The News – Just Click on the Link “For the Rest of the Story”

– Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia called on Congress to repeal The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, a 1986 law requiring hospitals to provide emergency health care treatment to anyone who needs it. It requires hospitals to provide stabilizing care to anyone regardless of race, nationality, or ability to pay. Calling it an onerous law, Governor Deal says “it is costing way too much money and just let poor people die.” In case you have forgotten. Gov. Nate Deal is one of those Governors who rejected the PPACA expansion of Medicaid which would cover those too poor to pay. One other aspect of the PPACA which is not mentioned often, is it begins to cut payments to hospitals for uncompensated healthcare by patients as they would be covered either through the individual exchanges or Medicaid. Governor Deal has placed Georgia hospitals between a rock and a hard place by rejecting the Medicaid Expansion leaving many no other recourse but to close.

“If they really want to get serious about lowering the cost of health care in this country, they would revisit another federal statute that has been there for a long time,” Deal said. “It came as a result of bad facts, and we have a saying that bad facts make bad law.” Governor Nathan Deal of Georgia

Seems the elderly Governor also blamed Meteorologists for failing to notify him of the coming ice storm recently. Unless he is loaded, thank goodness for Medicaid as it is the only provision which will supply Nursing Home care in case he becomes disabled to to Alzheimer disease.

Me: Maybe Governor Deal and the Louisiana State Representative Josh Miller whose life was saved (at 23 years of age and uninsured) and made more mobile through Medicaid and Medicare to discuss how to cut benefits for the uninsured? They both want to do so.

ht. Crooks and Liars   Georgia’s Republican Gov. Wants to Save Money by Not Allowing People to Receive Emergency Care!

– A stunning new report indicates the U.S. Navy knew that sailors from the nuclear-powered USS Ronald Reagan took major radiation hits from the Fukushima atomic power plant after its meltdowns and explosions nearly three years ago. If true, the revelations cast new light on the $1 billion lawsuit filed by the sailors against Tokyo Electric Power. Many of the sailors are already suffering devastating health impacts, but are being stonewalled by Tepco and the Navy.

Me: It was bad enough getting shot at and almost blown up, now you are expected to be radiated while on a humanity mission.

ht. Crooks and Liars   Report: Navy Knew USS Regan was Seriously Contaminated by Fukushima during a humanity visit to assist

– Goldberg: But if you open a shop on Main Street open to the general public then you have to really serve the general public and you can’t say I’m not going to serve these people but I’m going to serve those people. And a lot of the people—

Bream: Why not? Why not? I mean this is America, we all have freedoms. Why would you do business with somebody, no matter what your personal issue was that they had with you, why would you wanna force them to do business with you? Why not just go down the street and spend my money with somebody who supports me and is kind to me and wants to help me and provides these services for me.

Goldberg explained to her why the blacks that staged the Greensboro sit-ins were real American heroes.

Me: Maybe a little dose of the sixties may enlighten them? Where is the WABAC Machine when you need it Mr. Peabody?

ht. Crooks and Liars  Fox Anchorblonde; Why Can’t Businesses Discriminate Against Gays?

– ABC is reporting that Senate GOP-ers have blocked the veterans bill from moving forward to a vote. The bill needed 60 votes to proceed, but the final tally was 56-41.

Although agreement on the need to expand benefits for veterans is usually a bipartisan issue, it was the amount of spending in the bill in which Republican senators had a problem.

Me: This is a part of the you broke them, you fix them ideology. If you are going to have a war, then you owe them or do not go to war.

ht. Crooks and Liars  Patriotic GOP Blocks Veterans Benefits Bill!

– Exxon Mobil’s CEO has joined a lawsuit to stop construction of a water tower near his home that would be used to in the fracking process to drill for oil.

While fracking — hydraulic fracturing of rock to release pockets of oil — has raised complaints from environmentalists around the country, Chairman and CEO Rex Tillerson’s opposition to a project in his own neighborhood is interesting, given how deeply Exxon Mobil is involved in the process.

Tillerson appeared at a Town Council meeting in Bartonville, Tex., the wealthy enclave near his Dallas home last November to join in the protest over the water tower, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Me: No oil tankers going by his house either, I’ll bet.

ht: Hullabaloo/Bradblog   Speaking of letters … by digsby

– Do you hear that deafening silence? That’s the sound of the sky-is-falling inflation bears’ embarrassment by events that have totally contradicted their every prediction. The destruction of the middle class, the rise in income inequality, and continued wage declines have produced an extremely low-inflation economy, much to the chagrin of conservative “experts.”

It’s almost as if allowing obscenely rich people to have all the money, and creating a world in which companies requiring little startup capital and employing only 53 people can make $13 billion, might produce deflationary economic results with little circulation and growth.

Who knew? Aside from anyone with an ounce of sense, that is?

Me:  Still hasn’t stopped banks from hiking interest rates in anticipation of that first dollop of ketchup.

ht. Hullabaloo, David Atkins   The inflation bears get another sharp stick in the eye, courtesy WhatsApp

– Over the years I’ve posted about the direct through line from racism to anti-abortion zealotry, using the manipulation of religion, particularly the Southern evangelical churches, to get the job done. Today, they are pushing a “religious liberty” strategy to roll back abortion rights and allow discrimination against gay people.

Here, Ian Millhiser goes back to the Jim Crow era to show how religious “liberty” was used as an excuse for racism in the first place:

[W]hile LGBT Americans are the current target of this effort to repackage prejudice as “religious liberty,” they are hardly the first. To the contrary, as Wake Forest law Professor Michael Kent Curtis explained in a 2012 law review article, many segregationists justified racial bigotry on the very same grounds that religious conservatives now hope to justify anti-gay animus. In the words of one professor at a prominent Mississippi Baptist institution, “our Southern segregation way is the Christian way . . . . [God] was the original segregationist.”

ht. Hullabaloo digsby  Using religious “liberty” as an excuse to hate on others is as American as apple pie

– You wouldn’t know it from the political conversations happening in the United States and Australia, but the world’s scientists are speaking loud and clear. The debate is over, and it’s long past time to act:

Two of the world’s most prestigious science academies say there’s clear evidence that humans are causing the climate to change.

The time for talk is over, says the US National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, the national science academy of the UK.

The two released a paper, Climate Change: Evidence and Causes, written and reviewed by leading experts in both countries, lays out which aspects of climate change are well understood and where there is still uncertainty and a need for more research.

ht. Hulabaloo “thereisnospoon“