-door campaign called “Clean Air, Healthy Colorado” aimed at tracking the policies and statements of Gardner and Democratic U.S. Sens. Michael Bennet and Mark Udall.

Gardner, a former state representative who beat out Democrat Betsy Markey in November, has been assigned to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. The chairman of that committee, U.S. Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., earlier this month co-authored an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal targeting the “unconstitutional power grab” by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in attempting to regulate greenhouse gas emissions as pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Gardner recently told the Fort Collins Coloradoan he will increase oversight in order to rein in regulators.

“Clearly, oversight is going to be a key feature, and that is not only limited to the energy side or the environment side, but the health-care side as well,” Gardner said. “And so oversight, and reining in what many members of the committee see as a rule-making, regulatory process that has gone unchecked.”

The U.S. Supreme Court in 2007 ruled that greenhouse gases are pollutants covered by the Clean Air Act, and in 2009 the EPA release two findings allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases.

“Using our door-to-door, phone, email, and mail outreach programs, Clean Water Action will give thousands of members in northern Colorado the opportunity to learn what their federal lawmakers are doing on key issues impacting clean air, clean water, and public health,” said Gary Wockner of Clean Water Action. “In addition, Coloradans need to know that the U.S. EPA is America’s front-line defender of the Clean Air Act, which supports clean energy that will create jobs and protect the economy.”

Last month the EPA announced its timeframe for setting limits on greenhouse gas emissions by power plants and refineries.

Colorado Independent

Watch your tax dollars at work with Hank Johnson, Democrat from Georgia in the United States House of Representatives; Voters of the State of Georgia must be really proud. Really he was the best choice on the ballot? Doesn’t Congressmen Johnson know that the Army Corps of Engineers has securely fastened all US islands to the seabed. It did so after Key West almost tipped over in 1988 during a particularly exuberant gay pride festival.

Overall, if this doesn’t prove that the US needs to invest more money in education, I don’t know what does! And what category do we post this to? Comedy, News & Politics, Entertainment, Education. . .

Democratic Party News – The News of the Democratic Party.

John Boehner, Incoming Speaker of the House

The GOP’s dramatic gains in Tuesday’s midterm election have positioned John Boehner as the incoming Speaker of the House in the 112th Congress. In his twenty years in Congress, Boehner has been one of the fiercest protectors of Corporate America, and his political and legislative history provide a striking road map for what to expect from his tenure as Speaker.
Following stints in local politics and service in the Ohio State House, John Boehner was elected to the United States Congress in 1990. In his second term in Congress, Boehner helped write the Contract with America and became a stalwart ally of Newt Gingrich, even his “protégé.” Boehner backed Gingrich’s partisan and confrontational style of leadership, and Gingrich elevated him to the position of GOP Conference Chairman. From there, Boehner became the go-to Member of Congress for corporate lobbyists and business interests.

As Conference Chairman, Boehner “met weekly with leading lobbyists to enlist their support and discuss strategy” throughout his four year tenure. During a vote to remove a subsidy to the tobacco industry, Boehner personally handed out checks from tobacco lobbyists and industry PACs to other congressmen on the House floor. At least one Republican colleague, Rep. Linda Smith, blasted Boehner’s actions, saying that “if it is not illegal, it should be.” Since his role in the Republican leadership was closely tied to Gingrich, when Gingrich resigned following the GOP’s 1998 election loss, Boehner was voted out of his leadership position.

After he was forced out of his role as Conference Chairman, Boehner embarked on a plan to regain support among his Republican colleagues. His leadership PAC, called the “Freedom Project,” took in millions of dollars from special-interest lobbyists, and he then used the money to contribute to his fellow Republican candidates. Top contributors included Sallie Mae, Merrill Lynch, R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Cincinnati Financial Corp., which helped make Boehner’s leadership PAC one of the best-funded among his peers. The “major sources of financing” for the Freedom Project came from “for-profit colleges and trade schools, and private student lenders,” and as chairman of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, Boehner sponsored “legislation strongly supported by private student lenders to restrict the ability of the U.S. Department of Education to make government student loans less expensive by cutting fees.” Boehner told representatives from student loan companies that he has “tricks up my sleeve to protect you,” and he later helped pass a law to bar individuals from refinancing their student loans.
According to Boehner, “I have a good relationship to K Street and people who lobby us.”

