Alabama Governor Bentley signs Executive Order No.4 Creating Alabama Health Care Improvement Task Force

Yesterday, Monday, April 6, 2015, Alabama Governor Robert J. Bentley, MD signed Executive Order No.4 creating a 38-member “Alabama Health Care Improvement Task Force.”

Though the unspoken ostensible purpose of the task force is to likely make recommendations to the Governor for the expansion of Medicaid in Alabama, it’s being couched to the less-than-observant (or less-than-smart, take your pick), as a home-grown alternative to the big bad wolf of D.C. known as “ObamaCare.”

Again, for the benefit of the uneducated, in addition to decreasing fraud, waste and abuse, increasing efficiency, eliminating discrimination against women, children & people with “pre-existing” conditions, mandating numerous improvements to the quality of the delivery of healthcare from all states in order to receive payment (performance-based payment), the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (sometimes abbreviated as ACA, though popularly known as “ObamaCare”), contains a provision encouraging (but not requiring – that decision was made the U.S. Supreme Court) the state’s governors to expand Medicaid for their impoverished residents. The law provides for 100% payment for so doing, then gradually declines to 90%.

Governors in Kentucky and Arkansas have decided to Expand Medicaid in their states, and are already enjoying savings.

Currently, Alabama’s matching portion (the %age it pays to purchase Medicaid) is 32.4%; so to expand Medicaid, and have it ALL paid for, and then to pay a LOWER rate than is presently being paid is one of the smartest fiscal decisions the state could make.

Already, the Governors of Kentucky and Arkansas – both well-known Republican strongholds, with opposition to the ACA – have expanded Medicaid in their states, and are already reaping the rewards.

Here’s a chart showing the compensation plan to the states:

The Birmingham News knew of plot to assassinate Fred Shuttlesworth

The things we continue to learn about the explicit wickedness and evil of that era continues to plague the South, and the nation at large… particularly those who pander to it in the Republican party. And GOP party officials wonder why they continue to lose elections. Perhaps they should get a clue.

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Good and Evil in Birmingham

January 20, 2013

By DIANE McWHORTER

FIFTY years ago, Birmingham, Ala., provided the enduring iconography of the civil rights era, testing the mettle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. so dramatically that he was awarded the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize.

During his protest there in May 1963, the biblical spectacle of black children facing down Public Safety Commissioner Eugene (Bull) Connor’s fire hoses and police dogs set the stage for King’s Sermon on the Mount some four months later at the Lincoln Memorial. And the civil rights movement’s “Year of Birmingham” passed into history as an epic narrative of good versus evil.

Our understanding of the “good” has expanded beyond the lone-dreamer theory to embrace other activists, like King’s partner in Birmingham, the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth. Yet the evil segregationist archetype is fixed in the popular mind as the villainous housewife of “The Help” or the cretinous mob of “Django Unchained” — nobody we’d ever know, or certainly ever be.

But the disquieting reality is that the conflict was between not good and evil, but good and normal. The brute racism that today seems like mass social insanity was a “way of life” practiced by ordinary “good” people.

According to the Southern community’s consensus of “normal,” those fighting for rights now considered mainstream were “extremists,” and public servants could rationalize plans to murder men like Shuttlesworth, confident that they were on the right side of history.

Consider new evidence about a plan by Connor to have Shuttlesworth assassinated. Under Connor’s orders, Detective Tom Cook

I plead “Guilty,” your honor!

The Associated Press is reporting that the Fort Collins, Colorado couple of Richard and Mayumi Hene have plead guilty to felony and serious misdemeanor charges leveled against them by state and local authorities.

Mr. Hene appeared before a Larimer County District Judge and plead guilty to the felony charge of falsely influencing the sheriff. Mrs. Hene plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of knowingly filing a false report with emergency services.

Sentencing is set for December 23, and the couple’s attorney said they would have no public comment until after that date.

I predict this malicious escapade will yield for them beaucoup bucks in book deals, exclusive magazine stories, made-for-teevee shows, and motion pictures.

In other words, Mr. Hene’s warped plan will have worked… unless, of course, the judge exercises judicial wisdom and disallows any profiteering by the warped couple.