A Laughing Stock Health Care Report Card

Opinion/Editorial

 

 How self indulging is this if not downright self righteous on the part of the New York Times editorial board this morning.Talk about carrying the water for the Obama administration they have the audacity to give a report card on what is known as the 2010 Affordable Care Act aka Universal Health Care with everyone with a brain in their heads knows it was UNCONSTITUTIONAL on its merits.Even when the law hasn't totally been enacted yet.
 But the NYT editorial board likes to think otherwise with the title "Report Card on Health Care Reform."
 It begins "Republican leaders in Congress regularly denounce the 2010 Affordable Care Act and vow to block money to carry it out or even to repeal it. Those political attacks ignore the considerable benefits delivered to millions of people since the law’s enactment three years ago Saturday. The main elements of the law do not kick in until Jan. 1, 2014, when many millions of uninsured people will gain coverage. Yet it has already thrown a lifeline to people at high risk of losing insurance or being uninsured, including young adults and people with chronic health problems, and it has made a start toward reforming the costly, dysfunctional American health care system."
 Probably because no one wants this monstrosity of Government intervention into our lives in reference to the health scare crap.If the main elements of the law hasn't been enacted then why is there this report card.Another question why reform something that didn't need reforming liberalism at its best.
 Here is the NYT example of success of this fraudulent law:
 EXPANDING COVERAGE Starting in 2010, all insurers and employers that offer dependent coverage were required to offer coverage to dependent children up to age 26. An estimated 6.6 million people ages 19 through 25 have been able to stay on or join their parents’ plans as result, with more than 3 million previously uninsured young adults getting health insurance. The law requires private health insurers to provide free preventive care, without co-pays or deductibles. Some 71 million Americans have received at least one free preventive service, like a mammogram or a flu shot, and an additional 34 million older Americans got free preventive services in 2012 under Medicare.
 So in other words kids stay on their Mommy and Daddy's plan instead of being man enough or woman enough to get their own plans.
Here is where it gets laughable
SAVING CONSUMERS MONEY Private insurers are required by the law to spend at least 80 to 85 percent of their premium revenues on medical claims or quality improvements, or they must pay a rebate to consumers. In 2012, insurers had to pay $1.1 billion in rebates, an average of $151 per family. Although Republicans contend the law will drive up insurance premiums, thus far it seems to have reduced them. Any insurer that wants to increase its premiums by 10 percent or more for people who buy their own policies must justify the increase to state or federal officials. As a result, the proportion of rate filings that sought increases of 10 percent or more fell from 75 percent in 2010 to 34 percent in 2012, and it is expected to be even lower this year. The average premium increase in 2012 was 30 percent lower than in 2010.  
 Thats the laughing stock it saved money but cost those of us who work for a living alot more.
 As usual this OPED lies and deceives their lame brained readers who are so dumb they cannot figure things out on their own and need Big brother Government to look after them.    

Newsmax Tells The Truth

Pew: MSNBC Almost Entirely Dominated By Opinion

Monday, 18 Mar 2013 02:30 PM

By Bill Hoffmann Newsmax.com

 

 

If you’re looking for straight and unbiased news reporting, you may want to avoid MSNBC.
A new Pew Research Center study has found the liberal-leaning cable network is filled with opinion and commentary for 85 percent of its airtime.

Only a paltry 15 percent of MSNBC’s programming stuck to “factual reporting, according to Pew.

Fox News, by comparison, had a breakdown of 55 percent commentary and opinion and 45 percent "factual reporting."

CNN was the only one of the big three cable news networks to broadcast more straight news with 54 percent of its programming dedicated to factual reporting and 46 percent to opinion and commentary.

Pew’s findings are based on observing a half-hour of daytime programming for the first five months of 2012 and the first five minutes of primetime "general news shows."

Pew also found that in 2012, MSNBC devoted 57 percent of all its coverage to the presidential campaign, with Fox devoting 37 percent and CNN 30 percent.