Even Boehner’s landlord is a lobbyist, and the Washington Post writes that his landlord’s “clients — including restaurant chains and health insurance companies — hired him to lobby on issues at the heart of Boehner’s work, including minimum-wage increases, small-business tax breaks and tax-free savings accounts to help cover insurance costs.”

In addition to building relationships with corporate lobbyists, Boehner enhanced his standing with the Religious Right. In 2002 Boehner wrote a letter to the Ohio Board of Education urging them to teach intelligent design in public schools, using language derived from anti-evolution activist Phillip E. Johnson. Cyrus B. Richardson Jr., the school board vice president, called Boehner’s letter “misleading” because “it makes it sound like the law says you have to teach intelligent design, when that isn’t in the law.”

He has consistently stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Religious Right throughout his time in Congress. Boehner voted to ban same-sex couples from adopting children and to repeal domestic partnership laws, he opposed hate crimes laws and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and he supported Don’t Ask Don’t Tell and a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. On issues regarding reproductive justice, Boehner voted against protecting reproductive health clinics and backed laws which would compel women to go through biased counseling before terminating their pregnancy. In his speech to the Family Research Council’s 2009 Values Voter Summit, Boehner emphasized his steadfast, 100% anti-choice record. After the 2010 election, Boehner’s chief of staff met with Randall Terry, the radical founder of Operation Rescue, who pressured Republicans in the House to criminalize abortion.
Following Tom DeLay’s resignation as Majority Leader in 2006 (after DeLay was indicted on conspiracy and money laundering charges for which he was recently convicted) John Boehner returned to the GOP leadership and was elected to replace DeLay. From the outset, Boehner pledged to support Republican plans to privatize Social Security, worked against a bipartisan immigration reform bill, and vigorously fought stronger ethics laws. Once elevated to Majority Leader, his leadership PAC received even more financial support from special interest groups. The New York Times found that “Mr. Boehner’s biggest donors include the political action committees of lobbying firms, drug and cigarette makers, banks, health insurers, oil companies and military contractors.” Boehner’s PAC also received ,000 from casino-owning American Indian tribes with ties to convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

Boehner only deepened his ties to special interest lobbyists and intensified his pro-corporate agenda after the 2006 elections, when Republicans lost their majority and he became Minority Leader. Like the Freedom Project, the “Boehner for Speaker” committee allowed lobbyists to buy significant access to the congressman. Lobbyists were allowed “VIP access” to Boehner and his top aides if they could raise 0,000 worth of contributions or more for the committee. But Boehner’s ties to lobbyists don’t end there: he routinely met with business leaders, particularly from the banking and tobacco industries, at his Thursday Group meetings, spent tens of thousands of dollars “to travel to golf destinations on a corporate-subsidized tab,” and gave business associations a larger platform through his America Speaking Out initiative. In September, the New York Times profiled his close ties with K Street:

He maintains especially tight ties with a circle of lobbyists and former aides representing some of the nation’s biggest businesses, including Goldman Sachs, Google, Citigroup, R. J. Reynolds, MillerCoors and UPS.

They have contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to his campaigns, provided him with rides on their corporate jets, socialized with him at luxury golf resorts and waterfront bashes and are now leading fund-raising efforts for his Boehner for Speaker campaign, which is soliciting checks of up to ,800 each, the maximum allowed.

Some of the lobbyists readily acknowledge routinely seeking his office’s help — calling the congressman and his aides as often as several times a week — to advance their agenda in Washington. And in many cases, Mr. Boehner has helped them out.

Special interest groups continue to pay handsomely to gain access to Boehner and his aides. This year Boehner raised well over million and Fredreka Schouten of USA Today writes the “industries giving the most to Boehner” include “insurance companies, drug manufacturers and Wall Street firms, all of which now face new regulations adopted by the Democratic-controlled Congress.” In all, the financial and insurance industries have been his top donors, contributing .8 million to his political committees.

Boehner’s connections to corporate lobbyists and trade associations greatly influenced his political work. He is big business’s chief advocate on the Hill, and his efforts include “combating fee increases for the oil industry, fighting a proposed cap on debit card fees, protecting tax breaks for hedge fund executives and opposing a cap on greenhouse gas emissions.” Reacting to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Boehner agreed with the US Chamber of Commerce that taxpayers should subsidize the cleanup, rather than forcing BP to pay for the entire bill. Boehner has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from oil companies, and fought attempts by Democrats to lift the liability cap in order to make BP pay for the entire cost of the cleanup.

