08.30.09
This Is Why Brian Higgins And Our Other Elected Officials Fear Confronting The Senior Citizen At A Town Hall Meeting
Permalink Comments off
“Currahee”
Lt. Brian Brennan was severely wounded in Iraq and faced unbeatable odds but, as David Martin reports, he made a remarkable recovery with a little help from a special Cherokee word.
Home town return
Permalink Comments off
40DaysForLife
Permalink Comments off
Oath Keepers
Permalink Comments off
08.27.09
Rook Goodbye Ceremony for the New Class of Norwich University Cadets
Meaghan giving us a Norwich tour before the rook ceremony
Meaghan and some of her new rook mates
A final look after we said our final goodbye
A sea of over 500 new cadets assembled after the final family goodbye
Meaghan with a beaming smile amongst her fellow 3rd Company 1st Platoon cadets
Permalink Comments off
08.22.09
Health Care Town Hall Meeting With or Without Congressman Brian Higgins
Permalink Comments off
08.16.09
Closing segment of August 15, 2009 show
My closing segment dedicated to my daughter Meaghan as she embarks on her college journey as a cadet at Norwich University- Military College
Permalink Comments off
08.15.09
A Goodbye Wish Written By My Husband To Our Son Dennis As He Heads Off For Marine Corps Boot Camp…
Click and read:
“I Wish”
Dennis I wish you Godspeed as you embark on this path on your life’s journey…
I hope I have conveyed to you over the years what a privilege it has been to be your dad…
I hope I have shown you enough love so that you don’t have to think about how much you mean to your mom and I, I hope you just know…
Remember when you are in your toughest moments it is usually when you find out the most about yourself and the meaning of those who depend upon you….
Remember at your loneliest moments we are all here just one thought away…
I hope you know how proud I am of you, how proud I am to be your dad. From infancy, diapers and bottles, to playing catch, to watching all of your games over the years… I have watched you overcome adversity and it has truly been a pleasure watching you blossom from that cute disheveled thick blonde haired kid with coke bottle thick lenses and a patched left eye to the tall respectful humorous yet humble blue eyed young man on the verge of his life…
I hope you can look at loneliness as something that will help you to fully appreciate every breath spent with those most important to you…
I hope that as your Dad I have shown you enough discipline to help you stay on the road as you navigate your future. Beware of shortcuts. That usually results in your driving off the road, where it is always more difficult to drive, and that usually takes you to where you don’t want to be. The right decision is usually the hard one and ironically somehow always proves to be the best one in the long run…
Never be afraid of hard work, discipline and going the extra mile. Remember you can have fun not doing anything at all, or, you can have fun working hard your whole life. It is simply an attitude choice. Have fun preparing your feast… No one ever has fun preparing a famine. In the end we always reap what we sew…
Remember all things important in life are gifts… When you usually think of gifts you think of things given to you. These gifts are different… They must be earned by what you give…
To be faithful you must first be faithful in God and in yourself… To be respected you must first respect…
To be given responsibility you must first be responsible…
To be successful at life you must first be successful in your own life…
To be loved you must first be able to open your heart and love that special person with all of your heart….
Our ultimate gift has been you, your sister and brothers….
I hope that we have prepared you for the meaningful gifts God has in store for your life…
I hope I have shown you the meaning of sacrifice so that you know that all we have done over the years has been a labor of love for our family and that it truly has been fun…
May God always keep you safe…
May He always help guide your decisions…
And may He always keep you out of harms way….
“Semper Fidelis” Dennis, Always Faithful…
Semper Fi.
Dad
Permalink Comments off
Family Day United States Marine Corps, Parris Island, SC
Congratulations to our son Pfc Dennis Weppner II on his completion of 13 weeks of Marine Corps Boot Camp!!! Semper Fi
Permalink Comments off
08.13.09
Four Steps to Save Health Care
By Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
August is THE crucial month! While the senators and representatives are home in their districts, let’s give them a barrage of attacks on Obama’s proposals to deform our health system! Even as public opinion has turned against the plan, he still has 60 votes in the Senate and an ample margin in the House to pass it. Unless we unleash a FIRESTORM of public outrage, the bill will pass! And your own personal health care will never be the same.
Here’s how to fight it:
1. Arm Yourself With the Facts: Read Chapter 4 in Catastrophe, “Obama’s Health Care Catastrophe,” which details how Obamacare will destroy American health care and explains what has happened in Canada!
2. Help Air a Powerful TV Ad — Donate Money!: The League of American Voters is running an advertisement Dick wrote in the swing states with key senators. Give them as much as you can to run these ads.
See the New TV Ad Dick Says Can Defeat Obama’s Health Care Takeover — Go Here Now.