A separate Pew examination of programming in December 2012 found MSNBC “by far the most opinionated of the three networks, with nearly 90 percent of its primetime coverage coming in the form of opinion or commentary.

“And that remains the case with many of its packaged segments. Host Rachel Maddow, for example, often begins her show with a lengthy segment combining a monologue with video clips that can last for seven minutes or longer,’’ Pew said.

The findings are part of Pew's annual State of the News Media report.

 

To look at the report go to stateofthemedia.org

 

Budget Battle As Put Forth By NYT

Opinion/Editorial



 

 Here is another area where the New York Times is adding their very much unwanted opinion on a battle on the budget fight going on in Washington D.C.
 This mornings OPED is entitled "The Real Spending Problem" as if the NYT editorial board has a remedy to the fixation of our so called members of Congress has with wasting our tax dollars hand over foot.In fact in the past no surprise to anyone here that the NYT has endorsed some lame brained ways of wasting our tax dollars one thing to remember is that liberals and leftists love spending other people's $$$.
 Their hilarious solution begins "The budget fight in Washington, which entered a new round last week as Senate Democrats and House Republicans introduced dueling plans, is usually cast as a contest between raising taxes and cutting spending. In fact, the taxes-versus-spending distinction is largely meaningless.Each year, the government doles out tax breaks worth $1.1 trillion. That is more than the cost of Medicare and Medicaid combined. It is more than Social Security. It tops the defense budget, and it tops the budget for nondefense discretionary programs, which include most everything else.Tax breaks work like spending. Giving a deduction for certain activities, like homeownership or retirement savings, is the same as writing a government check to subsidize those activities. Functionally, they mimic entitlements. Like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, they are available, year in and year out, in full, to all who qualify. Yet in budget talks, Republicans ignore tax entitlements, which flow mostly to high-income taxpayers, while pushing to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security."
 Constitutionalists such as me prefer cutting the spending while leftists and RINOS (all now one in the same) along with the NYT are infactuated with raising our taxes.You can't be serious NYT taxes versus spending distinction is largely meaningless I can see why to you it's meaningless because the Government throws $$$ at the frivolous programs that keep establishment elected.HELLO NYT you can't be friggin serious there is a huge huge difference between deductions for homeownwership and retirement savings and your BS entitlement spending because those deductions are EARNED by those of us who WORK welfare or SSI is not earned sitting on one's ass.
 Tax breaks are good because the $$$ goes to those that earn it as opposed to the Government spending it.Thats common sense but I don't expect the establishment to understand that as well as the NYT.
 It continues with the same old same old left wing playbook tactic "President Obama and Congressional Democrats have rightly asserted that tax breaks are ripe for cuts that could raise revenue without hurting most taxpayers. One method, as presented in the Senate Democratic plan, is to convert tax deductions, which increase in value as income rises, to tax credits, which would provide benefits more broadly and evenly among low-, middle- and high-income households.

Tax deductions, however, are only one kind of tax break. Many others take the form of arrangements that allow wealthy taxpayers to either escape tax entirely on specific transactions or to defer it indefinitely."

 Let me correct the NYT as usual.Tax breaks is $$$$ in our pockets tax credits are a figment of the establishments imagination.Once again common sense.

Lack Of Understanding By NYT

Opinion/Editorial

 

 

 

 

