The Brand New Heavies

Surrender

Obama's Defeats At The SCOTUS Level

A glimmer of sense regarding the bounds of the Constitution?

From National Review Online:

Obama Suffers 12th Unanimous Defeat at Supreme Court

President Obama’s team suffered their twelfth unanimous defeat at the Supreme Court in the legal challenge to the so-called recess appointments made when Congress was not actually in recess, a string of defeats that only represents “the tip of the iceberg,” according to Senator Mike Lee (R., Utah)....

More at the above link.

Barack Hussein Obama is not cornered yet. Not by a long shot. He's bound to become more frustrated and overreach even more.

Stay tuned, America. We're in for a bumpy ride.

CRUZ TO HOLDER: APPOINT SPECIAL PROSECUTOR OR FACE IMPEACHMENT

From Breitbart:

If Attorney General Eric Holder refuses to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the IRS scandal, he should be impeached, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said for the first time today. 

“If this resolution is not passed and Democrats in the Senate choose not to put this necessary pressure on the Department of Justice, I have one very clear request,” Cruz said. “If Attorney General Eric Holder continues to refuse to appoint a special prosecutor, he should be impeached.” 

Cruz asked for unanimous consent to call up and adopt a resolution “expressing the opinion of the Senate that the Attorney General should appoint a special prosecutor to investigate, and prosecute,  if the facts support, the IRS targeting of Americans and its potential cover up of those actions.” 

The lower chamber passed a similar resolution, sponsored by Rep. Jim
Jordan (R-OH) in early May.  The resolution passed 250-168—with 26 Democrats in favor. 

The IRS is under fire for allegedly targeting conservative groups who have been seeking a non-profit status. IRS commissioner John Koskinen was grilled by Republican members of the House over the claim from the IRS that requested e-mails of IRS personnel like Lois Lerner were lost after their computers crashed. 

More recently, internal e-mails from 2012 surfaced showing Lerner discussing with a colleague whether the tax agency should investigate an issue regarding Sen. Charles Grassley (R-TX).

This Week On The Gathering Storm

Listen to The Gathering Storm Radio Show, hosted by WC and Always On Watch.

The show broadcasts live for 30 minutes every Friday beginning at noon, Pacific Time.

The call-in number is 646-915-9870. Callers welcome!

Our scheduled guest this week is IQ al Rassooli.

Listen to the June 27, 2014 edition of The Gathering Storm Radio Show, live or later, by CLICKING HERE.

UPCOMING SHOWS:

Another Victory for Allah The Great and Powerful

This is what Muslims are good at.

From Pensacola Forum.

Failure to afford the sharia mandated jizya

NO tax, no protection.

Wife, Daughter

Raped Before your

 eyes.

Husband, KILLS HIMSELF

From AINA:

Dr. Sallama Al Khafaji, a member of the Iraq High Commission for Human Rights, told AINA that on Saturday, June 21 ISIS began demanding a poll tax (jizya) from Christians in Mosul (AINA 2014-06-21). In one instance, ISIS members entered the home of an Assyrian family in Mosul and demanded the poll tax (jizya). When the Assyrian family said they did not have the money, three ISIS members raped the mother and daughter in front of the husband and father. The husband and father was so traumatized that he committed suicide.

“The Christians have told me that they cannot pay this tax,” said Dr. Al-Khafaji, “and they say ‘what am I to do, shall I kill myself?’”

According to the Arabic language website Alghadeer, four Christian women were shot and killed by ISIS members because they were not wearing veils. AINA has not confirmed this and this website is known to be administered by Shiites.

So the hospital called and asked why I ate shrimp and lobster sauce which had so much sodium …

After all, they said, their business process logic alarms had gone off since I had eaten at El Frijoles earlier in the week, which meant I had eaten high sodium re-fried beans on the side EVEN THOUGH it was good I had declined the fried chimichanga for a whole grain burrito instead, and had chicken instead of pork … and my last purchase at Hannaford Bros supermarkets included Jalapeno and Cheddar chips,  which are high sodium, but it was good that I bought baked instead of fried. It was just a friendly call, because after 2 heart attacks and a >50% mortality after 5 years from the first type of infarct I had, I need to help them keep their costs in line.

After all, they said, they are not there to make a profit on sick people.

