Mid-Week Post

Only slightly better than a world war.

 Six people are dead after a bus collided with a VIA train in Ottawa:

Witnesses to a fatal train crash involving an Ottawa city bus describe a scene of chaos and confusion as it appears the bus failed to stop at the rail crossing and crashed into the side of the train, killing six people and injuring as many as 33 others. The devastating nature of the crash was clear from the 911 call (audio in clip above), informing the operator of multiple 'code blacks' at the scene.

Officials are still trying to piece together what happened prior to the crash, which occurred shortly before 9 a.m. near the intersection of Woodroffe Avenue and Fallowfield Road. Transportation Safety Board said it would be "some time" before answers were clear.

What is known is that six people were killed in the crash between a double-decker city bus and a Via Rail train bound for Toronto. Another 33 people were treated in hospital, some of whom remained in surgery late into the day. ...

According to eyewitness accounts, passengers on board the double-decker commuter bus began shouting for the driver to stop as they approached the crossing.

Witness Pascal Lolgis told the Canadian Press that it appeared the bus drove through a barrier.

“Boom! It went into the train like that. He didn't stop. He must have lost his brakes. Or he had an . . . attack or whatever,” he said. “He just didn't stop. He just kept going like that. Then he got hit.” Another witness, Mark Cogan, similarly said the bus drove through the guard rail and struck the side of the train.

The man without a plan since forever apparently is more popular than Stephen Harper who has proven that at the very least he can think and answer for himself:

Justin Trudeau easily eclipses his political rivals when it comes personal popularity, according to a new nationwide survey released exclusively to QMI Agency.

And while Stephen Harper is the least popular, Canadians surveyed believe he is more qualified to be prime minister than either Trudeau or NDP leader Thomas Mulcair.

People deserve the government that they vote for. To prepare themselves for a term under Justin Trudeau, his voters should do the following:

- rely only on solar and wind power even though neither are reliable, reduce carbon emissions (believed to cause global warming- if you believe that sort of thing) and are incredibly expensive to maintain and pay for

-learn Russian for when Trudeau accidentally or deliberately hands over the resource-rich Canadian Arctic to the Russians

- don't be so sensitive when an Islamist again blames the Jews or instructs one on how best to beat one's wife. We don't want to use words like "barbaric", do we?

-concede that the failed province of Quebec must run the rest of Canada into the ground

Don't you feel Canada is better off with a poseur pothead in charge? Who needs real leadership with this guy around?


Premier Kathleen Wynne (friend to accused child pornographer Benjamin Levy) has appointed a panel to convince Ontarians that a hike in the HST for the Metrolinx is in their best interests.

Carry on.


Obama? Arrogant? NO! He can't be!

In an interview with Telemundo airing Tuesday, President Barack Obama said the growing majority of Americans doubting his healthcare law are wrong.

 

Noting that people can begin signing up for the Affordable Care Act's healthcare exchanges on Oct. 1, the Telemundo interviewer noted that the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows that most Americans oppose it, believing it will produce damaging results.

 

"Fifty-two percent believe the law will raise their health care costs. Is everybody wrong?" he asks.

 

"Yes," Obama said, laughing. "They are."

Yeah, about that:

 

President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, and their allies, are cheerfully citing “ten year” costs of $940,000,000,000.00 — apparently believing this to be a far more palatable figure than $1 trillion.  But even this colossal tally is like the introductory price quoted by a cell phone provider.  It’s the price before you pay for minutes, fees, and overcharges — and before the price balloons after the introductory offer expires. 

For a variety of reasons, this tally doesn’t remotely reflect the bill’s real ten-year costs.  First, it includes 2010 as the initial year.  As most people are well aware, 2010 has now been underway for some time.  Therefore, the CBO would normally count 2011 as the first year of its analysis, just as it counted 2010 as the first year when analyzing the initial House health bill in the middle of 2009.  But under strict instructions from Democratic leaders, and over strong objections from Republicans, the CBO dutifully scored 2010 as the first year of the latest version of Obamacare.  If the clock were started in 2011, the first full year that the bill could possibly be in effect, the CBO says that the bill’s ten-year costs would be $1.2 trillion.

**

 

Obamacare could cost a lot more than the official estimates, according to a new study by researchers at Stanford University. 

That's because the law will create big incentives for employers to drop worker health coverage so that employees can get health insurance through the law's insurance exchanges. Anyone who buys insurance through an exchange and has a household income between 133 and 400 percent of the poverty line is eligible for publicly funded subsidies. So if a lot more people than expected end up in the exchanges, that means a lot more subsidies — and a much higher total cost for the law.

 

**

 

One of Obamacare’s main selling points during the health care reform debate was the need to provide insurance coverage to those with pre-existing conditions—but like other aspects of the law, the plan is failing those it was intended to help.

Beginning in 2014, Obamacare will prohibit insurance companies from excluding anyone with a pre-existing medical condition from coverage (called guaranteed issue). Because this incentivizes people to wait until they’re sick to purchase coverage, Obamacare includes the dreaded individual mandate to force all Americans to purchase health insurance.

But these massive new insurance mandates don’t take effect until 2014, so in the meantime the law set up the pre-existing conditions insurance plan (PCIP), which funded new high-risk pools in each state, providing coverage to those with pre-existing conditions from 2010 to 2014. The PCIP was allocated $5 billion for that time frame.

In 2010, the Obama Administration estimated that 375,000 people would enroll in the PCIP. But as of January 2013, over two-and-a-half years since the plan began, only 107,139 were enrolled—less than 29 percent of original projections.

Despite such low enrollment, the PCIP is running out of money. By nature, the enrollees in this insurance pool are high-cost because they are already sick, but government cost projections were way off, as is typical for government-run health care programs. In a 2012 report, the Administration conceded that claims’ costs had been 2.5 times greater than they had anticipated.

 

Yeah. What do those voters know? If they knew anything, they would have watched the all-knowing president slag them on a Latin news channel. Dolts!

And now, a pleasant Chuseok to all.

Songpyeon- traditional rice cakes steamed in pine needles