  Talk about ignorance being addictive well it is to the addicts at the New York Times Editorial board apparently.Ignorance galore as far as their lead OPED this morning is concerned."Repeal the Military Force Law" is the title of the filth today.
  They begin "Three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress approved the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was enacted with good intentions — to give President George W. Bush the authority to invade Afghanistan and go after Al Qaeda and the Taliban rulers who sheltered and aided the terrorists who had attacked the United States.But over time, that resolution became warped into something else: the basis for a vast overreaching of power by one president, Mr. Bush, and less outrageous but still dangerous policies by another, Barack Obama.
 Obama is the one who is abusing the power Bush never did blame game to Bush continues.
  In addition to blaming Bush the NYT is still sticking to their most famous lie "Mr. Bush used the authorization law as an excuse to kidnap hundreds of people — guilty and blameless people alike — and throw them into secret prisons where many were tortured. He used it as a pretext to open the Guantánamo Bay camp and to eavesdrop on Americans without bothering to obtain a warrant. He claimed it as justification for the invasion of Iraq, twisting intelligence to fabricate a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks.
 Just to remind everyone of the intelligence that these lame brained idiots are refering to was the intell that the CLINTON administration had so blame Clinton oh wait crickets are chriping.
 Here is the remainder of the rant "Unlike Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama does not go as far as to claim that the Constitution gives him the inherent power to do all those things. But he has relied on the 2001 authorization to use drones to kill terrorists far from the Afghan battlefield, and to claim an unconstitutional power to kill American citizens in other countries based only on suspicion that they are or might become terrorist threats, without judicial review.

The concern that many, including this page, expressed about the authorization is coming true: that it could become the basis for a perpetual, ever-expanding war that undermined the traditional constraints on government power. The result is an unintelligible policy without express limits or protective walls.

Last Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder said the president would soon shed more light on his “targeted killing” policy. Mr. Obama needs to. In the last few weeks, confusion over these issues has been vividly on display. On one hand, the administration has said it would use lethal force only when capturing a terrorist was impossible, and it did arrest Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden who once served as a spokesman for Al Qaeda, and arraigned him on Friday in federal court in Manhattan. The Washington Post reported last week that counterterrorism officials considered using the authorization law as the basis for the government’s authority to kill Mokhtar Belmokhtar, a militant leader in Algeria and Mali, but decided it did not apply because he was not part of Al Qaeda or an associated group.

But the administration still has not fully disclosed to Congress the legal documents on which the targeted killing program is based. And in that same article, The Post said the administration was debating whether it could stretch the law to make it apply to groups that had no connection, or only slight ones, to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks.

A big part of the problem is that the authorization to use military force is too vague. It gives the president the power to attack “nations, organizations or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on Sept. 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

Making the law more specific, however, would only further enshrine the notion of a war without end. And, as Jeh Johnson, then counsel to the defense secretary, said in a speech last November, “War must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs.”

The right solution is for Congress to repeal the 2001 authorization. It could wait to do that until American soldiers have left Afghanistan, which is scheduled, too slowly, for the end of 2014. Better yet, Congress could repeal it now, effective upon withdrawal.

 It would be nice if President Obama understood the Constitution instead of high jacking it for his uses.

 

 

