#2 - The WellPoint Biz Model: Rescind Breast Cancer Coverage
Tens of thousands of women were dropped from their WellPoint health insurance plans as soon as they were diagnosed with breast cancer. Virtually all of the patients had paid their premiums and have never had any problems with payments. The disclosures come to light after a recent investigation by Reuters showed that another health insurance company, Assurant Health, similarly targeted HIV-positive policyholders for rescission. Full Story
#3 - No Taxes for General Electric
So-called "free" trade laws are coming into pay as General Electric (parent company of NBC-Universal) utilizes financial tricks that allow the mega company to claim a $408 million loss while actually earning a profit of almost $11 billion dollars. It has been noted that MSNBC has been rather favorable to the Obama administration as increasing pressure mounts to repeal "free" trade agreements. Full Story
#4 - GOP Chair: Blacks "Have No Reason" to Vote Republican
"You really don't have a reason to, to be honest -- we haven't done a very good job of really giving you one. True? True," Republican National Chairman Michael Steele told 200 DePaul University students, "For the last 40-plus years we had a 'Southern Strategy' that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South. Well, guess what happened in 1992, folks, 'Bubba' went back home to the Democratic Party and voted for Bill Clinton." Full Story
#5 - Earth Day Has Sold Out
Today is the 40th Earth Day. The observance started out in an environmental movement that was viewed as anti-business. But today, not only is a "green" label trendy but global corporations and organizations are co-opting the environment message for profit. Full Story also:
April 1 (Bloomberg) -- After months of litigation and political scrutiny, the Federal Reserve yesterday ended a policy of secrecy over its Bear Stearns Cos. bailout.
In a 4:30 p.m. announcement in a week of congressional recess and religious holidays, the central bank released details of securities bought to aid Bear Stearns’s takeover by JPMorgan Chase & Co. Bloomberg News sued the Fed for that information.
The Fed’s vehicle known as Maiden Lane LLC has securities backed by mortgages from lenders including Washington Mutual Inc. and Countrywide Financial Corp., loans that were made with limited borrower documentation. More than $1 billion of them are backed by “jumbo” mortgages written by Thornburg Mortgage Inc., which now carry the lowest investment-grade rating. Jumbo loans were larger than government-sponsored mortgage buyers such as Fannie Mae could finance -- $417,000 at the time.
“The Fed absorbed that risk on its balance sheet and is now seen to be holding problematic, legacy assets,” said Vincent Reinhart, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington who was the central bank’s monetary- affairs director from 2001 to 2007. “There is both an impairment to its balance sheet and its reputation.”
The Bear Stearns deal marked a turning point in the financial crisis for the Fed. By putting taxpayers at risk in financing the rescue, the central bank was engaging in fiscal policy, normally the domain of Congress and the U.S. Treasury, said Marvin Goodfriend, a former Richmond Fed policy adviser who is now an economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
200,000 new jobs will be announced today, half of those are temporary Census positions. Critics say that's a drop in the bucket.
When March employment figures are released Friday by the Department of Labor, analysts are expecting to see the biggest U.S. job gains in more than two years.
But perhaps half the 200,000 or so positions expected to be added to payrolls may be the byproduct of a government effort that has turned into a fortuitous job generator: the U.S. census.
The constitutionally mandated nationwide head count arrives this year at a crucial time -- after the start of the country's economic recovery, but before private-sector employers have created many jobs. That's a stroke of luck for the Obama administration, which has been criticized for failing to revive the labor market. And it's a windfall for the 700,000 temporary employees the census expects to hire, although most of the jobs will last only two to six weeks.
This year's census isn't just about counting heads, it's helping create jobs in an economy that needs them badly.
Microsoft has hit out at Google's Chrome browser, claiming that it doesn't respect users' privacy
Microsoft recently posted a video called "Google Chrome Steals Your Privacy" to its TechNet Website. The video explained why Microsoft didn't trust Chrome's privacy and used Internet Explorer 8 as a comparison.
