Condi Rice Blasts Obama on Weakness, Leadership

....

STEPHEN F. HAYES  "Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused Barack Obama of dramatically weakening the United States' position in the world, drawing a straight line between Obama’s ever-yielding foreign policy and the increasing troubles around the world."
"Citing Bashar al Assad’s slaughter in Syria, Vladimir Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, al Qaeda’s triumphant return to Fallujah, Iraq, and China’s nationalist fervor, she concluded: “When America steps back and there is a vacuum, trouble will fill that vacuum.”

 

"Rice – measured in tone, but very tough on substance – excoriated Obama administration policies without ever mentioning the president by name. She mocked the naïve hope that “international norms” would fill the vacuum left by U.S. retreat and blasted the president for hiding behind the weariness of the public.

One Doctor’s Viral Letter Exposes the Harrowing Reality of Obamacare’s ‘War Against Doctors’

"One doctor's viral letter exposes the harrowing Reality of Obamacare’s ‘War Against Doctors’ One voice speaking for all and it's terrifying."   Lucianne

Independent Journal Review   "In an address to the House on Wednesday, Alabama Representative Mo Brooks read aloud a letter sent to him by Dr. Marlin Gill of Decatur. The letter holds nothing back while detailing the excessive costs and regulations that Dr. Gill calls Obamacare’s “war against doctors.' ”  More here.

Dear Congressman Brooks,
 
As a practicing family physician, I plead for help against what I can best characterize as Washington’s war against doctors.
 
The medical profession has never before remotely approached today’s stress, work hours, wasted costs, decreased efficiency, and declining ability to focus on patient care.
 
In our community alone, at least 6 doctors have left patient care for administrative positions, to start a concierge practice, or retire altogether.
 
Doctors are smothered by destructive regulations that add costs, raise our overhead and ‘gum up the works,’ making patient treatment slower and less efficient, thus forcing doctors to focus on things other than patient care and reduce the number of patients we can help each day.
 
I spend more time at work than at any time in my 27 years of practice and more of that time is spent on administrative tasks and entering useless data into a computer rather than helping sick patients.
 
Doctors have been forced by ill-informed bureaucrats to implement electronic medical records (“EMR”) that, in our four doctor practice, costs well over $100,000 plus continuing yearly operational costs . . . all of which does not help take care of one patient while driving up the cost of every patient’s health care.
 
Washington’s electronic medical records requirement makes our medical practice much slower and less efficient, forcing our doctors to treat fewer patients per day than we did before the EMR mandate.
 
To make matters worse, Washington forces doctors to demonstrate ‘meaningful use’ of EMR or risk not being fully paid for the help we give.
 
In addition to the electronic medical records burden, we face a mandate to use the ICD-10  coding system, a new set of reimbursement diagnosis codes.
 
The current ICD-9 coding system uses roughly 13,000 codes. The new ICD-10 coding system uses a staggering 70,000 new and completely different codes, thus dramatically slowing doctors down due to the unnecessary complexity and sheer numbers of codes that must be learned.
 
The cost of this new ICD-10 coding system for our small practice is roughly $80,000, again driving up health care costs without one iota of improvement in health care quality.
 
Finally, doctors face nonpayment by patients with ObamaCare. These patients may or may not be paying their premiums and we have no way of verifying this. No business can operate with that much uncertainty.
 
On behalf of the medical profession, I ask that Washington stop the implementation of the ICD-10 coding system, repeal the Affordable Care Act, and replace it with a better law written with the input of real doctors who will actually treat patients covered by it.
 
America has enjoyed the best health care the world has ever known. That health care is in jeopardy because physicians cannot survive Washington’s ‘war on doctors’ without relief.
 
Eventually the problems for doctors will become problems for patients, and we are all patients at some point.

Signed ...

The Good Must Associate: Key Strategies in the Counterjihad Movement

Infidel Bloggers   "To prevail against orthodox Islam's relentless encroachment, we need to employ three essential strategies: gather allies, coordinate our efforts, and concentrate our forces at decisive points. Let me explain these in more detail:" ... Excerpts follow:

1. Gather allies. 
...If three of us demonstrate outside a mosque, and five hundred Muslims protest our demonstration, we will look like a small, unpopular fringe group and the Muslims will look like the mainstream majority opinion. This kind of thing has a psychological impact on anyone watching this on television because of the principle of social proof. But if five hundred Muslims demonstrate and ten thousand counterjihadists protest their demonstration, it sends an entirely different message to anyone watching on television or participating in the demonstration. Numbers count.