NYT OPED Board Too Stupid To See This Coming

Opinion/Editorial

   It took a professor from Northwestern University to make these blooming idiots at the New York Times editorial board how big our Government has become.The professor Monica Persad an assoicate professor of sociology and faculty fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University the title of her piece "Land of Plenty (of Government)" is an eye opener.
  She begins "Why do European countries have lower levels of poverty and inequality than the United States? We used to think this was a result of American anti-government sentiment, which produced a government too small to redistribute income or to attend to the needs of the poor. But over the past three decades scholars have discovered that our government wasn’t as small as we thought. Historians, sociologists and political scientists have all uncovered evidence that points to a surprisingly large governmental presence in the United States throughout the 20th century and even earlier, in some cases surpassing what we find in Western Europe.
  No kidding government was always getting bigger especially under left wing Democrats more like eastern Europe.
  Persad goes on "For example, European banks did not have to contend with regulations separating commercial and investment banking, as American banks did under the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933. Until the 1980s taxes on capital income were higher in the United States than in most European countries, where taxes on labor were and still are higher. American bankruptcy law has been harder on creditors and easier on debtors than any of the countries of Europe, even after bankruptcy reform here in 2005. Or consider the famous case of the thalidomide babies in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Thalidomide was a drug given to pregnant women for nausea. It caused devastating birth defects, from stunted limbs to spina bifida, and many babies died. Thalidomide was widely available in Europe and produced thousands of cases of birth defects there. But the Food and Drug Administration kept thalidomide off the American market, successfully using aggressive governmental intervention to protect children from a pharmaceutical company with a dangerous product. They would be in their early 50s now, those babies saved by the F.D.A. I wonder sometimes how many of them are walking around today complaining about big government.
But if Europe has been so favorable to business, how did it end up with lower poverty and inequality rates? To understand this, we have to let go of the idea that governments are the opposite of markets, or that welfare spending kills capitalist production. European countries do have larger public welfare states, and this brings down their poverty and inequality rates. But in return, European corporations received a gift: a political economy biased against consumption and geared toward production.
Beginning after World War II, Germany, France and several other countries aimed to restrain private consumption and channel profits toward export industries, in a bid to reconstruct their war-devastated economies. Loose regulation was part of this business-friendly strategy. Some scholars have even called these European policies “supply side,” in that they focused on incentives for producers, at the expense of demand-side measures that would benefit consumers. They were one ingredient in Europe’s spectacular postwar growth.
The United States, on the other hand, developed a consumer economy based on government-subsidized mortgage credit, a kind of “mortgage Keynesianism.” Increasing consumption was a Depression-era response to a problem that puzzled observers at the time. On the one hand, unemployment and hunger were everywhere. On the other, the government was actively engaging in crop destruction to raise prices — like the great pig slaughter of 1933, in which millions of piglets and pregnant sows were destroyed so that hog prices would go up. In the words of Huey P. Long, the populist governor and senator of Louisiana: “Why is it? Why? Too much to eat and more people hungry than during the drought years; too much to wear and more people naked; too many houses and more people homeless than ever before. Why? This is a land of super-abundance and super-plenty. Then why is it also a land of starvation and nakedness and homelessness?”
The true answer to Long’s question — at least as far as we understand it today — is that a restricted money supply was constraining the economy. But observers at the time thought that the problem was that wealth was concentrated in so few hands that consumers did not have purchasing power to buy the goods that lay rotting in the fields. Increasing consumer purchasing power became the paradigm that drove economic policy during the New Deal and for decades after. A central element of this was increasing homeownership by encouraging citizens to take on large debts for the purchase of homes, beginning with the creation of the Federal Housing Administration under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt thought the F.H.A. could revive the economy; the chairman of the Federal Reserve at the time called it “the wheel within the wheel to move the whole economic engine.” Where Europeans focused on restraining consumption, Americans saw consumption as the machine that drives growth — and we still do.
Understanding this fundamental divergence between the United States and Europe sheds new light on several episodes of recent history. It suggests that in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan tried to deregulate industry, he was actually pushing the United States in the direction of Europe. He was successful to some degree, although partly because European regulation moved in our direction as much as we moved in theirs. This history also explains the current resistance in Europe, especially Germany, toward Keynesian stimulus. One might imagine that countries with large welfare spending would be happy to raise spending even more on government programs. But the more fundamental goal of the postwar European political economy has been to rebuild industrial production through a focus on investments and exports. Keynesian spending to stimulate consumption is foreign to this goal.
A consumption bias, economists argue, is not a bad thing, as it leads to cheaper goods for Americans. And after all, someone has to do the consuming — otherwise, whom would the Germans and Chinese export to? But a consumption bias has distributional consequences that we are only beginning to understand. Some studies suggest that it undermines support for the welfare state, because as consumers come to depend on private assets — especially their homes — for their well-being, they appear to become less interested in providing for the welfare of others.
A consumption bias also focuses the efforts of the left on increasing private consumption. It was activists on the left who pushed for greater credit access for African-Americans and women in the 1960s and 1970s, and rightly so, because if credit is how Americans make ends meet, then those without access to credit are economically sidelined. But credit access does nothing for the truly poor, those who are not deemed creditworthy. Someone has to do the consuming, but if one country ends up as the world’s consumer for a long time, as America has, a political tradition can take root that works against the interests of the poor.
Pointing out all the ways in which the American government has actually been more interventionist than European governments seems to alarm partisans on both the left and the right. Activists on the right can no longer pretend that American history is about small government. Those on the left are equally alarmed, because pointing out the ways in which the government has been hostile to business can undermine their calls to be even more hostile to business. But poverty reduction is not about hostility to business. It’s about strategies like promoting saving over borrowing. We don’t need regulations as loose as postwar Europe’s, but if reducing poverty and inequality is the goal, we do need to rethink our love affair with consumption.
  Consumption that is paid for by us the taxpayer for those who dont work and sit on their collective asses and have no life
 

