Humana saw their profits rise 65 percent last quarter on Medicare profits: No wonder they oppose healthcare reform & more buzz

Humana saw their profits rise 65 percent last quarter on Medicare profits: No wonder they oppose healthcare reform

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 4:59pm.

• Alerts

BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT

November 2 Release from the Office of Senator Harry Reid

Spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Jim Manley, released the following statement today in response to news that Humana had a 65 percent jump in profit last quarter mostly due to their involvement with the Medicare Advantage Program:

“It’s no wonder why Humana has been misleading seniors about health insurance reform -- they saw their profits rise 65 percent last quarter and want to make sure the gravy train doesn’t

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BP Contests Record-Breaking OSHA Fine While Allowing 'Hundreds of Potential Hazards to Continue'

Submitted by MargaretS on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 4:07pm.

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BUZZFLASH NEWS ALERT
by Margaret Smith

It's shocking enough to hear that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a small subset of the U.S. Dept. of Labor, dropped a whooping $87.4 million fine on oil giant BP.

It comes as even more of a shock, though, when you find out that BP has challenged the fine, as well as the hundreds of cited health and safety violations that came along with it, as more and more of their employees are being injured due to safety accidents, some being fatal.

Yet that's what happened last Friday when BP formally contested the fines and citations imposed by the OSHA for what officials said was the company's failure to correct safety hazards identified after the 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers and injured 170 more at its Texas City refinery, the third largest refinery in the country.

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GOP Direct Mail King Weighs in on NY-23, Insisting the Race Is About Teabaggers, Not New Yorkers

Submitted by meg on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 1:31pm.

• Be-Elected

BE ELECTED
by Meg White

When President Obama appointed Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) to become secretary of the Army, he set up what was to become one of only two House special elections of 2009 as well as a test case for the midterm elections next year.

It seems everyone and their mother is weighing in on this race, and with the recent suspension of GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava's campaign and her subsequent endorsement of Democratic candidate Bill Owens, the district may be watched more closely than even the New Jersey gubernatorial race. In fact, the race is almost a Rorschach test indicating what the onlooker thinks of electoral politics in this country. The one thing it seems the election is not about is New York's 23rd district.

In a post Saturday afternoon, conservative pundit Richard Viguerie condemned Scozzafava for not endorsing the conservative third-party candidate Doug Hoffman.

Viguerie's stance should be no surprise to those who have been following him recently as he promotes his re-launch of the Republican Party by purging what he calls "big-government Republicans" from the helm of his Web site, ConservativeHQ.com. The one-time heavy hitter of the GOP emerged from the 1970s to become that era's Karl Rove, credited for creating the once-influential direct-mail campaigns for the political world.

Scozzafava, as a relatively moderate Republican who supported the stimulus plan, is an obvious target for Viguerie. What does strike one in Viguerie's statement is his insistence that this race is about the inevitable rise of the teabaggers (emphasis mine):

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Dave Lindorff: Country Joe, Kenny Rogers, and Obama

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 1:06pm.

• Dave Lindorff

Country Joe McDonald said it best in his iconic "Fixin' to Die" Rag: "Oh, it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me. I don't give a damn." In fact, we were fighting for nothing in Vietnam. It was a war that started out because the U.S. didn't want the Commies to win a battle in the so-called Cold War, and even though it was on the farthest side of the world, in a poor nation of peasants, even though they had been struggling to throw off colonialism for years and we had simply become the new colonists, no president dared to admit the obvious -- we had no business being there, and all the killing and dying had no point.

Afghanistan is the same thing all over again. We "got in" surreptitiously for the same reason. Russia had helped organize a coup to take over what passed for a "central government" and had found itself mired in a brutal war of occupation, and the U.S. had begun, back in the '70s, organizing and providing arms to the forces fighting the Russians, not because Afghanistan -- a country even more remote and meaningless in terms of U.S. interests or security than Vietnam -- had any importance but because it was a way to "stick it to" the Russians in the waning days of the Cold War.

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BuzzFlash Mailbag for November 2, 2009

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 12:30pm.

• BuzzFlash Mailbag

BUZZFLASH MAILBAG

Want to join the conversation? Share your thoughts with other Mailbag readers by clicking here. You also may comment below; post articles yourself at BuzzFlash.net; or send urls for BuzzFlash to post to: www.buzzflash.com/contact/newstip.html.

Subject: Cheney's little deferment, Liz lies.

The apple does not fall far from the tree!

While daddy sent our troops like lambs to the slaughter to his ego war, so goes Liz Cheney to lie for him and as we all know she was taught by the best of liars ever, her daddy. A daddy drunk with power!

How can this little girl live with herself if she had to accept the guilt of her father's lie that sent our troops to die, and then refuse to be there to honor them when they returned home to their families.

Cheney's motto must have been 'if you don't see them they where not there.' Also, this did not happen, and no one will remember who sent them or why they had to die!

While President Obama, by doing the loving thing as Commander in Chief and being there to honor those who died in the line of duty, is chastised. Can you believe it? Being honorable they, these troops, went, not knowing, it was on a Cheney power, ego trip. Baby Liz along with daddy have the shameful nerve to lie about President Obama's motive to be there when these heroes arrived home to their grieving loved ones. Why? Because the guilt would be so hard to bear for baby and daddy, and the truth does not permit them to live in peace with themselves. So lie they must to survive. Liz can't get her head around what? The truth??? I'll bet she can't!

