BREAKING: White House on Lockdown after Occupiers Chuck Smoke Bombs over Fence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iit8vmloKFM&feature=player_embedded

(Reuters) – All New Jersey income tax brackets should be cut 10 percent, Governor Chris Christie proposed on Tuesday, saying the state was on the comeback trail due to harsh budget measures taken last year.

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Workers at weight-loss surgery centers affiliated with the 1-800-GET-THIN ad campaign persuaded patients to have medically unnecessary surgeries and billed insurance companies for procedures that were never performed, a new lawsuit alleges.

Two women who formerly worked at surgery centers affiliated with the Lap-Band ad campaign claimed that surgery center executives covered up mistakes that contributed to the Sept. 8 death of Paula Rojeski, a Lap-Band patient from Orange County.

The new lawsuit seeks damages from eight people, including brothers Michael and Julian Omidi, who the lawsuit says run the weight-loss business from offices in Beverly Hills. The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, also seeks damages from 13 companies it says are controlled by the Omidis.

The Omidis did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

At least five patients have died since 2009 following Lap-Band procedures at clinics in Beverly Hills and West Hills that are affiliated with the 1-800-GET-THIN marketing campaign, according to autopsy reports, lawsuits and other public records.

Manufactured by Irvine-based Allergan Inc., the Lap-Band is a ring that is surgically implanted around the stomach to discourage overeating. The 1-800-GET-THIN marketing company said in a court filing last year that it scheduled more than 10,000 Lap-Band surgeries in its first 15 months.

The lawsuit accuses the Omidis, their mother Cindy, three of their attorneys and two employees of violating the Racketeer Influenced or Corrupt Organizations Act, which Congress passed in 1970 as a tool against organized crime.

The lawsuit by former surgery center workers Dyanne Deuel and Karla Osorio accuses the defendants of running a “criminal enterprise” centered around a scheme to drive up revenues from the Lap-Band surgeries by billing insurers for procedures that were never performed and encouraging patients to have procedures they did not need.

Deuel and Osorio also accused the defendants of improperly sterilizing and reusing surgical instruments in an effort to reduce costs.

“What the slick advertising campaign doesn’t disclose are the horrific and gruesome conditions that our clients allege exist at these surgery centers and the fact that patient care is sacrificed for profit,” said Alexander Robertson, the Westlake Village attorney who filed the lawsuit on behalf of Deuel and Osorio.

Source

I previously summarized research that two of my graduate students, James Felkerson and Nicola Matthews, are conducting on the Fed’s bail-out. Using data that the Fed was forced to release, they demonstrated that the cumulative total lent and spent on assets by the Fed was over $29 trillion.

By: Reuters

Rating agency Fitch said on Tuesday that Greece would default on its debt, although it said that such a default was likely to take place in an orderly manner.

“It is going to happen. Greece is insolvent so it will default,” Edward Parker, Managing Director for Fitch’s Sovereign and Supranational Group in Europe, the Middle East and Africa told Reuters on the sidelines of a conference in the Swedish capital. “So in that sense it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”

The Fitch comments come after Moritz Kraemer, head of Standard & Poor’s rating agency’s European sovereign ratings unit, said on Monday Greece would default shortly on its debt obligations.

Parker said that Fitch believed that even a voluntary agreement by private investors to take a haircut on Greek debt would constitute a default.

Read the rest here.

The public’s faith in the Fed’s ability to protect the economy from economic problems has been shaken by the Fed’s failures before and during the Great Recession. The recent release of the transcripts from 2006 monetary policy meetings where Federal Reserve policymakers discuss and ridicule the suggestion that the economy is threatened by a dangerous housing bubble has undermined its reputation even further.

How did the Fed get things so wrong? How can policy be improved?

Read the rest here.

By Jack Farchy in London

Central banks increased the amount of gold they lent for the first time in a decade in 2011, as they used their bullion reserves to help commercial banks raise US dollars.

Although central banks hold one-sixth of all the gold ever mined in their reserves, their activities in the bullion market are opaque, with not a single institution revealing its day-to-day operations. In addition to holding gold for their reserves, some central banks also trade the metal, lending it on the open market in order to obtain a yield.

Thomson Reuters GFMS, the precious metal consultancy that publishes benchmark statistics on the gold market, on Tuesday said that the quantity of gold lent by central banks had risen last year for the first time since 2000.

Read the rest here.