How About Supporting The Second Amendment For Once

Opinion/Editorial

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

   Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed

   These are two very fundamental GOD given rights that we cherish in a free and open society in this great country.Media outlets especially the New York Times under the freedom of speech/press clause of the first amendment not only cherish but take full advantage of this right.Some may say too much or not enough it depends on one's political view.
   In their lead OPED this morning the New York Times doesnot fullly respect nor as always correctly interpret the blessings and rights under these two amendments."Violent, Drunk and Holding a Gun" is the title of their mindless rant this morning.
   The dirty little secret is that liberal socialist members of the biased lame stream media like the aforementioned NYT don't want anyone including sound minded individuals (no one for that matter) to own guns.God forbid that we violate the rights of the NYT though they could careless about other Americans rights unless they fall under their corrupt political and ideological views.

 It begins "Multiple mass shootings by deranged young men have made keeping firearms out of the hands of mentally ill people a big part of the gun debate.Given the enormity of those crimes, that is understandable. Federal law does, in fact, prohibit gun ownership by mentally ill people if a judge has found them to be dangerous or they have been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. President Obama has also issued executive orders to ensure that federal background checks include complete information on people barred from owning guns for mental health reasons and to clarify that federal law allows health care providers to report patients’ credible threats of violence to the authorities. But a focus on mass murder, while critical, does not get at the broader issue of gun violence, including the hundreds of single-victim murders, suicides, nonfatal shootings and other gun crimes that occur daily in the United States. And focusing on the mentally ill, most of whom are not violent, overlooks people who are at demonstrably increased risk of committing violent crimes but are not barred by federal law from buying and having guns.
  The NYT here means everyone don't be fooled by their intentions.So only criminals would have weapons.
  Here is the rest of their BS rant "These would include people who have been convicted of violent misdemeanors including assaults, and those who are alcohol abusers. Unless guns are also kept from these high-risk people, preventable gun violence will continue.

VIOLENT MISDEMEANORS Federal law prohibits felons from buying and possessing firearms; it also bars people convicted of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence. But it permits gun purchase and ownership by people convicted of other violent misdemeanors, defined variously under state laws, including assault and battery, brandishing a weapon or making open, credible threats of violence. Many people convicted of violent misdemeanors were originally charged with felonies but then convicted of lesser charges because of plea bargains. And research shows that people who have been convicted of any misdemeanors and who then legally buy a handgun are more likely to commit crimes after that gun purchase than buyers with no prior convictions.

California provides a case study. It changed its law in 1991 to prohibit individuals convicted of violent misdemeanors from buying guns for 10 years after the conviction. Before that, a study showed that gun buyers with even a single prior misdemeanor conviction were nearly five times as likely as those with no criminal history to be arrested for gun-related or other violent crimes. After the law was enacted, a significant decrease in arrests was attributed to the denial of gun sales to people with misdemeanor records.

ALCOHOL ABUSE Federal law prohibits the purchase and possession of guns by anyone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance.” But the statute ignores alcohol abuse. That is also a mistake. The evidence linking alcohol abuse and gun-related violence is compelling. One study found that subjects who had ever been in trouble at work for drinking or were ever hospitalized for alcohol abuse were at increased risk of committing homicide and suicide.

Other studies also suggest that alcohol abuse is a factor in the association between gun ownership and the criminal justice system. The difficulty in policing alcohol abuse for purposes of gun control is that there is no precise definition of abuse. Pennsylvania, however, provides a useful example. It bars gun purchases by those who have been convicted of three or more drunken driving offenses within a five-year period. That criterion identifies drinkers with demonstrated tendencies toward recklessness and lawbreaking.

