Battle Creek, Michigan was hit as well. (click here for video - thank you)

James McBryde of Mt. Pleasant heads from the Morning Sun Meet of Champions to take cover inside Mt. Pleasant High School Tuesday after the track meet was postposed due to threatening weather and lightning. Sun photograph by LISA YANICK-JONAITIS (click here)

Speaking of Massachusetts

Tornado Strikes Springfield, Mass. (click here for video)

An apparent tornado struck the downtown of one of Massachusetts' largest cities Wednesday afternoon, scattering debris, toppling trees, and frightening...

It started over the river.  There was plenty of fuel there for that monster.  Moisture.  Heat.  And it was done.  A big one, too.  It doesn't have much color because tornadoes don't have color until they carry debris.

There is damage to URBAN areas by TORNADOES today.  Heat Sinks.  Familiar with that term?  They are urban areas otherwise known as concrete jungles that when conditions are right can spawn their own tornadoes from the heat coming off the buildings and streets.  An evaluation will have to determine that in this instance, but, it is very possible. 

Apparent tornado hits Mass. city, injuries cited (click title to entry - thank you)

By STEPHEN SINGER

Associated Press

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- A possible tornado has touched down in one of the biggest cities in Massachusetts, and a spokesman for the mayor says there has been damage and reports of injuries.

Other communities in western Massachusetts also may have sustained damage from the storm that hit Springfield on Wednesday. Tornado warnings are in effect. Residents have been told to stay indoors....

Baystate Medical Center spokeswoman Jane Albert says the Springfield hospital is treating numerous injured people. She says some have serious force trauma injuries.

Mayor Domenic Sarno's spokesman Thomas Walsh says there are no reports of deaths.

Walsh says he saw a spinning cloud of debris from a window at City Hall when the apparent tornado hit. He later saw uprooted trees downtown….

continued...

Buoy, it is not easy being a housekeeper these days, huh? Let's see if the USA prosecutors due better with international bankers than NBA superstars.

Twice in one week.  Perhaps International Bankers need to 'HIRE' their legal prostitutes before they come to the USA.  It wasn't like this when Bush was in office, huh?

..."It just blows our mind that this happened again (click title to entry - thank you)," said Joe McInerney, CEO of American Hotel & Lodging Association, the industry's biggest trade group.

New York police arrested Egyptian banker Mahmoud Abdel Salam Omar, 74, on a charge of sexually assaulting a housekeeper at The Pierre, a luxury hotel on New York's Upper East Side.

When she delivered tissues he'd requested Sunday, he locked her in his room and touched her inappropriately, police said.

Former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested May 14, accused of a sexual attack on a housekeeper at Manhattan's Sofitel hotel. Hotel managers and employee unions say such incidents are rare, but after the first report, chains reviewed their security procedures. "You can't have employees being scared," McInerney said....

This is where it really gets interesting, though.  I do believe hotel workers need a UNION !  See indeed.

Hyatt offers 98 cleaners new jobs  (click here)

Boston Financial News – Several Hyatt Boston Hotels are Embarrassed by Thoughtless Firing

By Katie Johnston Chase and Megan Woolhouse Globe Staff

Article Courtesy of:  The Boston Globe

Hyatt Hotels Corp., responding to public outcry, political pressure, and threatened boycotts, yesterday offered the 98 housekeepers it fired last month new jobs at their old wages, a move that was met with mixed reaction by those who protested the firings.

Hyatt said it is offering the housekeepers at the three Boston-area Hyatts, who had been abruptly replaced by lower-wage workers, full-time positions with United Service Cos., a Chicago-based staffing organization that the hotel chain uses for contract labor. Hyatt said those who accept the positions will be paid at their full Hyatt wage rate through the end of next year….

 It is EASY TO BE THOUGHTLESS, when the people that work for an international hotel chain seem so much the peon and easily replaced.  Must keep the cusotmers happy, happy, happy.  Except, of course, when those customers can also be employees.

We Should All Be Ashamed of Ourselves  (click here)

By The Editors

May 31, 2011 | 8:14 p.m

It's the last week in May and the weather is finally warm, the Hamptons commute is seasonally torturous, and our aging international businessmen are doing what has become increasingly commonplace this time of year: lecherously pursuing the housekeeping staff through the halls and in the well-appointed rooms of our fine luxury hotels. And by "increasingly commonplace" we mean "twice in two weeks."  Which is far more commonplace than we'd like. Once in two weeks is pushing it.  Twice is just ... embarrassing....

