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Foreclosures Rise 15% In First Six Months

This from Yahoo News:

The number of U.S. households on the verge of losing their homes soared by nearly 15 percent in the first half of the year as more people lost their jobs and were unable to pay their monthly mortgage bills.

The mushrooming foreclosure crisis affected more than 1.5 million homes in the first six months of the year, according to a report released Thursday by foreclosure listing serviceRealtyTrac Inc.

The data show that, despite the Obama administration's plan to encourage the lending industry to prevent foreclosures by handing out $50 billion in subsidies, the nation's housing woes continue to spread. Experts don't expect foreclosures to peak until the middle of next year.

Foreclosure filings rose more than 33 percent in June compared with the same month last year and were up nearly 5 percent from May, RealtyTrac said.

"Despite all the efforts to date, we clearly haven't got a handle on how to address the situation," said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's senior vice president for marketing.

So how's that stimulus and recovery working for you Barry?

Full story here.

Obama, Oh-BUM-Yeah

The world is all a titter over a split second shot of the current POTUS taking in the sights at the G-8 Summit.  He was caught allegedly "checking out" the derriere of a young intern as she passed.  The young lady, a girl from Ipanema.

Ahh, memories of an earlier day perhaps?

Thank You To All My Readers- BluegrassBulletin Is Two Years Old This Week

I want to thank all of you who read, link to, share and email the work published here on The Bluegrass Bulletin.  We are two years old this week.

In those two years many blogs have faded from the scene.  Some new ones have cropped up, only to stop updating articles and eventually have gone dark.  Not The Bluegrass Bulletin.

Other than the occasional times when pressing matters have necessitated that my attention be directed elsewhere, we have published thousands of articles, received thousands of comments and now have a readership which exceeds that of many newspapers.

In the last two years the New Media has begun to take root.  Some have used their first amendment rights with a limited sense of responsibility.  I have striven to bring you news, commentary, opinion and humor with a dedication to quality writing and respect for the privilege you have given me by being a loyal reader.

In the year to come I urge you to participate more, to share your thoughts and feelings and to invite others to come here.  Whether we agree or not, we are a community.

Thank you.

Michael Jackson "The Pervert"

If you haven't seen this yet, take a look.  Representative Peter King, on the King of Pop, Michael Jackson:

Get Ready For Israel To Bomb Iran

The Saudi's have said they will turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over it's nation on their way to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities.  Joe Biden seemed to say that his boss thinks Israel has the right to do just that, clearly a much stronger signal of support for an Israeli attack than has been seen before.

Might this all be a prelude to tougher talks with Iran?  Or might this be the go signal for Israel to send in the bombs.  I fully suspect that the meetings in Russia this week are in part an effort to secure Russian promises not to intervene should Israel attack.

Russia has the 6th largest Jewish population in the world, behind Israel, USA, France, Canada and the UK.

Get ready.  Israel is about to bomb Iran and the world will become a much more dangerous place almost immediately.

FULL STORIES HERE AND HERE

Cynthia McKinney Jailed In Israel

When Cynthia McKinney first splattered onto the national scene she accused President Bush of having advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.  Then she was remembered for having said Al Gore didn't have enough of a "negro tolerance level".

She was defeated as a Congresswoman from Georgia after her anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian/Arab sentiments became widely known.  Her father blamed it all on "J_E_W_S"

After being elected again in 2004 she once again splattered onto the national scene when she was stopped by security after walking around a metal detector at the Longworth House Office Building.  The security officers said she was not wearing the lapel pin of Members of Congress which permit them to avoid the detector.  She hit the security officer.

In May of this year she was a featured speaker at the University of California at Irvine during the Muslim Student Union's program on "Israel: The Politics of Genocide".

Now, according to FoxNews, she sits in an Israeli jail:

Former U.S. lawmaker and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney and several other human rights activists remained in an Israeli prison Thursday after refusing to sign a deportation form that they claim is self-incriminating.