President Obama has instructed the Justice Department to review the federal prohibitions on gun ownership and to make legislative and executive recommendations “to ensure dangerous people aren’t slipping through the cracks.” The answers are already out there.

 So the intention of this President and the rest of the lame stream medias agenda rid society and LAW ABIDING citizens of their rights.

 But wait the NYT has never ever been accused of lying or of a liberal leaning bias in their reporting (not opinion/editorials we all know where they stand as COMMUNISTS) no not the NYT thats fit to print.GIVE ME A BREAK!

NYT Leads Arguements Against Government Cuts In $pending

Opinion/Editorial

 

 Here comes the excuses from the Big Government and its mouthpiece the NewYork Times this morning as to why Washington cannot curb it's spending of our tax dollars.This mornings lead oped has a whole list of excuses "The Real Cost of Shrinking Government."
 In less than two weeks, a cleaver known as the sequester will fall on some of the most important functions of the United States government. About $85 billion will be cut from discretionary spending over the next seven months, reducing defense programs by about 8 percent and domestic programs by about 5 percent. Only a few things will be spared, including some basic safety-net benefits like Social Security, as well as pay for enlisted military personnel.
 Where the NYT mentions some basic safety net is the frivolous spending by liberal Democrtas and go along to get along RINO members of the Republican party is the reason why they are there they support those on SSI-disability and welfare who don't belong on the system.I find it funny how the NYT use military enlisted personels pay to help forward their BS.
 The sequester will not stop to contemplate whether these are the right programs to cut; it is entirely indiscriminate, slashing programs whether they are bloated or essential. The military budget, for example, should be reduced substantially, but thoughtfully, considering the nation’s needs. Instead, every weapons system, good or bad, will be hurt, as will troop training and maintenance.
 No way NYT we need to cut BS spending like welfare SSI-disability those who are on the system but can work it figures they still want to cut military spending.The government needs also to stop bailing out big banks with our tax $$$$.
 More scare tactics and BS fed lies "These cuts, which will cost the economy more than one million jobs over the next two years, are the direct result of the Republican demand in 2011 to shrink the government at any cost, under threat of a default on the nation’s debt. Many Republicans say they would still prefer the sequester to replacing half the cuts with tax revenue increases. But the government spending they disdain is not an abstract concept. In a few days, the cuts will begin affecting American life and security in significant ways."
  Always the loss of jobs excuse from these laimbrained idiots and blame the republicans again and again BS.LOL and hiw the cuts will effect us in just a few days in significant ways LOLOLOL!
  Now this BS according to the research (or lack there of) by the NYT  "Here are some examples from the government departments most affected:

NATIONAL SECURITY Two-week furloughs for most law-enforcement personnel will reduce Coast Guard operations, including drug interdictions and aid to navigation, by 25 percent. Cutbacks in Customs agents and airport security checkpoints will “substantially increase passenger wait times,” the Homeland Security Department said, creating delays of as much as an hour at busy airports. The Border Patrol will have to reduce work hours by the equivalent of 5,000 agents a year.

The Energy Department’s nuclear security programs will be cut by $900 million, creating delays in refurbishing the weapons stockpile, and cutting security at manufacturing sites. Environmental cleanup at nuclear weapons sites in Washington State, Tennessee, South Carolina and Idaho will be delayed.

AIR TRAFFIC About 10 percent of the Federal Aviation Administration’s work force of 47,000 employees will be on furlough each day, including air traffic controllers, to meet a $600 million cut. The agency says it will be forced to reduce air traffic across the country, resulting in delays and disruptions, particularly at peak travel times.

CRIMINAL JUSTICE Every F.B.I. employee will be furloughed for nearly three weeks over the course of the year, the equivalent of 7,000 employees not working each day. The cut to the F.B.I. of $550 million will reduce the number of background checks on gun buyers that the bureau can perform, and reduce response times on cyberintrusion and counterterrorism investigations.

