Photo Credit: Nationwide Children’s HospitalA study led by Dr. Sarah A. Keim from the Center for Biobehavioral Health at The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital and colleagues found that 75 percent of breast milk acquired over the internet is not safe for babies according to their report in the Oct. 21, 2013, issue of the journal Pediatrics.
This research is the first to examine the safety and practices used by nonprofit milk banks and individuals that sell breast milk on the internet.
The investigators compared 101 breast milk samples bought online with 20 samples obtained from a milk bank.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00kathleenhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngkathleen2013-10-22 00:01:332016-04-11 11:15:56Internet Breast Milk is Unsafe for Babies (+video)
As Democrats begin maneuvering for the 2016 presidential race, there isn’t one who would think of disparaging John F. Kennedy’s stature as a Democratic Party hero. Yet it’s a pretty safe bet that none would dream of running on Kennedy’s approach to government or embrace his political beliefs.
Today’s Democratic Party — the home of Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore — wouldn’t give the time of day to a candidate like JFK.
The 35th president was an ardent tax-cutter who championed across-the-board, top-to-bottom reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, slashed tariffs to promote free trade, and even spoke out against the “confiscatory” property taxes being levied in too many cities.
He was anything but a big-spending, welfare-state liberal. “I do not believe that Washington should do for the people what they can do for themselves through local and private effort,” Kennedy bluntly asserted during the 1960 campaign. It was a message he memorably restated in his inaugural address: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” One of his first acts as president was to institute a pay cut for top White House staffers, and that was only the start of his budgetary austerity. “To the surprise of many of his appointees,” longtime aide Ted Sorensen would later write, he “personally scrutinized every agency request with a cold eye and encouraged his budget director to say ‘no.'”…
Since that terrible day in Dallas 50 years ago, popular mythology has turned Kennedy into a liberal hero. Some of that mythmaking, as journalist and historian Ira Stoll argues in a new book, JFK, Conservative, was driven by Kennedy aides, such as Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had always wanted their boss to be more left-leaning than he was. Some of it was fueled by the Democratic Party’s emotional connection to the memory of a martyred president, and its understandable desire to link their priorities to his legacy.
Photo Credit: Fox NewsTop Washington lawmakers appeared no closer Sunday to reaching deals on upcoming budget negotiations than they were on the recent ones — disagreeing over an entire range of issues including taxes, spending and ObamaCare.
Among the key issues is whether negotiators for the Republican-controlled House and Democrat-controlled Senate can agree on an alternative to the indiscriminate cuts know as sequester, a result of the 2011 Budget Control Act.
Such a deal seemed unlikely considering Missouri Republican Sen. Roy Blunt told “Fox News Sunday” the act was “better than anything we’ve had before to control spending.”
And Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin said later on the show that Democrats “won’t trade” reducing cuts on defense spending for deep cuts to entitlement, as Republicans have proposed.
Democrats want to increase spending levels next year above the sequester caps and replace them with more long-term budget savings through spending cuts and tax increases, which Republicans have rejected.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-21 02:18:442016-04-11 11:15:57With New Budget Deadlines, Top Hill Lawmakers Appear as Far Apart as Ever
Photo Credit: AFP/Getty Oprah Winfrey has been notably distancing herself from President Obama and First Lady Michelle and apparently her latest slight came against Obamacare.
The media icon was asked to attend a meeting at the White House along with other celebrities to see how they could help create some positive publicity for the Affordable Care Act.
Rather than jumping on board like Alicia Keys and Jennifer Hudson, Oprah reportedly quickly said that she would not be attending the meeting.
‘All of Oprah’s top people thought she would go, because when the president invites you to the White House, most people automatically say yes, but Oprah said she didn’t have the time or inclination to go. It wasn’t like she had to think it over. It was an immediate, flat-out, unequivocal no,’ an Oprah advisor told journalist Ed Klein.
Klein wrote a book, The Amateur, about President Obama’s first term in office and is currently working on a second.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-21 02:13:562016-04-11 11:15:57The President Asked Oprah to Help Him Promote Obamacare ‘But She Refused Because She Feels Burned by the White House’
Photo Credit: AP Hard-line conservatives aren’t just sticking it to the national GOP by shutting down the government and bringing the nation to the brink of default – they’re also refusing to pony up to help their party defend the House in 2014.
With a little more than a year until the midterm election, many leaders of the shutdown strategy have yet to donate to the National Republican Congressional Committee, records show. At least eight of the debate’s 20 or so most outspoken figures have not given any money to the NRCC, and others have forked over token amounts.
Their refusal to contribute to the House GOP’s political arm, coming as Republicans are getting thumped by Democrats in the money race, is causing heartburn and frustration among Republican strategists charged with laying the groundwork for next year’s races. They say it is reinforcing a perception of the conservative gang that they’re only out for themselves and don’t much care about advancing the party’s larger cause.