There are rumors that at this point the Captain had already escaped the ship, climbed over the rocks, and hailed a taxi to get away from the scene.

by Frances Rice

08/16/2006

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 Nigger 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.

Today, Democrats, in pursuit of their socialist agenda, are fighting to keep blacks poor, angry and voting for Democrats. Examples of how egregiously Democrats act to keep blacks in poverty are numerous.

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 $10,000 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 $7 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.

Something to think about as we honor MLK today.

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As we remember the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., his niece, Dr. Alveda King, tells Peter Johnson, Jr. that she believes her uncle would have been considered a pro-life social conservative if he alive today.

Earlier on Fox and Friends, King discussed her uncle’s beliefs and said that since MLK was someone who gave his life to all humanity, “he would really support the best quality of life, and that is conception until natural death.”

“How can the dream survive if we murder our children?” Her uncle believed that man cannot win if he’s willing to sacrifice the futures of his children for immediate personal comfort and safety. She explained how this lead her to believe that he felt that a woman has a right to choose what she does with her body, but the baby is not her body.

King concluded the interview saying, “I have a dream it’s in my genes and the dream comes from the bible, from God, and the principles that are there.”

Watch the video here.

One can spend hours reading these complaints…Can they really be this bad?

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I sailed on the ship Carnival Elation from New Orleans to Mexico on Dec. 31, 2011. My experience onboard was terrible from cold food issues (every meal) to ridiculous and unprofessional child care and dangerous safety issues with child care provided. It caused my child in one incident to have to seek medical attention. After the Carnival website refused my login information to write a review, I called and waited on hold forever.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Published: January 14, 2012

QUELLE horreur! One of the uglier revelations about President Obama emerging from the Republican primaries is that he is trying to turn the United States into Europe.

“He wants us to turn into a European-style welfare state,” warned Mitt Romney. Countless versions of that horrific vision creep into Romney’s speeches, suggesting that it would “poison the very spirit of America.”

Rick Santorum agrees, fretting that Obama is “trying to impose some sort of European socialism on the United States.”

Who knew? Our president is plotting to turn us into Europeans. Imagine:

It’s a languid morning in Peoria, as a husband and wife are having breakfast. “You’re sure you don’t want eggs and bacon?” the wife asks. “Oh, no, I prefer these croissants,” the husband replies. “They have a lovely je ne sais quoi.”

He dips the croissant into his café au-lait and chews it with zest. “What do you want to do this evening?” he asks. “Now that we’re only working 35 hours a week, we have so much more time. You want to go to the new Bond film?”

“I’d rather go to a subtitled art film,” she suggests. “Or watch a pretentious intellectual television show.”

“I hear Kim Kardashian is launching a reality TV show where she discusses philosophy and global politics with Bernard-Henri Lévy,” he muses. “Oh, chérie, that reminds me, let’s take advantage of the new pétanque channel and host a super-boules party.”

“Parfait! And we must work out our vacation, now that we can take all of August off. Instead of a weekend watching ultimate fighting in Vegas, let’s go on a monthlong wine country tour.”

“How romantic!” he exclaims. “I used to worry about getting sick on the road. But now that we have universal health care, no problem!”

Look out: another term of Obama, and we’ll all greet each other with double pecks on the cheek.

Yet there is something serious going on. The Republican candidates unleash these attacks on Obama because so many Americans have in mind a caricature of Europe as an effete, failed socialist system. As Romney puts it: “Europe isn’t working in Europe. It’s not going to work here.”

(Monsieur Romney is getting his comeuppance. Newt Gingrich has released an attack ad, called “The French Connection,” showing clips of Romney speaking the language of Paris. The scandalized narrator warns: “Just like John Kerry, he speaks French!”)

But the basic notion of Europe as a failure is a dangerous misconception. The reality is far more complicated.

Read the rest here.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Jon Huntsmanwill withdraw Monday from the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

Campaign officials tell The Associated Press Huntsman will endorse Mitt Romney at an event in South Carolina on Monday morning.

The former Utah governor placed third in last week’s New Hampshire primary despite devoting much of his campaign resources to the state. He had already acknowledged that expectations for him in South Carolina’s primary this week will be “very low.”

Read the rest here.

A video filmed one of the passengers on the capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia captures the terrifying moments while rescuers sought to bring them to safety.

By The Week’s Editorial Staff | The Week – Fri, Jan 13, 2012

Investigators now believe the ship was dangerously close to the shore and hit a rock that the captain claims was unmarked.