The video has since disappeared but not before Ars Technica saw it and dissected the accusations made. Ars reports that the main accusation Microsoft makes is that Google's move to consolidate both the search and address bar means more of your information is being sent to Google. IE8, on the other hand, keeps these separate and sends less of your information to the search provider.
"As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a Web debugging proxy] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google," Ars cites IE product manager Pete LePage as saying. "I haven't even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I'm visiting."
Next LePage shows us how different things look when you do the same thing using Internet Explorer 8. He begins to type the same address into the URL bar and sure enough, nothing is sent to Microsoft until he presses enter.
The ruling was also a rebuff to President Obama who criticized Bush's surveillance program while running for President. Obama's Justice Department argued that courts lacked the power to decide whether the program was legal because any evidence of actual wiretapping was a secret that could not be disclosed without damaging national security. The Justice Department declined to say whether it would appeal today's ruling
The Bush administration wiretapped a U.S.-based Islamic charity under an illegal surveillance program that was not authorized by Congress or the courts, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled today.
The ruling by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker marked the first time that a court has found that the government illegally wiretapped an individual or organization since President George W. Bush authorized warrantless wiretapping of suspected foreign terrorists in 2001.
The government inadvertently sent a classified document in 2004 to the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, reportedly showing that two of its lawyers had been wiretapped. Several months after the surveillance began, the government classified Al-Haramain as a terrorist organization, a description its leaders called false.
The now-defunct charity, which was headquartered in Oregon, returned the document at the government's request and could not use it as evidence in a lawsuit it filed over the wiretapping. But Walker said today that Al-Haramain had established, through public statements by officials and nonclassified evidence, that the government had intercepted its calls without obtaining the court warrant required by a 1978 law.
Bush acknowledged in December 2005 that he had ordered the National Security Agency, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to intercept phone calls and e-mails between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without a warrant. He claimed the power to override the 1978 law's requirement of advance court approval for all such surveillance.
Today, Walker said Bush had lacked that authority.
Obama adopts the "Drill, Baby, Drill" policy as the administration opens up the East Coast and Alaska to offshore oil drilling. This new policy fly in the face of his 2008 campaign stance. Between his coal advocacy and push for the corporate-friendly "Cap and Trade" initiative, is it time to stop considering the Democratic President pro-environment?
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to open vast expanses of water along the Atlantic coastline, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and the north coast of Alaska to oil and natural gas drilling, much of it for the first time, officials said Tuesday.
The proposal — a compromise that will please oil companies and domestic drilling advocates but anger some residents of affected states and many environmental organizations — would end a longstanding moratorium on oil exploration along the East Coast from the northern tip of Delaware to the central coast of Florida, covering 167 million acres of ocean.
Under the plan, the coastline from New Jersey northward would remain closed to all oil and gas activity. So would the Pacific Coast, from Mexico to the Canadian border.
The environmentally sensitive Bristol Bay in southwestern Alaska would be protected and no drilling would be allowed under the plan, officials said. But large tracts in the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Ocean north of Alaska — nearly 130 million acres — would be eligible for exploration and drilling after extensive studies.
The proposal is to be announced by President Obama and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Wednesday, but administration officials agreed to preview the details on the condition that they not be identified.
But even as Mr. Obama curries favors with pro-drilling interests, he risks a backlash from some coastal governors, senators and environmental advocates, who say that the relatively small amounts of oil to be gained in the offshore areas are not worth the environmental risks.
The rumor mill is churning today as news of a CDMA iPhone running on Verizon will be manufactured by Pegatron in China while a whole new AT&T model, made by Foxconn, will also drop in the summer/fall timeframe. the Journal notes that the two new devices will be exactly the same except, obviously, the CDMA version will lack a SIM card.