Boehner vehemently opposes greater supervision of the financial industry and worked tirelessly against Wall Street reform, comparing new oversight and regulations to “killing an ant with a nuclear weapon.” When speaking to an “enthusiastic crowd of bankers at the American Bankers Association government relations summit,” Boehner told them to fight regulatory reform and not “to let those little punk staffers take advantage of you.” Before the historic financial reform bill came up for a vote, Boehner “met with more than 100 lobbyists” to strategize their opposition, and after the legislation was signed into law, he immediately called for its repeal.

But while Boehner looks after his friends and campaign contributors on K Street and Wall Street, he voted against recent legislation to increase lending and tax relief for small businesses, voted ‘No’ on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, attempted to stop extending benefits to unemployed Americans, and vigorously opposed a proposal to bolster and ensure government funding for the medical treatment of 9/11 rescue workers. He also led the opposition to the DISCLOSE Act, which would have made corporations publicly disclose their political contributions and prevent foreign corporations from spending in US elections.

An unapologetic beneficiary of corporate money and an unwavering ally of K Street, John Boehner consistently supports the interests of big business over the public interest. Corporations and their lobbyists are largely responsible for financing his political operations, crafting his policy proposals, and lifting his political career and ambitions. Not only has John Boehner embraced Wall Street and K Street, but he also worked hard to shore up his support from the Religious Right and other conservative interest groups. As the next Speaker of the House, John Boehner will have even more power to advance the goals of Washington lobbyists and push his right-wing, pro-corporate agenda.

The Democratic Republican – views and news

Successful propaganda is composed of equal parts deception and suppression, and the apparatchiks in the mainstream media are much better at the latter.

They may have erred in pushing the Arizona assassination attempt beyond its ideological limits last week, but they succeeded brilliantly a few months earlier in suppressing news of a nearly lethal attempt by a genuine leftist.

In September 2010 Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was scheduled to speak at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City.

At some point, wearing black clothes and a bullet-proof vest, 22 year-old Casey Brezik bolted out of a classroom, knife in hand, and slashed the throat of a dean. As he would later admit, he confused the dean with Nixon.

The story never left Kansas City. It is not hard to understand why. Knives lack the political sex appeal of guns, and even Keith Olbermann would have had a hard time turning Brezik into a Tea Partier.

Indeed, Brezik seems to have inhaled just about every noxious vapor in the left-wing miasma: environmental extremism, radical Islam, anti-capitalism, anti-Zionism and Christophobia, among others.

In his “About Me” box on Facebook, Brezik listed as his favorite quotation one from progressive poster boy, Che Guevara. The quote begins “Our every action is a battle cry against imperialism” and gets more belligerent from there.

On his wall postings, Brezik ranted, “How are we the radical(s) (left) to confront the NEW RIGHT, if we avoid confrontation all together?”

As good as his word, Brezik’s marched on Toronto in June 2010 to protest the G20 Summit, where he was arrested, charged, and deported. “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED,” he boasted.

Like many on the left, Brezik seemed to have found religion.

In reference to an article about Terry Jones and his proposed Quran burning, Brezik posted on the day before his planned assault, “This is now a Holy war. Scriptures have been desecrated. War U can’t handle. Make a choice and quick.”

No doubt, Brezik is something of a whack job, but the various rages that he acquired -culminating in Sudden Jihadi Syndrome – are those to which our students are exposed on a daily basis. For the last century or more, it is the progressive fever swamps that have nurtured most of the world’s hate and virtually all of its violence, including, paradoxically, radical Islam.

As Casey Berzik cried out with multicultural flair, “El Futuro es La REVOLUCION!” But if an assassin strikes in a media vacuum, and no one hears him, can there ever be a revolution?

Written by: Jack Cashill
Source: American Thinker

Democratic Party News – The News of the Democratic Party.

It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks. And as one pundit so succinctly stated, the Democrat Party is as it always has been, the party of the four S’s: slavery, secession, segregation and now socialism.