RIGHT?

Bloomberg:

You may soon get a call from your doctor if you’ve let your gym membership lapse, made a habit of picking up candy bars at the check-out counter or begin shopping at plus-sized stores.

That’s because some hospitals are starting to use detailed consumer data to create profiles on current and potential patients to identify those most likely to get sick, so the hospitals can intervene before they do.

Information compiled by data brokers from public records and credit card transactions can reveal where a person shops, the food they buy, and whether they smoke. The largest hospital chain in the Carolinas is plugging data for 2 million people into algorithms designed to identify high-risk patients, while Pennsylvania’s biggest system uses household and demographic data. Patients and their advocates, meanwhile, say they’re concerned that big data’s expansion into medical care will hurt the doctor-patient relationship and threaten privacy.

“It is one thing to have a number I can call if I have a problem or question, it is another thing to get unsolicited phone calls. I don’t like that,” said Jorjanne Murry, an accountant in Charlotte, North Carolina, who has Type 1 diabetes. “I think it is intrusive.”

Acxiom Corp. (ACXM) and LexisNexis are two of the largest data brokers who collect such information on individuals. They say their data are supposed to be used only for marketing, not for medical purposes or to be included in medical records.

While both sell to health insurers, they said it’s to help those companies offer better services to members.

Bigger Picture

Much of the information on consumer spending may seem irrelevant for a hospital or doctor, but it can provide a bigger picture beyond the brief glimpse that doctors get during an office visit or through lab results, said Michael Dulin, director of research and evidence-based medicine at Carolinas HealthCare System.

Carolinas HealthCare System operates the largest group of medical centers in North Carolina andSouth Carolina, with more than 900 care centers, including hospitals, nursing homes, doctors’ offices and surgical centers. The health system is placing its data, which include purchases a patient has made using a credit card or store loyalty card, into predictive models that give a risk score to patients.

Within the next two years, Dulin plans for that score to be regularly passed to doctors and nurses who can reach out to high-risk patients to suggest interventions before patients fall ill.

Buying Cigarettes

For a patient with asthma, the hospital would be able to score how likely they are to arrive at the emergency room by looking at whether they’ve refilled their asthma medication at the pharmacy, been buying cigarettes at the grocery store and live in an area with a high pollen count, Dulin said.

The system may also score the probability of someone having a heart attack by considering factors such as the type of foods they buy and if they have a gym membership, he said.

“What we are looking to find are people before they end up in trouble,” said Dulin, who is also a practicing physician. “The idea is to use big data and predictive models to think about population health and drill down to the individual levels to find someone running into trouble that we can reach out to and try to help out.”

While the hospital can share a patient’s risk assessment with their doctor, they aren’t allowed to disclose details of the data, such as specific transactions by an individual, under the hospital’s contract with its data provider. Dulin declined to name the data provider.

Greater Detail

If the early steps are successful, though, Dulin said he would like to renegotiate to get the data provider to share more specific details on patient spending with doctors.

“The data is already used to market to people to get them to do things that might not always be in the best interest of the consumer, we are looking to apply this for something good,” Dulin said.

While all information would be bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, he said he’s aware some people may be uncomfortable with data going to doctors and hospitals. For these people, the system is considering an opt-out mechanism that will keep their data private, Dulin said.

‘Feels Creepy’

“You have to have a relationship, it just can’t be a phone call from someone saying ‘do this’ or it just feels creepy,” he said. “The data itself doesn’t tell you the story of the person, you have to use it to find a way to connect with that person.”

Murry, the diabetes patient from Charlotte, said she already gets calls from her health insurer to try to discuss her daily habits. She usually ignores them, she said. She doesn’t see what her doctors can learn from her spending practices that they can’t find out from her quarterly visits.

“Most of these things you can find out just by looking at the patient and seeing if they are overweight or asking them if they exercise and discussing that with them,” Murry said. “I think it is a waste of time.”

While the patients may gain from the strategy, hospitals also have a growing financial stake in knowing more about the people they care for.

Under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, hospital pay is becoming increasingly linked to quality metrics rather than the traditional fee-for-service model where hospitals were paid based on their numbers of tests or procedures.