Donate today via credit card or send checks.
Time is of the essence.
We need to run these ads this month!
3. E-mail Your Friends, Family and Associates: We need a massive outpouring of public opinion. E-mail your Christmas card list, your colleagues from the office, your friends, and your family. Give them the facts about health care and Obama’s dangerous proposals. Think particularly of anyone you know in the following states (where the key Senators live):
a. Maine (Sen. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe)
b. New York (Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand)
c. Virginia (Sen. Mark Warner and Jim Webb)
d. Indiana (Sen. Evan Bayh)
e. Ohio (Sen. John Voinovich)
f. North Carolina (Sen. Kay Hagan)
g. Florida (Sen. Mel Martinez)
h. Louisiana (Sen. Mary Landrieu)
i. Arkansas (Sen. Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln)
j. Nebraska (Sen. Ben Nelson)
k. South Dakota (Sen. Tim Johnson)
l. Iowa (Sen. Chuck Grassley)
m. North Dakota (Sen. Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan)
n. Montana (Sen. Max Baucus and Jon Tester)
o. Wyoming (Sen. Michael Enzi)
4. Write or Call Your Senators and Representatives: Then sit down and write (by hand if possible) a letter to each of your senators and your member of Congress.
Simply address the letter to:
Your Senator or Congressman:
U.S. Senate or U.S. House of Representatives,
Washington DC 20510 (Senate) or 20515 (House)
Sending a letter by snail mail is much more effective than by e-mail.
They haven’t really caught up with the 21st century in Washington. So buy a real live postage stamp and mail your letters directly. Use the info from Catastrophe in your letter. Explain how your personal health care and that of our family will be adversely affected.
Even if your senator or representative is a liberal Democrat or a Republican, write then anyway. It can influence the atmosphere in Washington. Senators and members of congress talk and the more mail they get, the more public opinion weighs on them all. Even the ultra-liberals.
You can call Congress at (202) 224-3121.
Believe us. It works. Write today!
Permalink Comments off
08.08.09
10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care
by Scott Atlas
Fact No. 1: Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.[1] Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States, and 88 percent higher in the United Kingdom. Prostate cancer mortality is 604 percent higher in the U.K. and 457 percent higher in Norway. The mortality rate for colorectal cancer among British men and women is about 40 percent higher.
Fact No. 2: Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.[2] Breast cancer mortality is 9 percent higher, prostate cancer is 184 percent higher and colon cancer mortality among men is about 10 percent higher than in the United States.
Fact No. 3: Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.[3] Some 56 percent of Americans who could benefit are taking statins, which reduce cholesterol and protect against heart disease. By comparison, of those patients who could benefit from these drugs, only 36 percent of the Dutch, 29 percent of the Swiss, 26 percent of Germans, 23 percent of Britons and 17 percent of Italians receive them.
Fact No. 4: Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.[4] Take the proportion of the appropriate-age population groups who have received recommended tests for breast, cervical, prostate and colon cancer:
Nine of 10 middle-aged American women (89 percent) have had a mammogram, compared to less than three-fourths of Canadians (72 percent).
Nearly all American women (96 percent) have had a pap smear, compared to less than 90 percent of Canadians.
More than half of American men (54 percent) have had a PSA test, compared to less than 1 in 6 Canadians (16 percent).
Nearly one-third of Americans (30 percent) have had a colonoscopy, compared with less than 1 in 20 Canadians (5 percent).
Fact No. 5: Lower income Americans are in better health than comparable Canadians. Twice as many American seniors with below-median incomes self-report “excellent” health compared to Canadian seniors (11.7 percent versus 5.8 percent). Conversely, white Canadian young adults with below-median incomes are 20 percent more likely than lower income Americans to describe their health as “fair or poor.”[5]
Fact No. 6: Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K. Canadian and British patients wait about twice as long – sometimes more than a year – to see a specialist, to have elective surgery like hip replacements or to get radiation treatment for cancer.[6] All told, 827,429 people are waiting for some type of procedure in Canada.[7] In England, nearly 1.8 million people are waiting for a hospital admission or outpatient treatment.[8]
Fact No. 7: People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed. More than 70 percent of German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand and British adults say their health system needs either “fundamental change” or “complete rebuilding.”[9]
Fact No. 8: Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians. When asked about their own health care instead of the “health care system,” more than half of Americans (51.3 percent) are very satisfied with their health care services, compared to only 41.5 percent of Canadians; a lower proportion of Americans are dissatisfied (6.8 percent) than Canadians (8.5 percent).[10]
Fact No. 9: Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K. Maligned as a waste by economists and policymakers naïve to actual medical practice, an overwhelming majority of leading American physicians identified computerized tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as the most important medical innovations for improving patient care during the previous decade.[11] [See the table.] The United States has 34 CT scanners per million Americans, compared to 12 in Canada and eight in Britain. The United States has nearly 27 MRI machines per million compared to about 6 per million in Canada and Britain.[12]
Fact No. 10: Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.[13] The top five U.S. hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in any other single developed country.[14] Since the mid-1970s, the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology has gone to American residents more often than recipients from all other countries combined.[15] In only five of the past 34 years did a scientist living in America not win or share in the prize. Most important recent medical innovations were developed in the United States.[16] [See the table.]