It was the Democrats who fought to keep blacks in slavery and passed the discriminatory Black Codes and Jim Crow laws. The Democrats started the Ku Klux Klan to lynch and terrorize blacks. The Democrats fought to prevent the passage of every civil rights law beginning with the civil rights laws of the 1860s, and continuing with the civil rights laws of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the civil rights era of the 1960s, Dr. King was fighting the Democrats who stood in the school house doors, turned skin-burning fire hoses on blacks and let loose vicious dogs. It was Republican President Dwight Eisenhower who pushed to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and sent troops to Arkansas to desegregate schools. President Eisenhower also appointed Chief Justice Earl Warren to the U.S. Supreme Court, which resulted in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ending school segregation. Much is made of Democrat President Harry Truman’s issuing an Executive Order in 1948 to desegregate the military. Not mentioned is the fact that it was Eisenhower who actually took action to effectively end segregation in the military.

Democrat President John F. Kennedy is lauded as a proponent of civil rights. However, Kennedy voted against the 1957 Civil Rights Act while he was a senator, as did Democrat Sen. Al Gore Sr. And after he became President, Kennedy was opposed to the 1963 March on Washington by Dr. King that was organized by A. Phillip Randolph, who was a black Republican. President Kennedy, through his brother Atty. Gen. Robert Kennedy, had Dr. King wiretapped and investigated by the FBI on suspicion of being a Communist in order to undermine Dr. King.

In March of 1968, while referring to Dr. King’s leaving Memphis, Tenn., after riots broke out where a teenager was killed, Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd (W.Va.), a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, called Dr. King a “trouble-maker” who starts trouble, but runs like a coward after trouble is ignited. A few weeks later, Dr. King returned to Memphis and was assassinated on April 4, 1968.

Given the circumstances of that era, it is understandable why Dr. King was a Republican. It was the Republicans who fought to free blacks from slavery and amended the Constitution to grant blacks freedom (13th Amendment), citizenship (14th Amendment) and the right to vote (15th Amendment). Republicans passed the civil rights laws of the 1860s, including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Reconstruction Act of 1867 that was designed to establish a new government system in the Democrat-controlled South, one that was fair to blacks. Republicans also started the NAACP and affirmative action with Republican President Richard Nixon’s 1969 Philadelphia Plan (crafted by black Republican Art Fletcher) that set the nation’s fist goals and timetables. Although affirmative action now has been turned by the Democrats into an unfair quota system, affirmative action was begun by Nixon to counter the harm caused to blacks when Democrat President Woodrow Wilson in 1912 kicked all of the blacks out of federal government jobs.

Few black Americans know that it was Republicans who founded the Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Unknown also is the fact that Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen from Illinois was key to the passage of civil rights legislation in 1957, 1960, 1964 and 1965. Not mentioned in recent media stories about extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is the fact that Dirksen wrote the language for the bill. Dirksen also crafted the language for the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited discrimination in housing. President Lyndon Johnson could not have achieved passage of civil rights legislation without the support of Republicans.

Critics of Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who ran for President against Johnson in 1964, ignore the fact that Goldwater wanted to force the Democrats in the South to stop passing discriminatory laws and thus end the need to continuously enact federal civil rights legislation.

Those who wrongly criticize Goldwater also ignore the fact that Johnson, in his 4,500 State of the Union Address delivered on Jan. 4, 1965, mentioned scores of topics for federal action, but only 35 words were devoted to civil rights. He did not mention one word about voting rights. Then in 1967, showing his anger with Dr. King’s protest against the Vietnam War, Johnson referred to Dr. King as “that N***** preacher.”

Contrary to the false assertions by Democrats, the racist “Dixiecrats” did not all migrate to the Republican Party. “Dixiecrats” declared that they would rather vote for a “yellow dog” than vote for a Republican because the Republican Party was know as the party for blacks. Today, some of those “Dixiecrats” continue their political careers as Democrats, including Robert Byrd, who is well known for having been a “Keagle” in the Ku Klux Klan.

Another former “Dixiecrat” is former Democrat Sen. Ernest Hollings, who put up the Confederate flag over the state Capitol when he was the governor of South Carolina. There was no public outcry when Democrat Sen. Christopher Dodd praised Byrd as someone who would have been “a great senator for any moment,” including the Civil War. Yet Democrats denounced then-Senate GOP leader Trent Lott for his remarks about Sen. Strom Thurmond (R.-S.C.). Thurmond was never in the Ku Klux Klan and defended blacks against lynching and the discriminatory poll taxes imposed on blacks by Democrats. If Byrd and Thurmond were alive during the Civil War, and Byrd had his way, Thurmond would have been lynched.