2. Coordinate efforts.
If there were a hundred thousand active counterjihadists, but each worked on different projects, we wouldn't accomplish much. But if most of us worked on a few central projects, those projects would be much more likely to succeed.

3. Concentrate force at a decisive point.
Many times in history, a military force was outnumbered and yet won the battle. Often it was because the principle of concentration of force does not require absolute superiority in numbers. It only requires a local superiority at a decisive point.

Edmund Burke once wrote, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Obamacare Navigators Helping People Enroll At Mexican Consulates

Big Government   "The Obama administration has been helping to facilitate a series of events nationwide at Mexican Consulate offices to enroll people in Obamacare – and a key activist says the efforts are “our responsibility” regardless of citizenship.

“ 'Whether they’re Mexican nationals or whether they’re United States citizens or whether they’re in transition-- and if they’re there it is our responsibility within all of America to educate on the Affordable Care Act,” Enroll America Field Organizer Jose Medrano told Breitbart News on Wednesday."
Video at the link.
 

The October Surprise that Could Cripple the Practice of Medicine

American Thinker    "You won’t read about the International Classification of Disease (ICD) on TMZ or hear it discussed on The View, but it has the potential to be an unpleasant October surprise in the health care world.  It is a list of codes that physicians and hospitals use when billing insurance companies.  These codes cover all manner of medical diagnoses for diseases, conditions, and injuries."
...
"First, medical practices and hospitals must know and have all of these 68 thousand codes readily available to add to the medical record in order to bill correctly and hope to be paid.  One more distraction for physicians, aside from all of the daily distractions of electronic records.  When physicians pay more attention to their computer screen or tablet than to the patient, guess who suffers.  This is the reason why texting and driving is illegal."
 

Leland Yee; when guns are outlawed, only outlaws yada, yada, yada...

http://patriotpost.us/posts/24423

 

http://inagist.com/all/449219638170120192/

NY Times Op-ed: Obama’s Anemic Speech in Europe

NY Times editorial   "Better late than never: The Russian president has benefited from the perception of a United States in full-tilt, war-weary retrenchment; of American red lines turning amber and then green; of a divided European Union; and a hollow NATO living more on the past than any vision of a 21st-century future. Obama has been making up for lost ground.

"Still, his Brussels speech, presented as a capstone of his visit and one of those Obama specials designed to offset with eloquence a deficit of deeds, was a poor performance overall, a jejune collection of nostrums about binding values of free-market Western societies and their appeal to the hearts (and pocketbooks) of people throughout the world, not least Ukrainians."

Krauthammer; Obama vs. Putin: The mismatch

Charles Krauthammer  

“The United States does not view Europe as a battleground between East and West, nor do we see the situation in Ukraine as a zero-sum game. That’s the kind of thinking that should have ended with the Cold War.”
— Barack Obama, March 24

"Should. Lovely sentiment. As lovely as what Obama said five years ago to the United Nations: “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation.”

"That’s the kind of sentiment you expect from a Miss America contestant asked to name her fondest wish, not from the leader of the free world explaining his foreign policy."
....
... "Asked whether he’d misjudged Russia, whether it really is our greatest geopolitical foe, he disdainfully replied that Russia is nothing but “a regional power” acting “out of weakness.”

"Where does one begin? Hitler’s Germany and Tojo’s Japan were also regional powers, yet managed to leave behind at least 50 million dead. And yes, Russia should be no match for the American superpower. Yet under this president, Russia has run rings around America, from the attempted ingratiation of the “reset” to America’s empty threats of “consequences” were Russia to annex Crimea."
....
"Indeed, Obama’s dismissal of Russia as a regional power makes his own leadership of the one superpower all the more embarrassing. For seven decades since the Japanese surrender, our role under 11 presidents had been as offshore balancer protecting smaller allies from potential regional hegemons.

"What are the allies thinking now? Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and other Pacific Rim friends are wondering where this America will be as China expands its reach and claims."....     Full article...