The CMS, a division of the Federal Department of Health and Human services, is in charge of who and how health care providers get paid. Whatever CMS says, goes. If you don’t follow their rules, you can’t bill Medicare, Tricare, or Medicaid. You lose your Federal healthcare funding, all of it. If they say that you must do something, you do it, or you don’t get paid for providing healthcare services. It’s that simple.
Some bureaucrat who works for CMS in Oklahoma has informed Saint Francis Health System, the twelfth largest hospital in the nation, that they cannot have a Eucharistic candle in their hospital chapel because it is a fire hazard. Never you mind that this hospital has had the candle in its chapel for over 60 years without a single incident. It is not to be noticed that the Church has taken appropriate steps to ensure that the candle is behind two layers of glass, and that the installation has passed inspection by the state fire marshal’s office. Nope. This Federal employee is telling this church based hospital how to celebrate its faith.
Other people claiming to be Christians are saying that the Church is wrong, and that a wax candle can easily be replaced by an electric one. That a candle isn’t needed to praise their God. I will tell you that it is not the place of one faith to tell another how to celebrate their religion.
To say that you can worship god without following the tenets of your church is to allow those who are not a part of your religion to dictate the terms. If this were to be permitted to stand, the next rule may very well be that you can worship God without a physical church. After all, God is everywhere, is he not? Do your praying at home. Maybe they will even allow you to do so in a ‘virtual church’ on the Internet.
I make no secret that I am an atheist. However, I also will tell you that the celebration of faith is one of the fundamental rights that we as Americans have, and I will fight for any and all Americans to celebrate and support their faith. In this case, it isn’t about the candle. Reasonable precautions like having the candle being encased in the chapel have been taken, and the candle represents a lower risk than many of the pieces of equipment that are located elsewhere in the hospital.
No, this is about the government trying to dictate the terms of your life. Some petty bureaucrat makes a decision, and *poof* it’s the a law that you must obey, or else.
That isn’t the foundation upon which we built a nation. Perhaps it is time to revive another tradition- tar and feathers.
An article in Time magazine engages in some serious pearl clutching when they note that armed, private security is replacing the power vacuum left behind by the police that have been defunded all over the nation’s blue cities.
He seems unaware of the flutter of anxiety spreading through the store as customers see his weapon, handcuffs, and bulletproof vest. But if anyone asked, which they don’t, he’d assure them that he’s there for their own good, even though it’s hard to be relaxed in the presence of a loaded gun.
I thought that the left has claimed for decades that the only people who should have guns are the police, licensed security guards, and the military? The press certainly has no problem with their own, unlicensed security guards gunning down and killing people, nor do they have a problem when those guards get off scott free because the local DA is a known Antifa member.
Here is the naked truth: the police are there to first protect the public from criminals. When they begin, as they have in the country, to protect the government instead of the people, the people will find ways to protect themselves. It may be with paid security, or it may be with armed vigilance committees. This is also why the police have a second function: to protect the rights of accused criminals to have a fair, impartial trial. When the people form their own protection units, you get lynchings, which are soon followed by the anarchy of might makes right.
That’s where we are, the people are thoroughly disgusted with their government and are taking things into their own hands. I believe that this is being done on purpose as one of the tenets of the CIA Insurgent Manual. To be successful, and insurgency that wishes to overthrow the government must force the government to fail in providing basic services like police. The insurgents then step in and provide those services. “We can protect you from this violence, because the government can’t”
We are currently staring into the abyss.
News broke yesterday that Jane Roberts, wife of the Chief Justice, was soliciting large sums of money from powerful law firms in exchange for recruiting lawyers. More than $10 million in eight years. There was a lot of speculation during those years about Roberts being compromised. Theories were bandied about, some involving blackmail. Turns out it was good old fashioned grift.
Now that is going to cost SCOTUS. The left is involved in a political coup against the conservative justices. I don’t think that there is enough there for an impeachment, but after the 2024 elections, who knows?
The US has a history of being an unreliable ally. Just ask Afghanistan. Or Vietnam. So it’s no surprise that South Korea is having some doubts about the commitment that the US has made to defend them. So when Biden announces that US nuclear armed submarines will be docking in South Korea is a sign that the US will extend its nuclear umbrella to that country, I’m sure they are taking it with a HUGE grain of salt.
It’s the same reason why the Philippines says that US bases in their nation can’t be used for offensive operations.
This woman owed $15,000 in property taxes on her condo. The government took her home and auctioned it off for $40,000 (a fraction of what it was worth). They kept all of the money, and not just what they were owed. She is suing, claiming that the overage was an unconstitutional taking. The case has made it all the way to SCOTUS. The state claims that the woman didn’t lose out because the mortgage and her HOA fees are cancelled under state law.
I agree that the woman is the victim of an unconstitutional taking without compensation. Whether or not her mortgage and HOA fees are still payable is a different issue, and doesn’t change the fact that the state took what was never theirs to take.
The article mentions a Detroit case where a homeowner lost a home due to owed taxes, the state auctioned it off for $1, and the winning bidder subsequently sold the home for over $300,000. The article then mentions that a SCOTUS ruling may force local governments to sell properties for their fair market value, and not simply auction them off for a fraction of what they are worth. I believe that they SHOULD be forced to sell for fair market value. After all, if I sell a home to myself or to an associate, the IRS will certainly force me to pay taxes on the capital gain at fair market value.
