Shoes to fill



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Liberals Push to Regulate and Silence the Conservative Movement

Joe Otto

The day has finally come… Ann M. Ravel, a Democrat and Vice Chair at the Federal Election Commission, announced her plans to begin regulating conservative websites and news sources. “A reexamination of the commission’s approach to the internet and other emerging technologies is long over due,” she said.

Here at Conservative Daily, we reach 30-50 THOUSAND people every day just by email alone. Now, I know that we are not your only source for news, but I’ve looked over the proposals and this is a serious threat to the Conservative movement as a whole!

At the heart of this is the Democrats’ desire to dismantle Conservative online news sources and regulate them whenever they support/oppose political candidates. Under the proposed rule change, the FEC would treat political content, like videos, the same as paid political television ads.

Believe it or not, this is the natural evolution of the Democrat’s War on Free Speech. Harry Reid tried to push through a Constitutional amendment to change the First Amendment and restrict political speech, but that didn’t work. So now, the FEC is doing his bidding!

This all stems from a 2006 FEC ruling on whether a free political video posted online should be regulated the same as paid political advertising. The FEC was split 3-3 on whether an Ohio anti-Obama political campaign violated campaign finance rules when it failed to disclose its finances.

Even though the First Amendment protects the rights of individuals and organizations to engage in political speech, Liberals in the FEC want to restrict and tax anytime someone uses the internet to promote the Conservative agenda!  This is absolutely criminal!

It’s not hard to figure out the natural progression of this. If a free YouTube video can be regulated the same as paid political advertising, then no form of political speech is safe!

These types of regulations don’t make the country safer… they are designed to make it as hard as possible to participate in the political process.

If Liberals in the FEC get their way, we will be out of business… All conservative online news sources will be regulated out of existence!

The only way that these Liberals can win is if they silence their opposition. This is shameful and this scheme must be stopped!

This is straight out of George Orwell’s 1984… The first step towards controlling a population is controlling the news sources they have access to.

Democrats know they can’t win the debate; they know that America cannot physically afford to implement their social engineering programs. All the polling and evidence suggests that the Democrat Party is going to get shellacked in a week and a half when Americans go to the polls.

But instead of changing their platform and adjusting to be more competitive, the Left just wants to control the debate and regulate what information you have access to on a daily basis!

This is one of the greatest threats to the republic that has emerged in my lifetime. If we don’t put a stop to this now, the entire Conservative movement could be dismantled in a matter of weeks.

No more Mark Levin or other Conservative radio shows… no more Fox News commentary… and no more Conservative Daily advocacy alerts to your inbox… This is important! We can put a stop to this right now, but you need to raise your voice and demand it.

But why stop there? What’s to say that the FEC won’t also regulate individual speech?

What’s to say you won’t be silenced because of my political beliefs or be taxed as if your political speech is a paid endorsement?

Without a serious public outcry, Obama’s lackeys in the FEC will roll out these crippling regulations. You MUST raise your voice and force Congress to intervene and stop it!  Only you can protect Conservative media and DEMAND that Congress stop the FEC from introducing burdensome regulations!

Fighting for our lives

SOURCE

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Promised savings from grouped medical practice look increasingly unlikely to occur



For several years, the Obama administration has been touting accountable care organizations (ACOs) as a big part of its proposed solution to rising healthcare costs, particularly in Medicare. Early results suggest yet another disconnect between the promise and the reality.

The basic concept of an ACO is fairly simple: A group of doctors and medical facilities agree to coordinate their efforts in an attempt to improve care while cutting costs, and they share in any savings if costs decline or grow less than expected.

In theory there's nothing wrong with this, but in today's bureaucratic, government-directed health system, as simple an idea as "doctors should work together" gets turned into a system rife with unintended consequences and poor outcomes.

As set up under Obamacare and implemented through Medicare, ACOs are in many ways indistinguishable from health maintenance organizations (HMOs). Doctors and facilities are given a limited amount of money to provide care to patients and are expected to manage treatment in order to come in under budget.

This model wasn’t very popular in the 1990s because it gave doctors and medical facilities a powerful incentive to withhold treatment or use lower-cost options than what the doctor believed was the most appropriate treatment.

Why the Obama administration and congressional Democrats jumped on the ACO bandwagon isn’t clear, but I do have two guesses.

First, it fits with their view that central planning is vital to any endeavor. Every time you hear politicians moan about “fragmented care,” what they mean is “bureaucrats aren't in charge.”

ACOs supposedly reduce this fragmentation by bringing all decision-making regarding a patient under one roof, carefully supervised by people who may not know the patient but do know what the proposed treatments for that person will do to the bottom line and their bonuses.

Second, because ACOs supposedly save money, it allowed the planners of Obamacare to spin their abacuses and proclaim the president’s health care overhaul would save billions of dollars over the long run.

Reality now intrudes. Recently released information from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services shows a wide range of results, with some ACOs showing savings of up to 7 percent while others had spending increase by 5.4 percent. Several of the ACOs that enrolled in Medicare’s Shared Savings Program have dropped out. It’s also important to note many of the ACOs enrolling in the program were among those most likely to perform best, because they had embraced the idea years ago and had experience operating under this model of care.

Another problem with the ACO concept is it is accelerating the trend of hospitals purchasing medical practices, driving up costs because insurers and government programs offer higher reimbursements for hospital-based care.

These outcomes don’t surprise most people who have closely followed ACOs. A November 2012 article in Health Affairs by researchers Lawton Burns and Mark Pauly, for example, observed, “accountable care organizations have limited and uncertain impact, especially on cost savings,” and they “provide little support” for the belief they will limit Medicare spending growth.