The captain of the ship, Francesco Schettino, is now in custody, facing possible charges with manslaughter and abandoning his ship.

Schettino was detained by authorities and questioned along with the ship’s first bridge officer, the Italian news agency ANSA reported. ANSA said the captain could face criminal charges.

The agency reported that Schettino could be charged with abandoning ship since he reportedly left the stricken vessel about 12:30 a.m., while many passengers didn’t get safely off the ship until 6 a.m.

There are also reports in the Italian press that Schettino took the Costa Concordia close to the harbor of Giglio island many times in the past so his passengers could take photographs.

The captain’s lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, said Schettino was taken to the Grosseto jail, but argued that the captain was a hero.

“I would like to say that hundreds of people owe their life to the captain of the Costa Concordia’s skill in an emergency,” the lawyer said. “You have to be very good to bring a ship like this which is 117,000 tons and 300 meters long, which is sinking after a collision, close to land to allow for easy rescue so as to save so many people. I think the maneuver was brilliant from a nautical point of view.”

Harrowing tales of chaos ensued for several hours as the crew and passengers tried to scramble to safety.

Read the rest here.

By JOHN MERLINE, INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY Posted 01/12/2012 04:29 PM ET

 View Enlarged Image

Initial jobless claims unexpectedly jumped by 24,000 last week to 399,000 as more workers lost their jobs, the Labor Department said Thursday. At the same time, the economy continues to lose workers.

In the 30 months since the recession officially ended, nearly 1 million people have dropped out of the labor force — they aren’t working, and they aren’t looking — according to data from Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the past two months, the labor force shrank by 170,000.

This is virtually unprecedented in past economic recoveries, at least since the BLS has kept detailed records. In the past nine recoveries, the labor force had climbed an average 3.5 million by this point, according to an IBD analysis of the BLS data.

“Given weak job prospects, many would-be workers dropped out of (or never entered) the labor force,” noted Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute in her analysis of the BLS jobs report issued last Friday. “That reduces the measured unemployment rate but does not represent real improvement.”

According to the BLS, the “labor force participation rate” — the ratio of the number of people either working or looking for work compared with the entire working-age population — is now 64%, down from 65.7% when the recession ended in June 2009. That’s the lowest level since women began entering the workforce in far greater numbers several decades ago.

If you adjust for this drop, the unemployment rate would be close to 11%, instead of the official 8.5%.

Read the rest here.

John Crudele

The Rolling Stones said it best: “You can’t always get what you want.”

But it seems New York state never gets what it wants. That’s especially true when it comes to increasing tax revenue.

Case in point: cigarette taxes.

The state’s tax collectors were recently calling around to convenience-store owners, wondering what was up. The $130 million in extra tax that Albany was expecting from a change in the law about cigarette sales on Indian reservations wasn’t happening.

A memo sent to members of the New York Association of Convenience Stores from the group’s president, Jim Calvin — a copy of which I have on my desk — said, “I got a call from Gov. Cuomo’s budget office yesterday. In examining cigarette tax receipts so far this fiscal year (April 1 to March 31) it looks like they will fall considerably short of their projection in new revenues. . . .”

The state had hoped to get the extra dough by enforcing a new law that made it illegal for licensed cigarette wholesalers in the state to sell untaxed name-brand cigarettes like Newport and Marlboro to Indian reservations.

The reservation store would sell the cigarettes to non-Indian customers who were trying to avoid the hefty taxes imposed by the state. The state and legitimate sellers of cigarettes were both hurt.

The sale of nontaxed smokes by stores on Indian reservations became an issue two years ago when the state cigarette tax was raised significantly and many smokers took more of their business to reservations — or to Internet sellers — whose packs aren’t taxed. Some folks even bought lower-taxed cigs smuggled in from out of state.

Some wholesalers say sales are down between 20 percent and 30 percent among legitimate cigarette sellers.

State enforcement of the tax laws, meanwhile, has been lax, to say the least. New York, I’m told, has reduced the force working on illegal cigarettes by 80 percent since the tax hike went into effect.

But that’s another story.

So how much extra did the state collect in tax with the law change?

The state Department of Taxation did not return a call for comment.

But according to Calvin’s memo, “Cuomo’s budget office” was saying that cigarette tax revenues were flat this past October and November with the year before.

That seems to mean that Albany is $130 million short on its $130 million projection.