In a press release from the Green Party, McKinney said the form states that the Spirit of Humanity, a Greek-flagged relief boat carrying 21 activists, medical supplies, cement, olive trees and children's toys en route to Gaza, was violating the Israeli blockade and trespassing the country's territorial waters.

"We were in international waters on a boat delivering humanitarian aid to people in Gaza when the Israeli Navy ships surrounded us and illegally threatened us, dismantled our navigation equipment, boarded and confiscated the ship," she said in a statement, adding that they were immediately taken into custody.

"Immigration officials in Israel said they did not want to keep us, but we remain imprisoned," she said.

"State Department and White House officials have not effected our release or taken a strong public stance to condemn the illegal actions of the Israeli Navy of enforcing a blockade of humanitarian assistance to the Palestinians of Gaza, a blockade that has been condemned by President Obama." [h/t Gateway Pundit]

Let's Be Honest About "Health Care"

EDITORIAL

I just saw a TV commercial pushing the message that "It's Time" for everyone to have "health care".  It displayed the politically correct assemblage of racial and age diversity as one "ordinary" citizen after another told their tales of woe.

A working class white guy had lost his job, and now his family didn't have "health care".  An older woman said that her husband had heart trouble and they couldn't afford treatment.  A black woman said that the cost of her "health care" had doubled and "who can afford that".

Let's be honest, what they are talking about is "health insurance" not "health care".  The choice of words is important.  Surely those who support the socialist notion of a government run health maintenance organization (G-HMO) have run these terms through a focus group and learned that by inserting the word "care" in place of "insurance" that personal sympathies run more in favor of their game plan.

And second, we need to be honest about why the costs of health insurance have gone up so much.  The answer is very simple, new and improving technologies have emerged to treat and cure human health issues as a result of the open market place incentive to make a profit on these technologies.  Patients want the benefits of these things and as a result doctors and hospitals buy them.

You can get from home to work on horse back and a horse only costs a few hundred dollars.  Or you can drive there and back in a Mercedes which costs a lot more.  If you want the best medical treatment in the world, you must accept the fact that it will cost more.  The best medical treatment in the world is available only in America.

Now don't go jumping to the wrong conclusion and equate my analogy with the argument that good medical treatment should only be available to those who can afford it.  That's not the point, because that's not the case.  The point is that the more sophisticated and technologically advanced methods of solving a problem will necessarily cost more.  In fact, the high cost of "health insurance" is directly related to the fact that the best medical treatment in the world is available for free to every American.

The government mandates that hospitals cannot turn away a patient who cannot pay.  In other cases the poorest among us already get free medical treatment through medicare, medicaid, medical cards and similar government programs.  Government employees, retirees and military personnel get free medical treatment through government programs too.  And it is precisely because of the way those government mandated or supported programs are run that the cost of health insurance is so high for everybody else.

When a hospital makes available the most technologically advanced medical treatment in the world and is required to give it away free of charge to those who cannot pay for it, guess who ends up paying for those people?  The rest of us.

When the government tells a doctor or a hospital that even though the price of providing a service in the open market is $300 but they will only pay $100 for those covered under a public program, guess who ends up paying the rest?

When the poorest in the country get thousands of dollars a month in medical care absolutely free, guess who is picking up that bill?

The real problem is that the government has decided that through one program after another that millions of Americans must receive free or reduced cost medical treatment in an environment where the open market place has inspired the development of the best medical technologies in the world.  The whole issue then is not "medical care" it's "medical costs" to everybody who has been suffering higher prices for insurance due to the current forms of government "meddling".

Talk of "free government health insurance" for everybody is simply a lie.  You can't really believe that anything is really free can you?  You know somebody will always have to pay for it.  The question is who?  Should those who work pay for those who don't?  We went through a period just a few years ago where we witnessed the success of welfare reform. Government run HMO's would be the largest expansion of welfare in our history.