The 30-year odyssey of the South switching to the Republican Party began in the 1970s with President Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” which was an effort on the part of Nixon to get Christians in the South to stop voting for Democrats who did not share their values and were still discriminating against their fellow Christians who happened to be black. Georgia did not switch until 2002, and some Southern states, including Louisiana, are still controlled by Democrats.

After wrongly convincing black Americans that a minimum wage increase was a good thing, the Democrats on August 3 kept their promise and killed the minimum wage bill passed by House Republicans on July 29. The blockage of the minimum wage bill was the second time in as many years that Democrats stuck a legislative finger in the eye of black Americans. Senate Democrats on April 1, 2004, blocked passage of a bill to renew the 1996 welfare reform law that was pushed by Republicans and vetoed twice by President Clinton before he finally signed it. Since the welfare reform law expired in September 2002, Congress had passed six extensions, and the latest expired on June 30, 2004. Opposed by the Democrats are school choice opportunity scholarships that would help black children get out of failing schools and Social Security reform, even though blacks on average lose ,000 in the current system because of a shorter life expectancy than whites (72.2 years for blacks vs. 77.5 years for whites).

Democrats have been running our inner-cities for the past 30 to 40 years, and blacks are still complaining about the same problems. More than trillion dollars have been spent on poverty programs since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with little, if any, impact on poverty. Diabolically, every election cycle, Democrats blame Republicans for the deplorable conditions in the inner-cities, then incite blacks to cast a protest vote against Republicans.

In order to break the Democrats’ stranglehold on the black vote and free black Americans from the Democrat Party’s economic plantation, we must shed the light of truth on the Democrats. We must demonstrate that the Democrat Party policies of socialism and dependency on government handouts offer the pathway to poverty, while Republican Party principles of hard work, personal responsibility, getting a good education and ownership of homes and small businesses offer the pathway to prosperity.

Written by: Frances Rice, chairman of the National Black Republican Association (NBRA).

Democratic Party News – The News of the Democratic Party.

The U.S. Forest Service Friday released the results of new aerial mapping showing the mountain pine bark beetle epidemic raging since the mid 1990s has now consumed more than 4 million acres of pine trees in Colorado and southern Wyoming.

In Colorado alone, more than 400,000 acres of trees were killed last year, mostly in the Arapaho, White River, Roosevelt, Medicine Bow and Routt national forests.

In Boulder County – scene of the most devastating wildfire in state history last summer – USFS officials reported an additional 36,000 acres of mostly ponderosa pines were killed by the beetles in 2010 compared to 1,600 acres in 2009.

In Wyoming, forest officials say another 314,000 acres of trees were killed last year, bringing the total to 3.1 million acres since 1996, and the epidemic is also rapidly spreading into Black Hills of South Dakota.

Scientists say the beetles are a natural thinning mechanism for uniformly aging forests but that fire is the next step in the regeneration process. Some experts say beetle-killed forests are not necessarily that much more susceptible to wildfire, but firefighters say fires burn hotter and are less predictable in areas of mass beetle-kill devastation.

Most everyone agrees that this epidemic has been exacerbated by warmer temperatures that allow beetle larvae to thrive, and that the landscape of the West is being dramatically altered as a result. Former vice president Al Gore will keynote a forum next month in Aspen on how global climate change is impacting the national forests of the American West.

Colorado Independent

Updated Wednesday January 19, 2011 @ 11:10pm

The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted 245 to 189 Wednesday to repeal the Affordable Care Act of 2010 passed by the last Congress and signed into law by President Obama less than one year ago. Three blue dog Democrats joined the 242 Republicans in voting to repeal health care reform — Rep. Boren (Oklahoma), Rep. McIntyre (North Carolina) and Rep. Ross (Arkansas).

Before the final vote, Rep. Rob Andrews (D-New Jersey) proposed that the bill be amended to not go into effect until a majority of Congress gave up their taxpayer paid health insurance (0 a month of which is paid by American taxpayers). Eight Republicans have already done this, but the other 234 Republicans have decided to keep their taxpayer paid health insurance.