The Weiners, it is more than dignity, it is personal peril at the 'operative end' of a fool-hearty prank.

Congressman Anthony Weiner and his wife.

The young LADY involved does not want her name smeared from one end of the internet to the other either.  But, for Congressman Weiner he could face ethic charges or worse.  He is doing the right thing to pursue this with 'independent' investigation before the waters get really muddy and all kinds of insinuations can be propagated.

He is protecting his marriage as well as his reputation and the interests of constituents.

If the 'prank' wasn't so obviously silly, it might even carrry brevity in the real world.

Female college student backs Congressman Weiner's 'hacking' story after VERY risqué picture is tweeted from his account (click title to entry - thank you)

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 7:13 PM on 1st June 2011

A lifeline for embarrassed U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner seems to have been extended by the woman at the centre of a scandal after a saucy picture was sent to her from the politician's Twitter account.

The married New York Congressman was left red-faced on Friday night, after someone published a crude picture of a man in underpants on his official Twitter account.

The picture, a close-up of a bulge in a pair of man's grey boxer briefs, was sent to one Twitter user - a 21-year-old college student from Seattle called Gennette Cordova - but was on view to all 45,000 of his followers....

We have seen this type of SOCIAL ENGINEERING before.  He is absolutely correct to take control and find out what the heck is going on here.  I wish him the best as the personality doesn't fit the picture UNLESS it was his wife that was playing with allure and enticement. 

"Medicare Advantage" (The PRIVATE Medicare) is running scared. (Link to 'Regular' Medicare - click at this title)

To begin, IS PRESIDENT OBAMA LYING about waste, fraud and abuse in private health insurance?

NO !!!!!!!  BY their own admission they know they are guilty.

That is just to begin.

Medicare Advantage Compliance Symposium

July 11, 2011 - July 12, 2011 | Arlington, VA

Health care fraud costs an estimated 68 billion dollars annually, (click here) and in many cases health plans are left to pick up the tab. Health plans must bolster their arsenal of strategies to avoid investigation and battle corruption. Join leaders from health plans, provider groups, regulatory bodies and law firms at this as they discuss such key topics as: the development of Fraud Waste and Abuse offices and programming, insight on Utilization Management and Encounter Data, ICD-10, Audit and Investigation Response, and case studies on topics ranging from Trends in Fraud, to management of Special Investigations, to comprehensive Compliance Planning.

EXAMPLE:

Wellcare (From their own website - click here).  They ask at this website, "Looking for a BETTER MEDICARE plan?  If consumers actually looked at the prosecutions by the Security and Exchange Commision and the USA Attorney General's Office at the bottom of that website, they would see this.

...in connection with the purchase or sale of any security:  (click here)

(a) to employ any device, scheme, or artifice to defraud;

(b) to make any untrue statement of a material fact or to omit to state a material fact necessary in order to make the statements made, in the light of the circumstances under which they were made, not misleading; or

(c) to engage in any act, practice, or course of business which operates or would operate as a fraud or deceit upon any person....

Why would anyone WANT to be affiliated with this health care organization?

If I may?

Wellcare is an huge organization that can easily be characterized as "Too Big Too Fail."  It conspired through former officers and employees of the organization to 'take the consumer' for OVER $40 Billion starting in 2002.

The year the fraud began was 2002 (click here for document). 

That means for seven long years, NO ONE bothered to prosecute this WALL STREET COMPANY.  No one until President Obama came in to office and began to LOOK FOR  and find waste, fraud and abuse.  Now, if Republicans want to say funding "Medicare Advantage" is a good thing when they don't even bother to police it, then they need to come up with a better strategy because this OUTRAGEOUS.

"Wellcare" is a corporate entity.  "Medicare Advantage" is a corporate entity.  Neither of these ? organizations ? (more like racketeers) are government in any way shape or form, EXCEPT, they receive government monies from the American Taxpayer through the USA Treasury. 

Got that?  Wall Street firms EXISTING to defraud the USA Treasury.

Okay?

Now, what if Medicare, the REGULAR Medicare administered by the USA government, were to completely end.  Instead people would be provided a voucher to purchase PRIVATE health care from these scoundrels?  What would happen?  Now, realize, the monies these 'entities' are receiving is still coming from the USA Treasury.  What would happen?  Too big to fail, but, not too big for fraud.  What would happen?

Yes, they would receive a bailout JUST LIKE WALL STREET did in 2008, but, there is something far worse than that.  What is it?  Because it happened in 2008 with Paulson and his cohorts.  What happened other than the bailout and the abandonment of the USA's economy?  There was something more, far more important, that happened that was more important to realize than that?  What was it?