Take Kentucky for example. The availability of affordable health insurance in Kentucky nearly disappeared a few years ago when a democratic administration insisted upon requiring all health insurance companies to provide coverage to anyone who applied despite pre-existing conditions.  Suddenly, for the payment of a few months premiums, people with long standing diseases were in a position to make these companies pay out millions upon millions of dollars for treating pre-existing illnesses.  This drove many companies out of the Commonwealth, and drove up the price of insurance for the rest of us with the ones that remained.

The cost to the government of insuring everyone will be staggering.  To bring down the cost to the rest of us, it would be much cheaper to re-think the scope of the program.  Here are a few suggestions.

If the Government would just increase the amount of it's reimbursements now being paid under government programs medical providers would not have to pass along the difference to the rest of us, and the government would not have to insure everybody.

Instead of giving hospitals an unfunded mandate to provide free care to those who cannot afford it, the government could jump in and pay for the free care mandated for those who have no insurance and who do not participate under a government sponsored program.  This too is a much smaller group than insuring "everyone".

If the federal government gave every American a dollar for dollar tax credit for any money paid for medical insurance and out of pocket medical payments at the very least they would save the administrative costs of collecting the tax dollars first and then doing the same thing with them. 

And finally the federal government could increase the tax breaks given to employers who provide medical insurance to employees free of charge and increase the tax benefits given to insurance companies for the amounts they pay in claims.  This would immediately put more earned income into circulation, help the economy, avoid creating another bloated federal bureacracy and speed the payment of claims thus reducing costs to medical providers in the area of claims processing and collections.

The heartfelt commercials crying that people need free "medical care" are emotional appeals packed with lies.  It's time to be honest about the matter.  

Video Of Woman With Baby Squirrel In Her Cleavage

According to the KyPost, as the woman in this video was being questioned by police she kept tucking a baby squirrel into her cleavage. Take a look:

Is Jesse Jackson Being A Racist?

In response to the Supreme Court's decision which overturned an appellate court ruling which had given a thumbs up to affirmative action in the New Haven firefighter's case (Ricci vs. DeStefano), and in tacit support of Judge Sonya Sotomayor, who had participated in that decision, Jesse Jackson has written a piece for the Chicago Sun Times.

Read his words for yourself and then tell me, is he being racist?

For hundreds of years, white males have enjoyed more than 95 percent of the best jobs, the best housing, the best incomes, the best health care, whether they were best suited or not. When small steps are taken to level the playing field, the court determines that no inconvenience to white applicants is permissible.

What has bedeviled us these last 30 years since Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke is the notion that any pen-and-paper test can reveal everything you need to know in order to assess a candidate's ability to lead. And so we persist with the legal fictions that every qualification can be numerically assessed and that history counts for nothing.

The decision does not address the big questions about affirmative action, namely: How much may white employees be inconvenienced in order to rectify centuries of past discrimination?

Our penchant for rugged individualism and laissez-faire survival of the fittest seduces us into believing that every person is entitled to every benefit society has to offer and that no individual should pay a price for the greater good of the society as a whole.

This reasoning depends on a hyperindividualistic interpretation of American rights. Blacks were enslaved as a group. They were segregated as a group. They were held in economic and political subjugation in the South for decades following Reconstruction as a group. But now that we have reached the enlightened 21st century, remedies for these crimes cannot take the group stigma against blacks into account. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution protects individuals and not groups. We disagree.

Perhaps it is time to scrap the entire legal analysis of voluntary efforts to address discrimination. Perhaps we should permit employers and schools to devise plans to foster inclusion that straightforwardly account for past discrimination.

FDA Warns Of Serious Danger From Using Tylenol

The actual drug found in Tylenol is acetaminophen.  It's use is the leading cause of liver failure in the United States, according to a recent report, which says that this drug sends over 56,000 people to the emergency room annually.

Concerns include the overdosage which some people cause in themselves by taking acetaminophen along with other over the counter cold remedies which may also include the drug.

Please see the entire report below if you or your family use this medicine.

FULL STORY HERE