A cut of $338 million will mean more than a two-week furlough for 37,000 prison employees. This will result in lockdowns at federal prisons across the country, increasing the chances for violence and risks to guards, and preventing the opening of three new prison buildings.

Federal prosecutors will handle 2,600 fewer cases, because of furloughs resulting from a $100 million cut. That means thousands of criminals and civil violators will not face justice, and less money will be collected in fines.

EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION About 70,000 children will lose access to Head Start, and 14,000 teachers and workers will be laid off, because of a $424 million cut. Parents of about 30,000 low-income children will lose child-care assistance.

HEALTH AND SAFETY A cut of $350 million to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will mean 25,000 fewer breast and cervical cancer screenings for low-income women; 424,000 fewer H.I.V. tests; and the purchase of 540,000 fewer doses of vaccine for flu, hepatitis and measles. Community health centers will be cut by $120 million, meaning that about 900,000 fewer patients lacking insurance will receive primary care.

A three-week furlough of all food safety employees will produce a shortage of meat, poultry and eggs, pushing prices higher and harming restaurants and grocers. The Agriculture Department warns that public health could be affected by the inevitable black-market sales of uninspected food.Several air-monitoring sites will be shut down, as will more than 100 water-quality projects around the country. About $100 million will be cut from Superfund enforcement, allowing companies to evade their responsibilities to clean up environmental disasters.

RESEARCH Nearly 1,000 grants from the National Science Foundation will be canceled or reduced, affecting research in clean energy, cybersecurity, and reform of science and math education.

RECREATION National parks will have shorter hours, and some will have to close camping and hiking areas. Firefighting and law enforcement will be cut back.

DEFENSE PERSONNEL Enlisted personnel are exempt from sequester reductions this year, but furloughs lasting up to 22 days will be imposed for civilian employees, who do jobs like guarding military bases, handle budgets and teach the children of service members. More than 40 percent of those employees are veterans.

The military’s health insurance program, Tricare, could have a shortfall of up to $3 billion, which could lead to denial of elective medical care for retirees and dependents of active-duty service members.

MILITARY OPERATIONS The Navy plans to shut down four air wings on March 1. After 90 days, the pilots in those air wings lose their certifications, and it will take six to nine months, and much money, to retrain them. The Navy has also said the Nimitz and George H. W. Bush carrier strike groups will not be ready for deployment later this year because the service will run out of operations and maintenance money. This means the Truman and Eisenhower strike groups will remain deployed indefinitely, a decision affecting thousands of service members and their families.

Continuous bomber flights outside of Afghanistan will be reduced, and there will be cutbacks to satellite systems and missile warning systems.

TRAINING AND MAINTENANCE The Army, which has done most of the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, says it will be forced to curtail training for 80 percent of its ground forces and that by the end of the year, two-thirds of its brigade combat teams will fall below acceptable levels of combat readiness. Air Force pilots expect to lose more than 200,000 flying hours. Beginning in March, roughly two-thirds of the Air Force’s active-duty combat units will curtail training at their home bases, and by July will no longer be capable of carrying out their missions. Some ship and aircraft maintenance will be canceled for the third and fourth quarters of the fiscal year, resulting in fewer available weapons.

This is the cuts that the NYT claims will be effected a bunch of BS if you ask me.

But wait here come the NYT buddies in the US Senate "Last week, Senate Democrats produced a much better plan to replace these cuts with a mix of new tax revenues and targeted reductions. About $55 billion would be raised by imposing a minimum tax on incomes of $1 million or more and ending some business deductions, while an equal amount of spending would be reduced from targeted cuts to defense and farm subsidies.Republicans immediately rejected the idea; the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, called it “a political stunt.” Their proposal is to eliminate the defense cuts and double the ones on the domestic side, heedless of the suffering that even the existing reductions will inflict. Their refusal to consider new revenues means that on March 1, Americans will begin learning how austerity really feels.

Democrats to the rescue NOT!