Liz, daddy's little girl, who are we to judge you our your daddy, there is a higher authority that does have the power to do just that, and believe me there will be an atonement to be sure, because those who died for the daddy's big lie will not rest in peace till then. And all your lies will not do a darn thing to make daddy's sins go away.

A BuzzFlash Reader

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Barbara's Daily BuzzFlash Minute for November 2, 2009

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 11:06am.

• Barbara's Daily Buzz

BARBARA'S DAILY BUZZFLASH MINUTE

MEMO to CNN: As long as you give enough airtime to choke a horse to the likes of Repuglican Boner Boehner who says absolutely nothing of any substance, as long as you have Mary Matalin castrating her husband James Carville on air, as long as your bias is to the right, your ratings will remain in the tank! "State of the Union" is a reflection of the State of CNN, and your ratings will continue to be zip unless and until you stop reporting lies as the truth, and the truth as a lie!

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Susan J. Demas: Everything you ever wanted to know about the NY-23 starts with Tim Walberg

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 9:53am.

• Guest Contribution

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Susan J. Demas

Some people might be shocked about the carnage in the NY-23, where moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava was just forced out of the way to make room for uber-conservative Doug Hoffman, puppet of the anti-tax group Club for Growth.

I'm not one of them, because I covered the dress rehearsal back in 2006 in the MI-7. This was the start of the Republican civil war, which few people recognized at the time. But with the subsequent federal purges of Sen. Lincoln Chafee (R-RI), Reps. Wayne Gilchrest (R-MD) and Heather Wilson (R-NM), and now Scozzafava, it's clear that the Club for Growth-sponsored bloodletting won't be stopping anytime soon.

U.S. Rep. Joe Schwarz (R-MI) was in his first term representing a rural southern Michigan district and was named one the top 10 most effective freshmen. The seat was hand-drawn as the second-most conservative in the state with a 57-percent GOP base.

Today, it is represented by U.S. Rep. Mark Schauer, a pro-choice Democrat who has voted repeatedly to raise taxes.

How did this happen?

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NY-23, less 1, part 2 Submitted by pmcarpenter on Mon, 11/02/2009 - 5:44am.

• P.M. Carpenter

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Dede Scozzafava's Saturday understatement of withdrawal -- "Polls have indicated that my chances of winning this election are not as strong as we would like them to be" -- was the most clarity we've heard from New York's 23rd Congressional District in days.

A Scozzafava-campaign associate had earlier offered the rather vague but universal view: "This is the strangest thing I have ever seen. I don’t know what to make of this thing, to be honest. There are so many angles to this thing. It’s wild."

Political angles, both strange and wild, have dominated this suddenly two-man race, now between Republican-Scozzafava-endorsed Democrat Bill Owens and the Conservative Party's Doug Hoffman. But some things never change. For instance, prominent national Republicans who, out of deep convictions and imperishable principles, of course, had steadfastly backed Scozzafava and roundly condemned Hoffman, lurched on Saturday with unalarming alacrity to their former enemy's camp.

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What a Hoffman victory could mean for liberals

Submitted by pmcarpenter on Sat, 10/31/2009 - 6:16am.

• P.M. Carpenter

THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

In New York's Owens-Scozzafava-Hoffman race there had loomed two major narratives of keen-enough interest in the right's internal spats, but both are suddenly receding in the early shadows of, perhaps, a much broader electoral -- and unspeakable -- shift.

First, a short look into the conventional narratives.

The Times concisely framed one of them earlier this week: "The race ... has become a contentious referendum on the [Republican] party’s future, and its outcome will help shape what kinds of candidates the Republicans run as they look to rebuild their ranks in Congress next fall."

And none other than conservative Newt Gingrich, who, as you know, is backing the "liberal" GOP candidate, just as concisely framed the other narrative, which is largely procedural in nature: He cautioned his fellow Republicans about the "grave danger of establishing the precedent that every faction can run a third-party candidate if they lose a primary or a convention," thus sabotaging many a legitimate GOP candidacy and electing the Democrat.

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Sue Wilson: Culpability in the Jennifer Strange Saga

Submitted by BuzzFlash on Fri, 10/30/2009 - 2:37pm.

• Guest Contribution

BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY
by Sue Wilson

Today, a divided jury rendered a unanimous verdict against Entercom Sacramento in the case of Jennifer Strange, a mother of three who died as a result of radio station KDND's water drinking contest in January 2007. The jury of seven men and five women awarded Jennifer's family more than $16 million compensation.

For much of the past two months, I have been observing and live blogging the trial. There is much to process before I comment at length. But in brief:

KDND 107.9 "the End's" Morning Rave ruled the airwaves in Sacramento's morning drive. The on air personalities ruled the radio station, too, the proverbial inmates running the asylum. And they clearly knew a person could die from drinking too much water: just a month before the contest, the Morning Rave spent an entire show making fun of a local college kid who had died from water intoxication. They made fun of Matthew Carrington's death, and they knew someone could die from drinking too much water.

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