No doubt their “pay for” will involve another unpopular minority.Massachusetts cannot bar legal immigrants from a state health care program, according to a ruling issued Thursday by the state’s highest court…
The ruling said that a 2009 state budget that dropped about 29,000 legal immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than five years from Commonwealth Care, a subsidized health insurance program central to this state’s 2006 health care overhaul, violated the State Constitution.
“This appropriation discriminated on the basis of alienage and national origin,” wrote Justice Robert J. Cordy of the Supreme Judicial Court, ruling that the action “violates their rights to equal protection under the Massachusetts Constitution.”…
State officials say they will abide by the decision, although they are not yet sure how to pay for the change.
“This decision has significant fiscal impacts for the commonwealth, adding somewhere in the range of $150 million in annual costs to what is already a very challenging budget,” said Jay Gonzalez, secretary of administration and finance.
Former Romney/Obama advisor Jonathan Gruber has written that RomneyCare was already costing the state $50 billion more than projected by 2009. Of course, supporters have been hiding RomneyCare’s costs (and exaggerating its benefits) all along. http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/michaelfcannon/2012/01/15/romneycare_just_got_150_million_more_expensive
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Human Events writes: Well, it’s finally happened. Once again, socialism has put a silver fork in itself. Standard & Poor’s has downgraded France’s AAA credit rating, giving the country side-eye on claims to have its debt under control. This means the country will now have to pay it all back at an even higher interest rate.
Who are we kidding? No one’s paying back any debts right now. You need money to do that. When was the last time France had any extra cash lying around? It’s like raising the interest rate on the credit card of a smack addict whose pumping his capital into his veins faster than any German, Chinese, or Russian can slip him a tenner.
No amount of hot air and spin could ultimately keep socialism afloat. It’s a good lesson for those in America and other parts of the world who think that Europe is in any way an exemplary, sustainable alternative to free-market limited government capitalism. If capitalism is perceived to not be working in America -- as the Occupy Wall Street movement has argued -- then it’s because the system isn’t capitalist enough. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=48802
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Yahoo News reports: Compelling new scientific evidence suggests United Nations peacekeepers have carried a virulent strain of cholera -- a super bug -- into the Western Hemisphere for the first time.
The vicious form of cholera has already killed 7,000 people in Haiti, where it surfaced in a remote village in October 2010. Leading researchers from Harvard Medical School and elsewhere told ABC News that, despite UN denials, there is now a mountain of evidence suggesting the strain originated in Nepal, and was carried to Haiti by Nepalese soldiers who came to Haiti to serve as UN peacekeepers after the earthquake that ravaged the country on Jan. 12, 2010 -- two years ago today. Haiti had never seen a case of cholera until the arrival of the peacekeepers, who allegedly failed to maintain sanitary conditions at their base. [Unintended consequences of doing "good"] http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-un-soldiers-brought-deadly-superbug-americas-194141189--abc-news.html
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Washington Times reports: The Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) annual audit of federal agency financial statements, released last month. As it has for many years, the GAO concluded that it cannot express an opinion on the statements because of weak internal financial controls and unreliable evidence to support material information.In other words, the government’s financial reporting is so abysmal no one can tell taxpayers exactly how their money is being spent. That’s aside from the fact that the nation’s current fiscal path is unsustainable. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/jan/13/help-wanted/
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World Net Daily reports: Homeland Security is on the hot seat. Back in October 2010, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano named the devout Muslim Mohamed Elibiary to the Homeland Security Advisory Council. The Texas Department of Public Safety now says that Elibiary may have been allowed to gain access to a highly sensitive database of intelligence reports, and then allegedly shopped some of the material he found in that database to a media outlet for a story about “Islamophobia” in the Public Safety Department.
Who else is the devout Elibiary shopping sensitive intel to? Mohamed Elibiary was one of the speakers at a December 2004 conference in Dallas entitled “A Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary,” that is, the Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of Iran and the violent Muslim global revolution to install a universal Islamic government. When Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News challenged him about his appearance at this conference, Elibiary threatened Dreher, writing: “Expect someone to put a banana in your exhaust pipe.” I warned about Elibiary’s appointment back in 2010.
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The UK Register writes: A new strain of the Sykipot Trojan is been used to compromise the Department of Defense-sanctioned smart cards used to authorise network and building access at many US government agencies, according to security researchers.
Smart cards are a standard means of granting active duty military staff, selected reserve personnel, civilian employees and eligible contractors access to intranets at US Army, Navy and the Air Force facilities. They can be used to get into buildings or, when used in conjunction with a static password, to access networks.
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The Atlantic Wire reports: If Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz, the U.S. Navy has a backup plan to save one-fifth of the world's daily oil trade: send in the dolphins.
The threat of Iran closing the strait has reached a fever pitch, reports today's New York Times, with U.S. officials warning Iran's supreme leader that such moves would cross a "red line" provoking a U.S. response. Iran could block the strait with any assortment of mines, armed speed boats or anti-ship cruise missiles but according to Michael Connell at the Center for Naval Analysis, “The immediate issue [for the U.S. military] is to get the mines.” To solve that problem, the Navy has a solution that isn't heavily-advertised but has a time-tested success rate: mine-detecting dolphins. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/01/militarys-weapon-against-iranian-mines-high-tech-dolphins/47384/
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National Review writes: The U.S. is not spending enough on helping immigrants to assimilate, argues a USC professor in the New York Times. We should redirect “the billions of dollars spent on border enforcement” to the education budget, both to federal student loans and to community and four-year state colleges, says public-policy professor Dowell Myers.
Myers projects that by 2030, 18 percent of second-generation Hispanic students will have a college degree. He apparently means that as good news; in fact it is a sign of how slowly progress between the generations is occurring, since the Hispanic graduation rate in California was 10 percent in 2006. http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/288133/stingy-immigrants-heather-mac-donald
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American Thinker opines: Shakespeare's Mark Antony beseeched his countrymen to "lend me your ears." Is it time to ask Americans to lend their eyes to see how President Obama's foreign policies have endangered our country?
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