Investigators are re-examining conversations detected by US intelligence agencies in spring 2015 that captured Russian government officials discussing associates of Donald Trump, according to current and former US officials, a move prompted by revelations that the president’s eldest son met with a Russian lawyer last year.
Emphasis added.
Why is Special Counsel Robert Mueller allowing these leaks? Is he not interested in running an honest investigation?
Senator Ted Cruz (R, TX) has a provision in the latest Senate health bill that’s on offer, one that would allow sellers of actual health insurance to sell non-Obamacare compliant policies on the condition that they also sold Obamacare compliant plans on the ObamaMart. The idea, and it’s a sound one, is that those plans, better tailored their customers’ needs, would soon have commensurately lower premiums, deductibles, and copays and thereby be more affordable.
Health plan sellers don’t like it, though.
While this setup could offer healthy people less expensive policies, insurers and actuaries say it would likely prove dysfunctional over time, pushing up rates and reducing offerings for people buying the compliant plans.
That’s a market decision, though; nothing in the provision or in the overall bill would require the plan sellers offer fewer compliant plans or at higher premiums.
Aside from that, those non-compliant plans would be better tailored—market forces would require it—have fewer items covered that a plan purchaser doesn’t want or need—market forces would push plan sellers to stop forcing contraceptive coverage on men and geriatrics or prostate cancer coverage onto women—and they would, as advertised, have much lower premiums, smaller deductibles, and lower copays.
They would also attract customers, low income and others, from those ObamaMart plans into the non-compliant market because those better tailored and cheaper plans would better suit their needs, too.
Maybe the health care coverage welfare plan providers—sorry, the health insurance companies—don’t want the noise of competition; maybe they prefer the steady, safe income of government subsidies in the form of customers trapped in their protected monopoly in the health “insurance” industry. Maybe that’s why so many of these companies are leaving ObamaMarts, leaving folks with few plan choices or no plans to buy at all—because the industry as Obamacare has changed it is so sound.
On the other hand, the Progressive-Democrats in Congress should jump on this provision with both feet. Obamacare plans are terrific, they insist. Surely, in their wonderfulness, these plans would win resoundingly in the competition of the market place. Especially with so many of those plans still subsidized through other provisions in the bill. Wouldn’t they?
“The cloud” is, in Internet jargon, the Internet, and in this context the jargon word means a collection of computers somewhere on the Internet that are tied together via Internet connections (they don’t have to be collocated; although, usually they are) and user reachable via the Internet. The purposes of this sort of collection of computers are to centralize computational efforts, to centralize data storage, and for companies to pay the third parties operating a cloud facility to use it to do the computations or data storage.
The major risk of offloading these tasks is security. The companies using an Internet-centered third-party cloud facility have to trust two things beyond their control: the security skills of the enterprise running the cloud facility for them and the Internet connection between the company and that cloud facility.
I wrote all that to write all this.
A huge data leak at Verizon Wireless exposed millions of customer records, but the company blamed an outside vendor for the breach. The FOX Business Network‘s Tracee Carrasco reported, “Names, addresses, phone numbers and, in some cases, the security pins of millions of Verizon customers publicly exposed online by one of the company’s vendors, Nice systems, based in Israel.”
And
According to reports from ZDNet.com, “An employee of Nice Systems put information into a storage cloud area and incorrectly set the storage to allow external access,” said Carrasco.
Whether that mistake was one-off, incompetence, or nefarious is neither here nor there. What matters is the existence of a mistake of that magnitude and that the process used and the person using it were not under the control of the company using that cloud facility.
Mistakes of this nature actually are quite rare, but the magnitude of a failure of this sort (estimates of the number of customers whose data were exposed range from 6 million to 14 million) is too huge to make such risks useful.
It’s simply foolhardy to use any cloud facility that is not under the sole control of the company using it. This kind of mistake still will occur, but at least the company would have full control over the equipment and IT personnel training and consequences, and it would be better positioned to take faster action to correct a mistake and mitigate its consequences.
Senator Rand Paul (R, KY) has said he will not vote for the latest Senate effort at beginning the repeal and replace process of Obamacare. He claims he can’t tell the difference between this offer and the Obamacare that exists because, in part, it leaves some of the Obamacare taxes in place.
Never mind that a critical difference between the offer and Obamacare is that the offer does repeal some of the Obamacare taxes.
The offer isn’t a perfect bill, but it represents progress, and it’s not a final answer—and I know of no one, other than a few Senators, perhaps, who are arguing that it is; that there will be, can be, no possibility of coming back next year to make more progress and coming back in the next Congress to make yet more in each of those two years.
Furthermore, there aren’t enough votes to get all of the Obamacare taxes passed in this bill. And, at least some Obamacare taxes must be repealed in order to be able to effect significant tax code reform.
Finally, the only politically possible alternative to passing a bill that repeals only some of the Obamacare taxes is to preserve the status quo and all of the Obamacare taxes.
Paul knows all of this, of course; he’s just virtue signaling.
I have to ask, then: on whose side is he?
I posted this in 2012; it bears repeating.
On this day 235 and more years ago, a group of Americans got together and, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes and their sacred Honor to each other while relying on the protection of divine Providence, took our country free from tyranny and set us on a new, wholly experimental course.
These men openly acknowledged both our right and our duty to throw off any government that too badly violates its moral obligations to us sovereign citizens, that for too long abuses our liberties and our individual responsibilities. At the same time, though, they acknowledged that routinely rebelling at every small offense was equally wrong: Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. Yet those light and transient offenses want correction along with those abuses and moral failures.
And so, while fighting (and some dying) for our newly born nation and during the immediately ensuing years of a troubled peace, these men, with others from the newly independent and united States joining them, in a second phase of our experiment invented a wholly new form of government. They created a government that would recognize the essential sovereignty of the members of a voluntarily formed social compact over our compact’s government, and they gave that government a structure and a strictly limited set of authorities designed to maximize our control of government and our ability to maintain that control.
They also invented a wholly new mechanism for throwing off an abusive government and replacing it with one more suited to our needs and to our control: a set of elections that would let us turn all the rascals out of one house of our legislative body every two years, that would let us depose the whole of the other house of our legislative body in sequential one-third increments every two years, and that would let us fire the chief executive of this government every four years—any and all whom we found wanting during their time in office. This invention was accompanied by another invention of these men: a judiciary that sat, neither above nor below our executive and legislative, but equal to and separate from them—a third powerful check that granted stability to the whole.
We are here today arguing amongst ourselves, usually with great passion, over the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Environmental Protection Agency, climate change, Benghazi, emails, and a host of other things, too, both momentous and trivial. And we could not be without the genius and the sacrifice of those men those 235 and more years ago.
As you sit around by your barbecue, or at the beach, or wherever you may be, hamburgers and hotdogs in hand, beer nearby, children screaming and yelling in their own happinesses, take a moment to think about that.