THE IMPUGNING OF THE LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Paulson and his cohorts impunged the laws of the USA and called into question its sovereignty in favor of corporate domination of all that transpired in regard to their industry.

"Wellcare" and abusive practices of "Medicare Advantage" are now under the control of 'the law' to a certain extent, but, not to the extent they need to be.  It is why the Financial Reforms by the Obama Administration and the Consumer Protection Agency have become NECESSARY and VITAL.  They PRESERVE the sovereignty of the USA over and above the 'Too Big Too Fail" domination of Wall Street and Corporate America.  The USA in the case with "Wellcare" STILL has the ability to prosecute law breakers and send them to prision and levy fines.  When that changes and Medicare is completely privatized that will end and all that will be available to Americans is FUNDING the bailouts to the companies they pledge allegence and THIS TIME for their health care.

OH, no, no, no, no.  I don't think so.

The ONLY place private industry should be allowed to practive is in offering Medicare Supplemental insurance for a monthly fee.  In no way, should private industry ever control 'the care' Americans receive to the quality or the quantity that will impact the longevity of an entire country.  Placing the well being of Americans in the hands of Wall Street has caused deaths across this nation when it never should have happened.  It has to stop.  When we allow people to be 'a commodity' rather than a citizen we lose our integrity as a nation and a people. 

The Republicans are going to have to come up with something BETTER than they have got now which is ALL RHETORICAL and IRRELIVANT.

I want us to take our country back from WALL STREET and corrupted and corruptable politicians.  Let's do that in 2010. 

"Oh, yes we can."

The Bush Tax Cuts. How many of the people in this picture are still in office?

President Bush signing the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 in the White House East Room in June 7, 2001




















The question is NOT how much of the USA public spending is a percentage of the GDP !

The REAL question is WHOM is funding the percentage of the USA GDP represented by public spending?



The public sector of the USA economy, along with the entitlements of SSI and Medicare, are a vital part of the USA GDP.  The 'idea' that measuring public spending against the entire GDP of the USA is very, very deceiving.  When there are contractures in the USA economy because the business sector of the USA economy has been irreverent and/or negligent and/or greedy, the percentage of the GDP of the USA that is the public sector spending will definately GO UP.

Why?

Because the business sector of the USA GDP is losing its PERCENTAGE of the total.  So, while in 2000 after the surplus of the Clinton Administration, the USA seemed to be cruising without a lot of concern to the increasing percentage of the public spending of the USA, at the end of 2008 when the entire USA economy was in jeopardy and heading south, the percentage of the USA public spending grew.

It makes more sense to realize that 'economic growth' needs to be the focus of any economic policy and asking the government to 'down size' is not realistic a solution to the CONCERNS of the average citizen or the lousy financial experts around the globe.

The real solution to 'growth' of the USA economy is to increase local and SINCERELY small business owners to 'saturate' their local economies to the extent they can and then and only then seek foreign markets to make up the difference.  In other words, put everyone back to work in local economies to increase the tax revenues and then seek outside ? competition ? or better yet, business opportunists that are not competitive to bring new products to existing HOME GROWN American products.

One aspect to politics that I can usually count on is that when 'rational' by political pundits and candidates seems backwards' it most definately is. 

I asked myself, would I rather higher taxes on the wealthy and healthy to fund the USA's vital public sector economy or would I rather yield precious needed tax dollars to wealthy citizens and corporations to spend in Germany on orgies?

The way the USA economy works now with outsourced jobs, marginal incomes to the USA Middle Class with profits from Wal-Mart going to China, is that when we 'run short' of revenues we turn around and BORROW the profits China is reaping from OUR starved economy.

Hello?  Do I detect a vicious cycle that will further starve the USA of vital tax revenue through vital and good paying jobs while asking the profiteers in China to pay for their own purchase power in the USA by increasing our debt without investment to our growth?  I do believe so.

What India and China do not realize or at least appear not to realize is that when USA dollars, in the way of profits, leave the country, they are actually destroying their own markets.  Have we seen this before?  Yes.  When?  When USA automakers moved their production plants out of the USA for higher dividends to their stockholders while putting American workers out of work so they had no more income to actually purchase automobiles.

Something has to give here and it HAS TO BE WALL STREET and the Super Rich.  The USA Middle Class has given all it can give and it needs to stop.

