Just plain Curel

Last night the Hamilton County Democratic Party held its annual county wide dinner . Our guest speaker was Senator Joe Donnelly, D- Indiana. A few points from him concerning the Republican Health Care Senate Bill. The Conservative four who have said they will vote against, will vote for in the end. They are just saying they are against it for home town press. Right now he believes the vote will be 50/50 with VP Pence breaking the tie in its favor. 

He did point out that if you are making $30,000 a year and live in Indiana and are between the ages of 40 and 55 your health insurance premiums will jump to $16,000 a year. Effectively ending your coverage. If you have a pre-existing condition you will be allowed to have and continue coverage BUT the insurance companies will be allowed to have a rider to cover that illness in effect forcing you out of insurance. Some of these premiums will go up over $100,000.00 a year. To top this off the proposed Republican tax reform provides mainly cuts to the top 1% of income earners from the savings of Trumpcare. In his words this bill "is just plan cruel".

I want to add one more note to the above: CRUEL- from my buddy Webster--disposed to inflict pain and suffering: delighting in another's suffering without mercy or pity.

So if you make less than $200,000 a year this will effect you. Don't think it won't. If you work for someone who provides medical coverage for its employees this will effect you. I am willing to bet that coverage will be ending soon, they also will not be able to afford buying your insurance. Don't forget any cost increase effects their bottom line.

If your over retirement age and covered by Medicare, they will be coming for you next, oh but wait they already have, if your have supplemental insurance your premiums will be going up 166%.

Also Congresswomen Susan Brooks has a 100% voting record to support the House version of this cruel Bill. 

Lets make sure we remove Ms. Brooks and we re-elect Senator Donnelly in 2018.

Fadness and Jennifer Messer -- no Bargain

-->

I was very surprised to see Mayor Fadness say that the Messer Contract is a bargain. Lets do some math. The City has two full time attorneys on payroll with a total cost of $190,000. Jennifer Messer is being paid $240,000. So for an additional $190,000 the City of Fishers could hire another two full time attorneys and save $50,000. Or since one of the attorneys is paid $80,000 maybe they hire three at this level and now the City has three additional attorneys for the price of one.

So how is the payment to Jenifer Messer a bargain or is it just a way to funnel money to her husband the Congressman.

Added- I just read a comment on another blog asking the question how come we don't have any good attorneys in Indiana that the City of Fishers has to send $240,000 to Washington.

HEA1523 - Kathy Richarson authors Bill to hide Government Abuse

HEA 1523

Author - Kathy Richardson

Search fee for public records requests. Allows a state or local government agency (agency), with certain exceptions, to charge a maximum hourly fee for any records search that exceeds two hours. Prohibits, with certain exceptions, an agency from charging a fee for providing a public record by electronic mail. Provides that if a public record is in an electronic format, an agency (excluding the office of the county recorder) shall provide an electronic copy or a paper copy, at the option of the person making the request for a public record. They can charge $20 an hour if the time to search exceeds two hours.

OK - here is my thoughts - all searches will last more than two hours form now on. 

     - When government wants to hide something that came up the search will last a lot of extra hours.

     - Local governments will exploit this law to make sure that they can stop some one from doing a search. 

    -Government should be open and I have run into too many roadblocks trying to find out what they are hiding. This is just another reason to prevent the public from knowing what is going. All of a sudden all searches will be hours and hours long.

     _ The author is Kathy Richardson, in addition to being a State Representative for District 29, she is the Elections Administrator for Hamilton County so in other words she runs her own election. Maybe she is in fear that open government will find something about how she runs for office and how she holds these two jobs. This is being done to stop people from finding out what is going on. Without a fee the people tasked to look something up will do it fast, with a few they will drag it out to make more money for their agency.

Some comments from others:
As an Indiana tax payer, I would like to see the financial proof that this is necessary.  Rita McBride.

Public records should remain public! Beverly Bush

The records belong to the public and it is unreasonable to impose a viewing charge.  Claudia Szymaszek

Why is it OK to charge a fee for a service I am already paying to much for through my taxes. HMMM I wonder where the extra money would go. Or is it to deter finding information. I wonder why we don't trust our officials. Robert Davis

Public records should NOT cost taxpayers because they already own them! Steve Landis

House Bill 1523 is an obstruction and an affront to the peoples' right to inspect public records of the government's goings on. The supporters of this bill are not being honest about the intentions of this bill which clearly are to keep information of governmental wrongdoing and unethical conduct from the public. Brian Vukadinovich

Keep our government open for to see. Not just those with money.  Dave Simcox

Adding an arbitrary fee to the collection of public records will dramatically limit the public's ability to access records we have already paid for through our taxes. Government and what it does is for the people. Carrie Napoleon

We need more government transparency, not less. Rick Taylor

I fear that agencies will use the search fee as an opportunity to make records inaccessible to the public. The search itself is not transparent to the requester, who will have to rely on the government to be honest about its search efforts. Defining "search" can be problematic. Does it include compiling records, or truly locating them? There is a difference. As a former public access counselor, I can attest to the fact that the fees agencies charge for records is often a barrier to obtaining information about the government. Karen Davis

Because citizens need affordable access to government business to keep our government accountable. Mike Conway

This is obviously designed to discourage access to public records. Under NO circumstances should this ever be signed into law! Gary Atkins

Open transparent government is a prerequisite for Democracy. This under-handed restriction on access to public records is appalling. Robert Pedersen

Governmental transparency is vital to our democracy. Cindy Guy

Sean Spicer on Syria: 'Hitler didn't even sink to the level of using chemical weapons'

Sean Spicer "not even Hitler used chemical weapons"

Tell that to my 93 year old Aunt who is living in Carmel in a nursing home that her father and mother and 10 brothers and sisters who were told to get in one line at Auschwitz while she and her sister were put in another line. She never saw them again they were gassed and then went up in smoke that same day in 1944.