Hospital Fines

As a result, the U.S. has begun levying fines against hospitals that have too many patients readmitted within a month, and rewarding hospitals that do well on a benchmark of clinical outcomes and patient surveys.

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which operates more than 20 hospitals in Pennsylvania and a health insurance plan, is using demographic and household information to try to improve patients’ health. It says it doesn’t have spending details or information from credit card transactions on individuals.

The UPMC Insurance Services Division, the health system’s insurance provider, has acquired demographic and household data, such as whether someone owns a car and how many people live in their home, on more than 2 million of its members to make predictions about which individuals are most likely to use the emergency room or an urgent care center, said Pamela Peele, the system’s chief analytics officer.

Emergency Rooms

Studies show that people with no children in the home who make less than $50,000 a year are more likely to use the emergency room, rather than a private doctor, Peele said.

UPMC wants to make sure those patients have access to a primary care physician or nurse practitioner they can contact before heading to the ER, Peele said. UPMC may also be interested in patients who don’t own a car, which could indicate they’ll have trouble getting routine, preventable care, she said.

Being able to predict which patients are likely to get sick or end up at the emergency room has become particularly valuable for hospitals that also insure their patients, a new phenomenon that’s growing in popularity. UPMC, which offers this option, would be able to save money by keeping patients out of the emergency room.

Obamacare prevents insurers from denying coverage because of pre-existing conditions or charging patients more based on their health status, meaning the data can’t be used to raise rates or drop policies.

New Model

“The traditional rating and underwriting has gone away with health-care reform,” said Robert Booz, an analyst at the technology research and consulting firm Gartner Inc. (IT) “What they are trying to do is proactive care management where we know you are a patient at risk for diabetes so even before the symptoms show up we are going to try to intervene.”

Hospitals and insurers need to be mindful about crossing the “creepiness line” on how much to pry into their patients’ lives with big data, he said. It could also interfere with the doctor-patient relationship.

The strategy “is very paternalistic toward individuals, inclined to see human beings as simply the sum of data points about them,” Irina Raicu, director of the Internet ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, said in a telephone interview.

To contact the reporters on this story: Shannon Pettypiece in New York atspettypiece@bloomberg.net; Jordan Robertson in San Francisco atjrobertson40@bloomberg.net

Housing UAC's

UAC's is the government term for Unaccommpanied Alien Children.

Where to house them?

From Fox News:

Feds to house, feed illegal aliens in Border Patrol Academy

The federal government has found a place in New Mexico to help house the tide of humanity pouring in from Mexico: The Border Patrol Academy, the very facility where agents are supposed to be trained to keep illegal immigrants out of the U.S.

The Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Artesia, a sprawlinThe Obama administration has tasked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with finding temporary housing for illegal immigrants waiting to be processed for deportation in what is known as Expedited Removal proceedings.g campus in the arid dirt plains of western New Mexico known for oil and dairy farms, could soon house hundreds of children and families that have crossed the southwest border. Tens of thousands of immigrants have crossed in through Mexico primarily from Central America, where they appear to have been led to believe that once in the U.S., they will be allowed to stay. The government is scrambling to accommodate them, but some critics say putting them up in the academy turns government policy on its head.

[...]

The Obama administration has tasked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson with finding temporary housing for illegal immigrants waiting to be processed for deportation in what is known as Expedited Removal proceedings....

Meanwhile in San Antonio: Swine Flu Confirmed at Shelter for Unaccompanied Minors.

School starts in about two months: [Boston area] Chelsea Schools Overwhelmed By Sudden Influx Of Immigrant Students. Go to the link to read the article and to watch the video.

Home owners, get ready for your real-estate taxes to soar. Those who lease residents will also see their monthly rent soar.

Lois Lerner Sent Email To Her Blackberry

Weasel Zippers has the story.

THIS WOULD MEAN THE PHONE COMPANY HAS ALL THE EMAILS.

KOSKINEN ADMITS UNDER OATH THAT HE DOESN'T GET INTERNAL EMAILS ON THE LOIS LERNER SUBJECTS!?!?

UNDER OATH, KOSKINEN CLAIMED NOT TO REMEMBER THE DATE HE WAS TOLD THE LERNER EMAILS WERE PERMANENTLY LOST - OR THE PERSON WHO TOLD HIM.