But, Americans can get that 'feel goof feeling' by DONATING to invaluable NGO's that do the work of angels.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Campaign seeks to raise awareness of domestic minor sex trafficking  (click title to entry - thank you)

Billboards such as this one at Stewart Street and Minor Avenue have been placed by Shared Hope International. It's part of a national campaign to raise awareness about sex trafficking of American girls....

...The campaign, called "Do you know Lacy?" is being spearheaded by Shared Hope International, an anti-trafficking organization based in Vancouver, Wash., that was founded by former U.S. Rep. Linda Smith in 1998. Lacy, a pseudonym Smith gave to one young victim in her book, "Renting Lacy," is now an every girl of sorts, representing every American girl lured into the sex trade....

There are the exceptions though. It would seem these exceptions are among those exceptions that exist along the Arizona Mexican border.

3 Ariz. officers accused of drug, human smuggling

BOB CHRISTIE, Associated Press

Updated 07:43 a.m., Wednesday, May 25, 2011

PHOENIX (AP) — (click title to entry - thank you) Three employees of America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff have been arrested in a drug and human trafficking case, authorities said Tuesday.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said a deputy and two female detention officers at the sheriff's largest jail facility were among 12 people taken into custody and accused of being in a Phoenix-based international drug smuggling ring....

The underpaid and endangered public employee that is "The American Police Officer" is hard at work especially in Nashville.

Chief Steve Anderson announces the distribution of new flood badges during a news conference at the North Precinct.  (click here)


There was a crime sweep in Nashville through six precints. 






Undercover arrests pick up drug, prostitution cases  (click title to entry - thank you)

2:12 PM, May. 28, 2011

Undercover detectives in Metro Police's six precincts charged 108 persons this week with mostly drug and prostitution offenses.

…They seized 30.3 grams of cocaine, 100.2 grams of marijuana, 161 pills, two guns, one vehicle and $220 cash….

…168 grams of cocaine and 2.5 grams of marijuana….

…seized 19.7 grams of cocaine, 59.7 grams of marijuana, one gun, one vehicle and $465 cash.…

…seized 1.5 grams of cocaine, 4.6 grams of marijuana, one gun and $1,858 cash….

…150 Lortab pills, 59.2 grams of cocaine and 148 grams of marijuana….

…Anyone suspecting drug activity in their neighborhood is urged to call the police department’s 244-DOPE hotline. Callers to the hotline can remain anonymous.

And why EXACTLY  do these PUBLIC EMPLOYEES even bother?  Because children are more safe if they do.

What the heck? LEGAL Corporate Orgies in Germany to insure loyalty to corruption? Really?

The trip was Mr. Kaiser's troops (click title to entry - thank you)  in the historic Gellert thermal baths of Budapest. What happened to the townsfolk in the 13th Century are relaxed, now known as "water Nights"takes place..

..Brothel visits at trade fairs and sex parties are seen as ways of providing (exclusively male) employees with an incentive that goes beyond the  normal pay raise or bonus. A representative from a German sex worker association posits that the red light reward trend may also be popular precisely because it would be embarrassing if made public.

“Rewards bind the interested parties and are therefore often the little connection to corruption,” she says. “If a reward in the form of prostitution is taken, then a much easier potential for personal blackmail emerges.” But the person who arranges and pays for the sexual encounter is also at risk of blackmail. {Der Spiegel}

Well, that’s one way to ensure loyalty.

We can only hope that the legality of  the events themselves help to ensure that everyone involved is a willing participant. Victims of human trafficking can often be forced into sex work, and in a field no one wants to admit they’re involved with that makes it all too easy for traffickers to continue what can be very shady, terrible treatment of women....

Just in case one was pondering the words, "The Kaiser's Troops," this might help.  The Kaiser is a very old concept of a powerful man with many underlingings.

From a little acorn, a great friendship grows (click here)

12:01AM GMT 14 Nov 2004

Ninety years after he was conscripted, Germany's only surviving veteran of the Great War talks to Tony Paterson in Alsace

Charles Kuentz holds up a sepia photograph of himself taken in 1916. It shows a youth of 19 wearing the Prussian spiked helmet, a heavy, grey field coat and sword that make up the full military dress uniform of the Kaiser's Imperial Army. Now, at 107, Mr Kuentz is the last soldier alive who fought for the Germans during the Great War.

His other photos show frightened-looking young men in ragged battle dress staring at a landscape turned into a sea of mud by shell fire. "We thought it would be a war to end all wars and I fought it in the belief that it would never happen again, but sadly it always does," Mr Kuentz told The Telegraph, from his home in Colmar, in eastern France, yesterday. "I will die hoping that mankind will one day see sense and we will stop killing each other."...