Citizen KOCH ...

Uninsured Veterans qualify for Medicaid ...

""

Yes, Alex Jones is a Humongous Jerk ...

Exclusive: V.A. Scandal Hits New Hospital

Source: Daily Beast

Veterans with serious heart conditions, gangrene, and even brain tumors waited months for care at the Albuquerque V.A. hospital, a whistleblowing doctor tells The Daily Beast.
Add Albuquerque, New Mexico to the growing list of VA hospitals accused of keeping secret waiting lists to hide delays for veterans seeking medical care. And it may already be too late to get to the truth and find out what harm, if any, was done to veterans there—VA officials are already destroying records to cover their tracks, a whistleblower inside the hospital tells The Daily Beast.

Last month, word broke that the Department of Veterans’ Affairs hospital in Phoenix kept a secret waiting list that allegedly led to dozens of preventable deaths. The VA’s inspector general was brought in to investigate the charges and hasn’t yet found any deaths in Phoenix linked to wait times, but his investigation is ongoing. Since then five other facilities have come under fire, leading to calls for VA Secretary Eric Shinseki to step down. And now there’s Albuquerque. The evidence for this new secret list may be hard to track down, however.

“The ‘secret wait list’ for patient appointments is being either moved or was destroyed after what happened in Phoenix,” according to a doctor who works at the Albuquerque VA and spoke exclusively with The Daily Beast. “Right now,” the doctor said, “there is an eight-month waiting list for patients to get ultrasounds of their hearts. Some patients have died before they got their studies. It is unknown why they died, some for cardiac reasons some for other reasons.”

There’s no proof yet that veterans died while waiting for treatment, like what allegedly happened in Phoenix. But the doctor says it’s quite possible that some veterans would still be alive if they hadn’t been pushed through a record-keeping trap door that buried their requests for medical care.

Read more: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/18/exclusive-v-a-scandal-hits-new-hospital.html

Former GOP Senator Who First Hired McConnell Slams Him for Opposing Obamacare

By mounting a crusade to repeal Obamacare, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell has betrayed the residents of Kentucky—so says the former Republican senator from the Bluegrass State who gave McConnell his first job in politics.

In 1968, the year after McConnell graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Law, Marlow Cook, a moderate Republican running for an open US Senate seat in Kentucky, hired McConnell as his campaign's state youth chairman. McConnell, who had previously served two internships in Washington for Kentucky politicians, "fit in very well" with the campaign, Cook recalls, because he had been state president of the Young Ripon Society, an organization of moderate GOPers. And after Cook won the Senate seat, he offered McConnell a job as a legislative aide. McConnell moved to Washington with Cook, and as a top staffer in Cook's office he helped the senator with one of Cook's chief priorities: passing the Equal Rights Amendment. Cook was the lead Republican in the upper chamber pushing the ERA, a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing equal rights for women. McConnell, Cook recounts, "worked and worked hard" to gain support for the measure and counter opposition—both inside and outside the Senate. "Phyllis Schlafly was one of the people we had to contend with, and he did," Cook notes, referring to the prominent conservative who led the anti-ERA effort. (In those days, McConnell also was skeptical about the Vietnam War and inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement.)

The ERA passed the Senate and House in 1972, but by then McConnell had left Cook's office and headed back to Kentucky. The amendment was subsequently not ratified by enough state legislatures to be added to the Constitution.

Having decades ago embraced the young McConnell partly because he was a fellow moderate Republican, Cook is mystified by his former staffer's journey to the right. "I am absolutely amazed he became a conservative," Cook, now 87 years old, says. And he is aghast that McConnell is a fierce advocate of killing President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act. "If he had any knowledge of the lack of health and medical facilities in the hills of Kentucky," Cook says, "he'd know it's a problem we need to solve. For Mitch McConnell to decide the new health program is not good for Kentucky—it tells me he's not looking out for his own constituency." Cook notes that the Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, has been "tremendously successful" in signing up thousands of Kentucky citizens for health insurance under Obamacare.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/05/former-gop-senator-marlow-cook-hired-mcconnell-opposing-obamacare

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Why does Mitch do what he does in politics ?.. its called money, big huge piles of money ..

Republican ‘establishment’ sinks cash into ads pushing back at Tea Party

BOISE, Idaho (Reuters) – On a recent Saturday, foot soldiers in the Republican Party’s civil war fanned out across a neighborhood of winding streets and manicured lawns to beat back the Tea Party.

They did not meet much resistance. Over the course of two hours, dozens of residents said they planned to vote in the May 20 primary election for Idaho Representative Mike Simpson, a veteran lawmaker with a reputation for pragmatism. None said they would back his Tea Party challenger Bryan Smith.