Original Post Tuesday January 18, 2011 @ 9:59am

A government study released today shows that up to 50 percent of Americans under age 65 have some type of pre-existing health condition. The study predicts that 30 percent of currently healthy Americans will likely develop a pre-existing condition over the next eight years.

Under the Affordable Care Act of 2010 — the president’s signature health care reform legislation — policies set to be in place by 2014, these 129 million Americans can receive health coverage despite their previous conditions; if the new law is repealed, millions could risk losing health care or being forced to pay more.

cagle.com

Today, the Republican controlled U.S. House of Representatives plans to debate a bill titled, “Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act,” to repeal the Affordable Care legislation entirely.

The AP today delivered an awkward fact-check that effectively dismantles the GOP’s central argument against the the Affordable Care legislation kills jobs.

The Republican repeal bill, if passed by the Sentate and signed by Pres. Obama, would add roughly 0 billion to the deficit by 2021 and leave about 54 million nonelderly Americans uninsured by 2019, according to CBO projections.

Here are some of the private health insurance industry reforms mandated in the legislation that Republicans want to repeal:

• Health Insurers cannot deny children under age 19 health insurance because of pre-existing conditions. A ban on the discrimination in adults will take effect in 2014.
• Small businesses with fewer than 50 employees will get tax credits covering up to 50% of employee premiums for 2009 and 2010.
• Seniors will get a rebate to fill the so-called “donut hole” in Medicare drug coverage, which severely limits prescription medication coverage expenditures over ,700. As of next year, 50 percent of the donut hole will be filled.
• The cut-off age for young adults to continue to be covered by their parents’ health insurance rises to the age 27.
• Lifetime caps on the amount of insurance an individual can have will be banned. Annual caps will be limited, and banned in 2014.
• Adults with pre-existing conditions may buy into a temporary national high-risk pool until the exchanges come online. While these will not be cheap, they’re still better than total exclusion and get some benefit from a wider pool of insured adults. Health insurance exchanges will eliminate the program in 2014.
• Free preventative care – New plans must cover checkups and other preventative care without co-pays. All plans will be affected by 2018.
• No more rescission. Effective immediately, insurance companies can no longer cut someone when he or she gets sick.
• Authorizes early funding of community health centers in all 50 states (Bernie Sanders’ amendment). Community health centers provide primary, dental and vision services to people in the community, based on a sliding scale for payment according to ability to pay.
• Insurers must now reveal how much money is spent on overhead – All insurers must post their balance sheets on the Internet and fully disclose administrative costs, executive compensation packages, and benefit payments.
• Any new plan must now implement an appeals process for coverage determinations and claims.
• This tax will impose a ten percent tax on indoor tanning services. This tax, which replaced the proposed tax on cosmetic surgery, would be effective for services on or after July 1, 2010.
• New screening procedures will be implemented to help eliminate health insurance fraud and waste.
• Medicare payment protections will be extended to small rural hospitals and other health care facilities that have a small number of Medicare patients.
• Non-profit Blue Cross organizations will be required to maintain a medical loss ratio — money spent on procedures over money incoming — of 85 percent or higher to take advantage of IRS tax benefits.
• Chain restaurants will be required to provide a “nutrient content disclosure statement” alongside their items. Expect to see calories listed both on in-store and drive-through menus of fast-food restaurants sometime soon.
• The bill establishes a temporary program for companies that provide early retiree health benefits for those ages 55-64 in order to help reduce the often-expensive cost of that coverage.
• The Secretary of Health and Human Services will set up a new Web site to make it easy for Americans in any state to seek out affordable health insurance options The site will also include helpful information for small businesses.
• A two-year temporary credit (up to a maximum of billion) is in the bill to encourage investment in new therapies for the prevention and treatment of diseases.

Only one in four Americans said they support full repeal of the reforms, according to a newly-released Associated Press-GfK poll, and 30 percent strongly opposed the law, the lowest figure since September 2009. The drop is particularly notable among Republicans. Forty-nine percent said they’re against the law, down considerably from 61 percent after the elections.

Democratic Blog of Collin County – News

According to the Stamford Times, Rolf Maurer of the Connecticut Green Party failed to get enough signatures to appear as a balloted candidate for the Feb 22 special election to fill a vacant seat on the Connecticut State Senate. He will instead be running as a write in candidate:
Maurer, who ran for Stamford mayor [...]
Green Party Watch