If an auto mechanic accidentally breaks your windshield while trying to repair the engine, he would never get away with billing you for fixing his mistake. On Wednesday, Medicare will start applying that logic to American medicine on a broad scale when it stops paying hospitals for the added cost of treating patients who are injured in their care.
Medicare Stops Paying to Treat Medical Errors
Halliburton says class status denied in fraud case
Halliburton Co. said on Tuesday a federal judge has denied class-action status to the lead plaintiff in a six-year-old case about securities law violations.
With the Sept. 29 decision, lead plaintiff Archdiocese of Milwaukee Supporting Fund will have to pursue on its own the lawsuit, which claims Halliburton defrauded investors through questionable accounting practices from 1998 to 2001.
TVNL Comment: Note that US Vice President Richard Cheney was Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000.
Campaign tries to explain Palin's Putin comment
Gov. Sarah Palin cites vigilance against Russian warplanes coming into U.S. airspace over Alaska as one of her foreign policy credentials. But the U.S. military command in charge says that hasn't happened in her 21 months in office.
The spokeswoman for the McCain-Palin campaign, Maria Comella, clarified in an e-mail to The Associated Press that when "Russian incursions near Alaskan airspace and inside the air defense identification zone have occurred ... U.S. Air Force fighters have been scrambled repeatedly."
However, no Russian military planes have been flying even into that zone, said Maj. Allen Herritage, a spokesman for the Alaska region of the North American Aerospace Defense Command, at Elmendorf Air Force Base.
Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be exchanged for the same quantity of Israeli territory.
He also dismissed as "megalomania" any thought that Israel should attack Iran on its own to stop it from developing nuclear weapons, saying the international community and not Israel alone was charged with handling the issue.
When Journalists Refuse To Tell the Truth About Israel
'Fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East'
by Robert Fisk
What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa against the majority black population? What if we had lauded the South African white leadership as "hard-line warriors" rather than racists? What if we had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at Sharpeville as an understandable "security crackdown" by the South African police. And described black children shot by the police as an act of "child sacrifice" by their parents? What if we had called upon the "terrorist" ANC leadership to "control their own people".
Almost every day that is exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the Israelis, no matter how many murders – by either side – and no matter how bloody the reputation of the Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African whites against the blacks. No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily supported the apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the blacks of the shanty towns. But there's not much difference between Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there's not much difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied territories and that of the South African police. The apartheid regime had death squads, just as Israel has today. Yet even they did not use helicopter gunships and missiles.
Taxes could get sky-high with aerial technology
A new high-tech aerial photography system that can spot an illegal porch from 5,000 feet is being marketed to tax assessors as a way to grow revenue.
Pictometry International Corp. says it offers tax assessors 12 different views of every square foot of building or land in a jurisdiction that buys their system. They call it "sophisticated visual intelligence."
State Sen. Jeff Van Drew has another name for it.
"It's Big Brother," said Van Drew, D-Cape May, Cumberland, Atlantic.
"We're not supposed to be spying on people. When it gets to the point where we're doing aerial spying on people's lives, I've had enough," Van Drew said.
You won't believe where that $700-billion bailout figure came from
You know where that very important $700-billion figure came from?
Here's a quote from that Forbes story:
"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."
They made it up to be sufficiently ginormous to frighten everyone into rapid action.
And it worked.
2008 election results to be routed to private middlemen in Illinois, Colorado & Kentucky
A new OpEdNews article details information about the pending subpeona of Mike Connell in connection with a transfer of the Ohio election results server to a partisan server in 2004. Black Box Voting has learned that similar results middlemen are already set up in 2008 for Illinois, Colorado and Kentucky. At this point citizens need to get on a search and expose mission for every state to learn the routing of election results production and publication.
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