As he heads for a likely victory on Tuesday, Simpson has plenty of help. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and the National Rifle Association have joined with groups representing hospitals, dentists and home sellers to try to return him to Congress for an eighth term.


The push is part of a wider drive by so-called establishment Republicans to back mainstream candidates and prevent Tea Party figures like Smith from winning primaries ahead of the November 4 midterm elections.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/05/18/republican-establishment-sinks-cash-into-ads-pushing-back-at-tea-party/

Feinstein: House Benghazi committee 'ridiculous'

Sen. Dianne Feinstein says the new House Select Committee on Benghazi led by Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) is “ridiculous,” considering that her Senate Intelligence Committee has already investigated the 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in Libya.

“t’s ridiculous,” the Democratic Intelligence Committee chairwoman said Sunday on "State of the Union" on CNN. “It’s a hunting mission for a lynch mob actually, I think that’s what’s going on. There have been four major reports, we spent a year and a half on a report. We held hearings, thousands of pages were reviewed, the staff spent hours and weeks on it.”

The California senator also told Candy Crowley she’s confident all the necessary questions have been answered on the White House’s “talking points” in the days after the attack that killed four Americans.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/politico-live/2014/05/feinstein-house-benghazi-committee-ridiculous-188727.html

Issa Pushes Forward With His Own Benghazi Investigation

""

Just days after the House voted to impanel a select committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa signaled that he will continue his own separate investigation into the attacks.

The California Republican on Thursday issued another subpoena to Secretary of State John Kerry, calling on the former senator—who was serving in the Senate at the time of the attack—to appear before the Oversight Committee on May 29. Earlier this month, the same day that House Speaker John Boehner announced his intention to form a select committee on the matter, Issa issued a subpoena requiring Kerry to appear before the committee on May 21, but changed the date due to a conflict with Kerry's scheduled trip to Mexico that week.

"The State Department had discussed May 29 as a possible alternative date and that's when Secretary Kerry will be obligated to appear—further accommodation will not be possible," Issa said in a statement. "Absent an assertion of executive privilege, the State Department has a legal obligation to fully and completely comply."

Boehner said at the time that he supports Issa's subpoena, and spokesman Michael Steel confirmed Thursday that that remains the case.

http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/despite-select-committee-issa-pushes-forward-with-his-own-benghazi-investigation-20140515

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This guy is BENGHAZI ...

Pesticides, Not Mites, Cause Honeybee Colony Collapse

Researchers racing to find the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), which has been killing off honeybees in much of the U.S. and Europe, are zeroing in on the culprit. And — surprise — mites are apparently no longer suspects. But cold winters may be accomplices to the crime.

Studying colonies of honeybees (Apis mellifera L.) at three locations in central Massachusetts during the 2012-13 winter, researchers found that two widely-used pesticides were directly responsible for the hive abandonment and death of several colonies. Comparing their results to previous research, the scientists noted that colder winters may aggravate the negative effects of the pesticides.


Pesticide Spread

For the study, appearing today in the Bulletin of Insectology, researchers monitored 18 bee colonies — six in each location — from October 2012 through April 2013. A third of the colonies were exposed to low doses of the pesticide imidacloprid, while another third were exposed to the pesticide clothianidin. Both pesticides belong to the neonicotinoid class and are commonly used in agriculture. The remainder of the colonies were left untreated.

The numbers of bees declined in all 18 colonies with the onset of winter weather, which is the usual seasonal pattern.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2014/05/09/pesticides-not-mites-cause-honeybee-colony-collapse/#.U3G3rEZdWSp

Beyond Honeybees: Now Wild Bees and Butterflies May Be in Trouble

By now you probably know about the plight of America’s honeybees: the collapsed colonies and dying hives, threatening pollination services to crops and the future of a much-beloved insect.

But it’s not just honeybees that are in trouble. Many wild pollinators—thousands of species of bees and butterflies and moths—are also threatened. Their decline would affect not only our food supply, but our landscapes, too. Most honeybees live in commercially managed agricultural colonies; wild pollinators are caretakers of our everyday surroundings.

“Almost 90 percent of the world’s flowering species require insects or other animals for pollination,” said ecologist Laura Burkle of Montana State University. “That’s a lot of plants that need these adorable creatures for reproduction. And if we don’t have those plants, we have a pretty impoverished world.”

Compared to honeybees, wild pollinators are not well studied, and their condition has received relatively little public attention. Most people don’t realize that there are thousands of bee species in the United States. Even many butterflies are overlooked, with the plight of just a few species, particularly monarchs, widely recognized.

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/wild-bee-and-butterfly-declines/?mbid=social_twitter