Conclusion. Despite serious challenges, such as escalating costs and the uninsured, the U.S. health care system compares favorably to those in other developed countries.
Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor at the Stanford University Medical Center. A version of this article appeared previously in the February 18, 2009, Washington Times.
Permalink Comments off
Obama: His reform drive has led to bills that hurt everyone who has insurance now
By BETSY MCCAUGHEY
PRESIDENT Obama promises that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” even after he reforms our health-care system. That’s untrue. The bills now before Congress would force you to switch to a managed-care plan with limits on your access to specialists and tests.
Two main bills are being rushed through Congress with the goal of combining them into a finished product by August. Under either, a new government bureaucracy will select health plans that it considers in your best interest, and you will have to enroll in one of these “qualified plans.” If you now get your plan through work, your employer has a five-year “grace period” to switch you into a qualified plan. If you buy your own insurance, you’ll have less time.
And as soon as anything changes in your contract — such as a change in copays or deductibles, which many insurers change every year — you’ll have to move into a qualified plan instead (House bill, p. 16-17).
When you file your taxes, if you can’t prove to the IRS that you are in a qualified plan, you’ll be fined thousands of dollars — as much as the average cost of a health plan for your family size — and then automatically enrolled in a randomly selected plan (House bill, p. 167-168).
It’s one thing to require that people getting government assistance tolerate managed care, but the legislation limits you to a managed-care plan even if you and your employer are footing the bill (Senate bill, p. 57-58). The goal is to reduce everyone’s consumption of health care and to ensure that people have the same health-care experience, regardless of ability to pay.
Nowhere does the legislation say how much health plans will cost, but a family of four is eligible for some government assistance until their household income reaches $88,000 (House bill, p. 137). If you earn more than that, you’ll have to pay the cost no matter how high it goes.
The price tag for this legislation is a whopping $1.04 trillion to $1.6 trillion (Congressional Budget Office estimates). Half of the tab comes from tax increases on individuals earning $280,000 or more, and these new taxes will double in 2012 unless savings exceed predicted costs (House bill, p. 199). The rest of the cost is paid for by cutting seniors’ health benefits under Medicare.
There’s plenty of waste in Medicare, but the Congressional Budget Office estimates only 1 percent of the savings under the legislation will be from curbing waste, fraud and abuse. That means the rest will likely come from reducing what patients get.
One troubling provision of the House bill compels seniors to submit to a counseling session every five years (and more often if they become sick or go into a nursing home) about alternatives for end-of-life care (House bill, p. 425-430). The sessions cover highly sensitive matters such as whether to receive antibiotics and “the use of artificially administered nutrition and hydration.”
This mandate invites abuse, and seniors could easily be pushed to refuse care. Do we really want government involved in such deeply personal issues?
Shockingly, only a portion of the money accumulated from slashing senior benefits and raising taxes goes to pay for covering the uninsured. The Senate bill allocates huge sums to “community transformation grants,” home visits for expectant families, services for migrant workers — and the creation of dozens of new government councils, programs and advisory boards slipped into the last 500 pages.
The most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll (June 21) finds that 83 percent of Americans are very satisfied or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their health care, and 81 percent are similarly satisfied with their health insurance.
They have good reason to be. If you’re diagnosed with cancer, you have a better chance of surviving it in the United States than anywhere else, according to the Concord Five Continent Study. And the World Health Organization ranked the United States No. 1 out of 191 countries for being responsive to patients’ needs, including providing timely treatments and a choice of doctors.
Congress should pursue less radical ways to cover the uninsured. We have too much to lose with this legislation.
Betsy McCaughey is founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths and a former lieutenant governor of New York. betsy@hospitalinfection.org
Permalink Comments off
Admiral Gary Roughhead Chief Naval Officer of the United States Navy
We had the opportunity to meet Admiral Gary Roughhead Chief Naval Officer of the United States Navy at the Change of Command Ceremony onboard the USS Harry S Truman (CVN 75) nuclear powered aircraft carrier at Norfolk Naval Base in Norfolk, Va. on 24 July 2009.
Permalink Comments off