County and local governments complain that such a system would cripple local government property tax collection, but that is horse hockey. We don’t (or at least aren’t supposed to) determine the constitutionality of a law by how much money the government will lose on the deal.
Let’s see how this plays out.
Congress wants to pass a law requiring that SCOTUS adopt a code of conduct. I don’t think this is Constitutional. Any rules for SCOTUS would be in Article III of the Constitution, and there is nothing there granting Congress authority over the Supreme Court. If they want to do this, an Amendment would be required.
It will be interesting to see how SCOTUS reacts to this. The left wants badly to bring this court to heel, or even impeach a justice or two.
Colorado is now the most crime ridden state in the US. A former cop complains that the police are leaving the profession because they don’t like all of the monitoring and second guessing that they are being forced to endure.
“Law enforcement in Colorado is facing a historic recruiting, retention, and morale crisis,” Evans said. “Nobody wants to be a cop. The cops that were cops are fleeing the profession in droves. And that’s the second prong of this kind of two-pronged issue that’s driving crime up in Colorado.” Specifically, according to Evans, one of the policies that “broke the back” of law enforcement was the passage of SB 217.
According to Evans, two parts of SB 217 are particularly demoralizing to law enforcement. The first was the requirement that every encounter be extensively documented, adding significant paperwork to an already demanding job, and the second was a body camera requirement.
What brought that law about was events like randomly shooting people from a moving car because you find it to be funny.
One of the officers admitted in court during the trial: “We went out that evening and concealed our presence so people wouldn’t flee and we’d be able to get close enough to shoot them… and we were actually having fun shooting them”
Or cops threatening people, simply because they can.
“You seem like an argumentative person. You need to take your hand, go like this, and pull your head out of your ass. Don’t mess with me, I am not the guy you want to mess with. You hear me??”
Even people like me, who worked with cops for decades and haven’t had so much as a traffic ticket in more than 20 years, yet get threatened with death because a cop wants to prove who is boss now see police for what they are- criminal gangs with badges.
Cops have no one to blame for this but themselves. There are loads of bad cops out there. Now we can argue as to just how many of the cops out there are bad, but they have to take responsibility for the “thin blue line” nonsense where cops are not cleaning up the problems in their own ranks because they view the very public that they are supposed to serve as being the enemy. Get rid of your own bad cops, clean up your own ranks.
The police are making enemies of both sides in this conflict.
For those of you who saw the behavior of the cop in this story and were as outraged as I was, I just learned that the courts AGAIN have given the cops a pass. The man’s lawsuit was dismissed. He gets nothing, and the cop is free to treat others the same way.
The cops act like tyrants, and the courts rubber stamp the poor behavior. No surprises there.
There are repercussions for this.
It has long been said that the US has a “nuclear triad” made up of nuclear weapons that could be delivered by three different means- bombers, ground based missiles, and submarine launched missiles. Is that even accurate any longer? The short answer is no, it isn’t.
Our ground based bombers are no longer available as a part of the triad. Sure, we still have deliverable warheads, but there is no alert force, no SIOP, and no organized plan for delivering them. In fact, the US only has 66 nuclear capable strategic bombers remaining in our inventory. The B-1 bomber used to be able to deliver nuclear weapons. Nope. Not anymore. The B-52 can, but those bombers are older than the grandfathers of the pilots who now fly them. The B-2 Spirit can, but there are only a handful of those. At best, we could drop a few weapons, but the truth is that there just isn’t a way to deliver enough warheads by bombers to make that a credible deterrent. Don’t believe me, ask the Air Force, who has said:
You’re going to need more aviators, you’re going to need more Security Forces [personnel], more maintainers … more bombers … infrastructure improvements at the [alert] facilities, and you’re going to need more tankers.
What about the Air Force’s ground based ICBMs? You mean the LGM-30 that was designed with a 10 year lifespan, but has been in service for over 50 years? The Minuteman III began development in 1964 and entered service in 1970 with a force of 550 missiles. There are 440 of them left, and 400 of them are on alert. The missiles originally carried a total of 1,500 warheads- most had three warheads each. As of June 16, 2014, on Obama’s orders, the U.S. Minuteman III missiles have only a single warhead. Now they carry only 400- a 75% reduction in deliverable warheads by this leg of the triad.
What about from the sea? When I was in the Navy, we had the capability to launch nuclear strikes from aircraft carriers. That capability was completely taken from the Navy by George HW Bush. That capability is gone, and cannot be replaced. The training and knowledge was lost when we eliminated the personnel whose job it was to make that happen.
The Navy also had the ability to use Tomahawk cruise missiles to deliver nuclear warheads. That’s gone as well.
Then there are the much advertised SLBMs. There are 18 of the Ohio class submarines, but 4 of them have been rendered incapable of carrying SLBMs, leaving 14 nuclear capable submarines in the Navy. Scheduling means that only 4 of them are on station at any given time, for a total of 80 SLBMs on alert at any given moment. As for the missiles themselves, they can carry up to 14 warheads each, but in practice they each carry four warheads, on average. So the Navy can deliver 320 warheads at any given time.
In total, adding them up, the US is capable of delivering less than 750 warheads in response to an enemy surprise attack. In October of 2022, US intelligence estimated that the Chinese had 450 land based ICBMs. They also estimate that the Chinese will have more than 1500 warheads by 2035.