We've seen weird leaks of an iPhone 4G screen - something longer than the current iPhone screen with a front-facing camera - but nothing concrete. We also need to take this with a grain of salt. Asian manufacturers enjoy talking up their connections with certain companies because it gives them a slight boost in the equities markets, so this could be a pump and dump.
Those who own an older PS3 version and currently run Linux on the console will want to listen up: a new firmware update coming down later this week will kill that installation.
According to Sony, it plans to release PlayStation 3 firmware version 3.21 on Thursday to achieve one goal: eliminate the "Other OS" option currently available in all pre-Slim models of the video game console. The feature allowed PS3 owners to install an operating system--in almost every case, Linux--onto the PlayStation 3.
Warned About Abuse, Vatican Failed to Defrock Priest
Top Vatican officials — including the future Pope Benedict XVI — did not defrock a priest who molested as many as 200 deaf boys, even though several American bishops repeatedly warned them that failure to act on the matter could embarrass the church, according to church files newly unearthed as part of a lawsuit.
The internal correspondence from bishops in Wisconsin directly to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope, shows that while church officials tussled over whether the priest should be dismissed, their highest priority was protecting the church from scandal.
The documents emerge as Pope Benedict is facing other accusations that he and direct subordinates often did not alert civilian authorities or discipline priests involved in sexual abuse when he served as an archbishop in Germany and as the Vatican’s chief doctrinal enforcer.
The voters said no at the polls but Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa still imposed a "carbon surcharge" on monthly water bills in the name of "green" despite the fact it was a crony pay-off. Energy prices for citizens and businesses have increased 70 percent in 2 years in a city that is losing jobs, people, and businesses daily. Now another in a series rate hikes is being proposed under the threat of city-wide bankruptcy. Al Gore is giving the unpopular increases a "green" justification as other mayors look on.
from Huffington Post: In a rebuke to Mayor Villaraigosa, the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to review his proposal to raise DWP rates. The LA Times reports:
On a 15-0 vote, the council asserted jurisdiction over the Department of Water and Power board's decision to approve the first of four increases over the next year to help pay for renewable energy and other expenditures.
Several council members said they were especially disturbed by Villaraigosa's warning, sent to them in writing the night before the vote, that a failure to let the rate hikes stand would cause the DWP to renege on its plan to provide $73 million to the city's strained general fund, which pays for basic services such as public safety and parks.
This has become a particularly contentious issue in recent days, especially as the Mayor shifts focus from the hikes a s a Green initiative, to one essential for the city's economic survival. The LA Weekly weighs in:
Funny, because Mayor V. has been saying for months that the word bankruptcy is not in his vocabulary -- that it's not going to happen under his watch. Of course, he did not tie his DWP rate increases to the city's budget problems -- which would make the hikes look like indirect taxes -- until Tuesday.
Regardless of the Mayor's change in tone, his initiative has still received the endorsement of heavy-hitter environmentalists like Al Gore and the Sierra Club. In a blog post for the HuffPost LA, Bill Corcoran of the Sierra Club writes:
By supporting the Mayor's proposed investments in clean energy now, members of the Los Angeles City Council can demonstrate the foresight to protect their constituents from drastic and avoidable rate increases in the future--especially those low-income families that could be devastated by such a hardship. This proposal addresses concerns about increasing rates in the midst of tough economic times by incentivizing energy efficiency programs, which allows families to manage the bottom line of their DWP bills as rates are marginally increased.
Two U.S. senators met with President Obama on Thursday to push for a national ID card with biometric information such as a fingerprint, hand scan, or iris scan that all employers would be required to verify.
In an opinion article published in Friday's edition of the Washington Post, Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) say the new identification cards will "ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs" and "dramatically decrease illegal immigration."
Schumer and Graham pitched the idea to President Obama during a private meeting Thursday at the White House. Graham said afterward that Obama "welcomed" their proposal for a new ID card law; the White House said in a statement that the senators' plan was "promising."