She and her one remaining sister were put to work making radio tubes in a camp slave factory.  As the Soviet Army approached Auschwitz in January 1945, most of its population was sent on a death march to Bergen-Belsen and other camps. She and her sister survived the march, wearing just a dress and no shoes in the snow. When the British army liberated the camp she and her sister were near death. She was transported to a hospital in Sweden and as she was lifted into an ambulance her sister next to her died.  She was in Sweden in rehab for a year and then remained their for two more years before she was allowed to leave and come to the United States.

Mr. Spicer Hitler did not drop the gas from an airplane, as the modern day Hitler is doing in Syria, he dropped it from the ceiling in a death camp in an airtight room. Please tell me what’s the difference? 

Or is it just your way of providing another alternative fact. Come to Carmel and stand in front of my Aunt and tell her that her parents, her brothers and sisters were not killed by chemical weapons. You don't have the guts to come. You are as bad as the Nazi's willing to say anything to justify what you and this government is doing. Shame on all of you.

Fake Excuse on the Rail line Fishers/Noblesville to Indy

Fishers and Noblesville want to build a 9.3 million dollar trail and rip out the tracks of the Nickel Plate to make this happen. Sounds wonderful and once again the Republicans are using fake positions to get their way.

They don’t care about a Monon style path the real reason is they don’t’ want the tracks in place that could lead to a mass transit rail service. Funny how Mayor Fadness has spoken about how he is now against light rail when he was for it a few years ago.  If you rip out the tracks the cost in the future skyrockets and it might prevent any rail service from coming to town.

Of course the concept of a trail is wonderful and that is the trick they will be using to try and kill any rail service.  Another bit of fake statements is a term called rail banking where the area could in the future be converted back to rail.  Now according to the American Trails only 8 potions of track have ever been returned to active railroad service. One was for a 350-foot section of a 64.5-mile rail track.  Another one where they realized they need a small section to park rail cars or .21 miles of a 6.2 mile section. A few others were much larger. But the odds are this will never come back as very little has of the 4,408 miles set aside.  

While it makes sense to use abandoned rail lines for trails this is not the case. This is a clear attempt to stop light rail from Fishers and Noblesville to downtown Indy.

Repiublican Medical Insuance Sticker Shock

The Wall Street Journal is well known for fake news and its highly liberal outlook in its articles. That is what I expect the Trump conservatives to say very soon. You see the Journal that is extremely accurate and fair in it’s reporting is saying some nasty truthful things about Trumpcare or Ryancare whichever name you want to give to the proposed replacement to the Affordable Care Act.

Lets look at some of the items the Journal brought up. Low-income old people will see substantial increases in the cost of insurance, while high income people will see lower costs. People living in rural areas will pay more. So the Trump supporters from the rural area you just got your gift from the Republican Party a reduction in your take home pay.

But wait say the Republicans we have reduce red tape, taxes and mandates, well does that matter if the cost of insurance zoomed up. I don’t think so.

Ok here are some of the facts from the article:

45 year old making $18,000 a year

Rural person increase of $2,291

Urban person increase of $1,588

But if your 62 years old look at what happens

Rural person increase $9,075

Urban person increase $6,954

Since this based on where you live look at what happens to the poor person living in Chase County in Nebraska who earns that magic $18,000 a year, their insurance premiums would be $20,000 a year an increase from $760 under the Affordable Care Act.  All of you can do this math, $2,000 more than they earn and an increase of $19,240. A year.

So if you’re on social security earning about $18,000 a year you need to live on $8,000 a year on average. In some parts of the county you can’t live. So the older and poorer group of people who live in the rural area and voted for Mr. Trump. Are you happy now?

Oh by the way if your 35 and making $54,000 a year your insurance will drop about $3,000 a year or if you’re 62 year old making this amount you would see a drop of $2,856.

What ‘s very wrong with this picture.

How Indiana fakes lower taxes.

It’s a game in Indiana. They move items from the state to local governments and then claim to be the “State that works”.

A few years ago they put caps on property taxes so they could tell everyone how great the lower tax rates were. What actually happened, school districts started to do referendums to raise taxes, which were not limited by the caps. You see the state lowered money to the schools. Local governments started to raise fees, which were outside of the property taxes. Want a building permit, that fee went up. What about a tax on cars, its called a wheel tax so no one under stands what it is. So on and on go the local tax increases because the state that works lowered the money to make the state work.

Then they said you know people who go to jail would do better in the local sheriff jails so they can be close to family and that way they would be better able to merge back into society when they get out. The real reason, make local governments spend more money on jails so the state does not have too. This way the state did not have to spend money on jails and the counties now have overcrowding and need to spend more on jails and watch taxes at the local level go up again.

Ah, Indiana the state that doesn’t work for the real people.