Take Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, the libertarian acolyte of Ron Paul and one of the most outspoken lawmakers for a hard line on the budget and debt negotiations. Amash, who voted against the final deal to reopen the government, hasn’t contributed to the NRCC this year, according to Federal Election Commission reports. Nor has he given to the committee at any point during his two terms in Congress.
Photo Credit: APThe Obama administration Sunday said it’s called on “the best and brightest” tech experts from both government and the private sector to help fix the troubled website at the root of the Obamacare enrollment problems.
The unusual Sunday 600-word blog post from HHS was the first update in more than a week on the many failings of an expensive website that HHS itself described as “frustrating for many Americans.” But it didn’t specify who the administration had called in, or when the American people would see clear-cut results on Healthcare.gov.
“We’re kind of thinking of it as a tech ‘surge,’” an HHS official told POLITICO.
The Health and Human Services statement didn’t explain everything that’s wrong, or give technical details about the repairs underway. It outlined some steps being taken to fix the site, including updates with “new code that includes bug fixes.” The department also says it’s installing monitors to catch parts of the website that are proving the most troublesome for consumers. And it also said it had seen some improvements in wait times and consumer access to the website, the online portal to health insurance exchanges or marketplaces the federal government is running in 36 states.
The administration said one essential component — the federal data hub — is working as hoped. That hub is crucial. It links federal agencies to determine an applicant’s eligibility for Obamacare coverage and subsidies. States running their own exchanges have to be able to draw on that data as well, and some of them have been doing so successfully.
Photo Credit: Daily Caller If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor under Obamacare — if you both belong to the same race.
Obamacare’s spectacular flop of a rollout distracts from its crude calculus that encourages the allocation of healthcare resources along racial lines and a doctor-patient system splintered into ethnicities.
While the 2010 Patient Protecion and Affordable Care Act’s language on diversity sounds innocuous, a review of the frankly separatist thinking of the law’s ardent supporters indicates Obamacare is aiming for a health care system that puts political correctness above the struggle against illness and death.
A 2009 report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) examining the House and Senate bill eventually signed by President Barack Obama advocates pairing patients and doctors of the same race, a goal toward which the law channels taxpayer dollars.
“Research suggests that health care providers’ diagnostic and treatment decisions, as well as their feelings about patients, are influenced by patients’ race or ethnicity,” the CAP report reads. “Several studies have shown that racial concordance is substantially and positively related to patient satisfaction.”
Photo Credit: IsraelinUSAThe United States should not ease sanctions against Iran until it can prove that Iran has fully dismantled its nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
The warning comes amid reports that the Obama administration is considering offering Iran a chance to recover frozen assets overseas in exchange for steps to scale back its nuclear program.
“The question is not of hope,” Netanyahu said on “Meet the Press” on NBC. “The question is of actual results.”
“I think the pressure has to be maintained on Iran, even increased on Iran, until it actually stops its nuclear program,” he added. “You don’t want to go through halfway measures.”
Netanyahu compared Iran’s nuclear program to chemical weapons stockpiles in Syria, which President Bashar Assad has pledged to eliminate.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-21 02:00:252016-04-11 11:15:58Netanyahu Warns US Not to Roll Back Iran Sanctions, Release Frozen Assets (+video)
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) appeared on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning where reporter Dana Bash questioned him about the efficacy of his position on the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act. Cruz said that those Republicans who want to implement the ACA and hasten its collapse are misguided.
Bash asked Cruz if he believed that Health and Human Services Sec. Kathleen Sibelius should resign. Cruz replied that he believed she should. Bash questioned him about the politics of that. She asked, if Sebelius is such a liability for the Obama administration, whether Republicans benefit more from her remaining in her position.
“There are Republican gray beards that make the point, ‘Let’s let this collapse,’” he said.
Sen. Ted Cruz says he’s not bothered by the tensions and anger from his Republican colleagues over his strategy to defund Obamacare, saying he doesn’t work for “party bosses.”
“Not remotely, because the people I work for are the women and men and men you just saw. I work for 26 million Texans. That’s my job to fight for them. I don’t work for the party bosses in Washington. I work for the people of Texas and I fight for them,” Cruz said in an interview aired Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The freshman Republican from Texas also took a shot at his Republican colleagues, whom he said would commented “very differently” if cameras were inside their closed-door meetings.
“You know what was very interesting about some of those closed-door discussions? What I said in those closed-door discussions, I would’ve said the exact same thing if CNN”s camera was sitting in the room. What I say privately to my colleagues is the same thing I say publicly,” Cruz said.
https://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.png00Joe Millerhttps://joemiller.us/wp-content/uploads/logotext.pngJoe Miller2013-10-21 01:57:342016-04-11 11:15:58Ted Cruz: GOP’ers Who Want To Implement Obamacare Want to See ‘The American People Suffer’ (+video)