It may not be on the scale of “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan” or the pledge families would see their health premiums fall by $2,500 per year, but it’s starting to look like the cost savings from ACOs are just as illusionary as those other promises.

SOURCE

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Federal Prosecutors Break Rules, Wreck Lives, and Get Promoted

A group of Washington overlords—federal prosecutors—sometimes break rules and wreck people's lives. President Obama may soon appoint one of them to be America's next Attorney General.

The prosecutorial bullying is detailed in a new book by Sidney Powell, Licensed to Lie. She reports that the Department of Justice's (DOJ) narcissistic and dishonest prosecutors destroy people by doing things like deliberately withholding evidence.

Remember the Arthur Andersen accounting firm? It was killed off by ambitious prosecutors who claimed the company helped Enron commit accounting fraud and then shredded the evidence.

But instead of charging people who allegedly ordered evidence destroyed, the DOJ indicted the entire company. That destroyed the accounting firm. Publicly traded companies cannot do business with companies under criminal investigation, so Andersen lost most of its clients.

The prosecutor's purpose, says Powell, was to chill resistance from other companies that might dare fight the Feds. The message: cooperate, or we will destroy you! These pressure tactics were appropriate, said one prosecutor, because shredding documents "attacks the justice system itself by impeding investigators and regulators from getting at the truth."

But who actually hid the truth? The prosecutors, writes Powell. In fact, Andersen had saved most of its documents and gave them to the government. The prosecutors simply lied to the court about it.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Arthur Andersen's conviction. But by then, 80,000 employees had lost their jobs—80,000 people who'd done nothing wrong.

You'd think that this would teach federal prosecutors to obey the law. Paul Kamenar of the Washington Legal Foundation said, "this decision will send a strong message to the Justice Department to stop this kind of abusive prosecutorial misconduct."

So were the prosecutors fired or jailed? No. Many were promoted. Washington's overlords protect their own.

Next, some of the same prosecutors accused four Merrill Lynch executives of falsifying Enron's books. The government lawyers told the media that Enron "conspired with Wall Street bankers to carry out a sham transaction." The Merrill Lynch executives charged with fraud got three- to four-year jail sentences.

But Powell writes that the government "failed to allege anything that actually constituted a crime by the Merrill Lynch executives. Instead it cobbled together parts of different statutes to make up some kind of new crime that didn't even make sense."

Sure enough, an appeals court tossed most of the verdict, and the Merrill executives were released. But that was after they had spent a year in jail.

Did the prosecutors hang their heads in shame? No. Far from it. Some of them then went after Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. Stevens, the prosecutors claimed, took $250,000 in gifts from rich donors and never reported that.

But later it was revealed that the prosecutors withheld evidence that showed Stevens had not taken anything like $250,000. A judge threw out that conviction, too. But by then, Sen. Stevens had lost his Senate seat. His replacement, a Democrat, became the deciding vote for Obamacare.

So was the lead prosecutor, Matthew Friedrich, finally punished? Again, no. He took a higher-paying job at a private law firm. Leslie Caldwell, who helped destroy Arthur Anderson, got promoted to assistant attorney general at the Justice Department. Andrew Weissmann, who helped prosecute the Andersen and the Merrill Lynch employees, was made deputy director of the FBI.

Finally, prosecutor Kathryn Ruemmler, who helped manipulate the system to unfairly jail four Merrill Lynch employees, was promoted to deputy attorney general, then promoted again to White House counsel. Now Bloomberg reports that she's President Obama's first choice to replace Eric Holder!

If you find these charges as hard to believe as I did, you can read Powell's supporting documents at LicensedtoLie.com. We invited prosecutors Ruemmler, Friedrich, Caldwell and Weissmann to reply to the charges laid out in Powell's book and on my TV show, but they didn't respond.

Federal prosecutors always have a big advantage over anyone they attack. The U.S. government has endless time and money. Only multi-millionaires can afford to fight back. Most people accused, even those who are innocent, just settle with the prosecutors and get punished. Prosecutors abuse this awesome power and get promoted for it.

SOURCE

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Voter ID Laws Suppress White, Latino, and Black Voting About the Same Amount

Republicans Are Trying to Make Sure Minorities and Young People Don't Vote This November," reads a Mother Jones headline. How? MJ continues...."shorter voting hours, restrictions on voter registration drives, and the requirement that voters present a government ID or proof of citizenship to cast a ballot"

With regard to imposing voter ID requirements, a new study reports that the nefarious Republican plot is likely to fail if the goal is to suppress black and Hispanic votes relative to white votes. Researchers Rene Rocha from the University of Iowa and Tetsuya Matsubayashi from Osaka University in Japan have published an article, "The Politics of Race and Voter ID Laws in the States: The Return of Jim Crow?" in the current issue of the Political Research Quarterly.

They do find that states with relatively small minority group populations and dominated by Republican governors and legislatures have passed more voter ID requirements, both photo ID and non-photo ID, than states with larger minority group populations and/or dominated by Democrats. But what effect do such requirements have on voter turnout?

The study cited by the GAO that showed minority group vote suppression and most other prior research compared voting changes between states that had adopted voter ID requirements and those that had not. The researchers in the study Political Research Quarterly parse time series data noting changes in voting participation before and after voter ID requirements were adopted in individual states. Contrary to the earlier state-to-state comparisons, the new study using time-series data extending over the past 30 years finds:

Our primary explanatory variables, photo ID and nonphoto ID laws, have no statistically discernible relationship with the probability that whites, blacks, and Latinos voted in the general elections between 1980 and 2010 except that the nonphoto ID law has a positive and significant relationship with Latino turnout. In short, more stringent ID requirements for voting have no deterring effect on individual turnout across different racial and ethnic groups.

More HERE

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