I’ll show you a real breaking point

~ susie

Veterans Drivers License

Poor Tom. It’s all about him, and nobody else:

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Advocates for the poor and uninsured gathered Tuesday in the Pennsylvania Capitol to throw Gov. Tom Corbett’s words back at him after he warned that he was at his “breaking point” over the federal government’s apparent resistance to conditions he wants before accepting billions of Medicaid expansion dollars.

Rather, they said, it is the uninsured who are their breaking point because they do not have access to the government-funded health insurance program that Corbett has thus far refused to expand.

Last week, Corbett told reporters that he was frustrated over talks with the Obama administration and suggested repeatedly that he was getting to his “breaking point.”

“That would be a good thing if he was going to help us,” said Carmela Green, a 51-year-old home health care worker from Williamsport who said she and her husband fall into a gap in President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law that was supposed to be filled by the Medicaid expansion.

The Greens’ income falls short of the threshold of about $15,500 for a couple to qualify for partially subsidized private insurance under the law. Yet they also cannot get access to the broader Medicaid coverage envisioned by the 2010 law because Corbett has opposed the expansion in Pennsylvania, unless he secures certain changes in the federal-state program.

Thus far, half the states, including every neighbor to Pennsylvania, have embraced a Medicaid expansion of some sort.

“Pennsylvania is now an island of the uninsured,” Antoinette Kraus, executive director of the Pennsylvania Health Access Network, told the rally in the Capitol.

Hopefully, Tom’s going down with the ship:
Continue reading “I’ll show you a real breaking point” →

Ha ha

~ susie

US car workers vote No to union plan

This is awesome:

An anti-union group said today that Volkswagen is considering disregarding the February election results over United Auto Workers representation at the Chattanooga plant and accepting authorization cards the union claims to have collected last year.

Matt Patterson of the Center for Worker Freedom said that such a course of action “would hand over its Chattanooga assembly plant to the UAW in spite of that union’s failure to win a February secret ballot election.”

VW workers rejected the union in a 712 to 626 vote after a three-day election overseen by the National Labor Relations Board.

Patterson, citing unidentified sources, said VW is considering recognizing the cards even though they’ve never been examined by a third party and a number of VW workers have complained to labor authorities that they had been tricked or coerced into signing such cards.

Family man

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Link:

McAllister won the special election on Nov. 16 to replace Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.). McAllister won in the heavily Republican district by playing up his conservative credentials, including his Christian faith and his 16-year marriage.

You can guess the rest.

Singing to the grand jury

~ susie ~ 4 Comments

AFP-Getty_461557241
Sounds like David Wildstein got his immunity deal:

Bad news for Chris Christie — and very good news for the citizens of New Jersey: Esquire has learned from sources close to the investigation that David Wildstein, the former Port Authority operative who helped plan and execute the Great Fort Lee Clusterfk, is now cooperating with Paul Fishman, the federal prosecutor investigating the soon-to-be-ex-governor and his minions for criminal conduct. Fishman has also increased the number of investigators at work on the case, and has begun presenting evidence and witnesses to a grand jury in Newark.

Wildstein was forced to quit his PA job in December, before Fort Lee’s corpses bobbed to the surface. Christie, who went to high school with Wildstein and put him at the PA as “director of interstate capital projects” — a job created just for him — helped edit the media statement thanking Wildstein “for his service to the people of New Jersey and the region.”

In January, Wildstein refused to testify before a New Jersey legislative committee investigating last September’s George Washington Bridge lane closures, citing his 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination. It was Wildstein’s cache of e-mails and texts, provided to the committee, that featured the instantly immortal exchange between Christie’s former deputy chief of staff, Bridget Kelly (“Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee”) and Wildstein (“Got it”).

Danger while blogging

~ susie

Roger Shuler

Read the rest:

An Alabama blogger posted a simple question on his website this week: “Why did it take five months for me to be released from jail?”

Roger Shuler’s extraordinary imprisonment last autumn came after he blogged about allegations of an affair between a powerful Republican and a lobbyist, and in conservative Alabama, it seems that can land you some enemies.

NJ will rejoin greenhouse gas initiative

~ susie

No thanks to the ambitious governor who ran as a moderate and governs like a wingnut.

Editorial: N.J. courts reverse Gov. Christie’s misguided rejection of greenhouse gas initiative (via NJ.com)

You can’t always get what you want. The Appellate Division of the New Jersey Superior Court a state reaffirmed that conclusion with its ruling last month that Gov. Chris Christie unilateral decision to remove New Jersey from a regional pollution control…

Continue reading “NJ will rejoin greenhouse gas initiative” →