HE KNOWS HE WAS TOLD AND NOT INFORMED VIA EMAIL BECAUSE HE SAID SO:

 "I DO NOT GET EMAILS ON THESE SUBJECTS."

I THINK THIS MUST BE BECAUSE HE HAS ORDERED ALL HIS SUBORDINATES INVOLVED IN THIS MATTER NOT TO CREATE A PAPER TRAIL.

WHY WOULDN'T HE WANT A PAPER TRAIL?

BECAUSE IT COULD BE SUBPOENAED.

I THINK THIS PROVES AN INTENT TO OBSTRUCT - 

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE VIDEO

Humpday Blues

Roy Buchannon

Roy's Bluz

The Messiah Will Come Again

Lois Lerner Mistakenly Received an Email to Senator Chuck Grassley Inviting Him to Speak at an Event. She Immediately Asked If She Should Refer Him For an Audit

Yes, you read it right.

Click on the title and read the whole thing.

BY THE WAY, at this point, isn't it incumbent upon me to ask,

HOW THE FUCK DID LOIS LERNER ACCIDENTALLY RECEIVE AN EMAIL INTENDED FOR CHUCK GRASSLEY?

UPDATE - On December 3, 2012 (the day before Lerner fired off that email), Grassley gave a speech attacking Obama's budget, which included these words:

Mr. President, this chart from the Congressional Budget Office details non-interest spending as a percentage of GDP. We already know the significant role health care spending plays in our budget. Over the next decade, the federal government will spend over $7 trillion on Medicare and $4.5 trillion on Medicaid. 

Together these two programs account for one quarter of the entire federal government’s spending throughout the next ten years. 

But look closely at the even longer term projections of our spending. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the middle graph--- Social Security, as a percentage of GDP, will remain relatively stable over the next 25 years. 

Non-interest spending, the bottom graph, as a percentage of GDP will also remain relatively stable over the same period. 

Now, look at the top graph. Over the next 25 years, spending on health care entitlements will basically double as a percentage of GDP. Mr. President, unless we take a serious look at health care spending, we aren’t genuinely acting to reduce our country’s debt. 

Twenty-five years is not a lot of time. We need to be talking about health care spending now. Not sometime next year. Not just once we’ve discussed taxes. Mr. President, to me, the terms are irrelevant and the conclusion is undeniable. We must gain control of health care spending. 

As we move forward in debt talks, I know a lot of attention will be devoted to taxes and revenue.

Those conversations are important and should conclude with tax policy that fosters economic growth. But conversations about the health care entitlements should not be postponed or relegated to second tier status. And they certainly should not be confined to cost-reduction exercises that ignore the fundamental cost drivers.

UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:The storing up of political vengeance

Now that the Lois Lerner email catastrophe has attained Rose Mary Woods status, and democrats AS AN INSTITUTION IN CONGRESS AND THE SENATE are uttering support for the admin line that there is STILL no there, there, and people like Chuck Todd wonder with drooling idiocy if there is any victim to this event, I have to wonder if  …

Since it appears that the admin has gotten away with Benghazi, the VA, IRS, bungling EVERY SINGLE foreign event of consequence down to the level of BLOWING THE OLYMPIC VENUE, yaada  yadda until we all empty our stomachs … if the republicans being hardly better, if at all, morally or ethically than the democrats, will conclude that if they do NOT execute political vengeance on the dems by using the out of control executive branch dept authorities as THEIR tool —- they are SCHMUCKS.

And that will be that sports fans,

Who will feel any loyalty to an america like that? 

Cassandra moment at IBA - Christians now forced to pay Jizya in Iraq (no Jews left, I assume)

Christians in a northern Iraqi city are reportedly being ordered to pay a tax in return for protection by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

A Middle Eastern Christian website and a Lebanese daily reported that Christians have been required to pay $250 per individual who works and $500 per couple. If accurate, the tax would fall in line with past Islamist efforts to impose fines on Christians in the region, a Middle East expert told TheBlaze.

Is there the SLIGHTEST SURPRISE?
Can there EVER be?

Scorpion, frog, forever

Another Amazing "Coincidence"

EPA Says It “Lost” Emails From Employee Who Refused To Be Interviewed By Oversight Committee

That dog eats a lot of homework, doesn't he? He gets around!