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Breaking: Partisan gridlock blocks Hobby Lobby bill. Friend, This afternoon, Republicans in the Senate filibustered the bill that would undo the impacts of the recent Hobby Lobby decision. This bill would have ensured that employers can't stand between a woman and her doctor and protected the rights of all employees to have access to basic health care. This partisan gridlock is outrageous. We deserve to have a real debate on this bill, and it deserves to have a vote. Nearly 20,000 supporters like you have added their name demanding action. The momentum is with us to fix this. Today’s filibuster...

Above: Employees of the nightshift at Lowe’s in Staten Island, New York - David, Marcus and Souleyman - get to work.by Gina Cassini | Top Right NewsVeteran Michael Sulsona had been waiting on a new wheelchair from the VA for years. But as with so many vets suffering under scandalous conditions in the VA system, he got nowhere. His wheelchair was rickety and always seemed on the verge of collapse. Then one day it did exactly that-- right when he was shopping in a Staten Island-area Lowe's. But what happened next That’s when three strangers stepped right in to help...

The VA scandal continues to unfold, although primarily through local and regional reporting, demonstrating that the issues of corruption and bureaucratic fraud go beyond just wait lists. Today, Congress will make public the testimony from an Inspector General agent, and it’s not pretty. The IG found that mail and claims were hidden in two separate VA systems, and in Philadelphia the postmarks go back to 2011, and claims were redated to hide their age:

Veteran Michael Sulsona had been waiting on a new wheelchair from the VA for years. After receiving no help, his broke down inside a Lowe’s. That’s when three strangers stepped in to help.

Wow. A reputable poll shows that the public believes Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II. Worse than Richard M. Nixon, driven from the presidency by Watergate? Much. Worse than Jimmy Carter, for decades the very symbol of the feckless chief executive? Loads. Worse than George W. Bush, still a lightning rod on the left and a symbol of disappointment on the right? Definitely. These startling poll results set loose the predictable reaction: A flurry of told-you-so nods on the right and a fusillade of this-tells-us-nothing assertions on the left. For once, they're both right. Obama is...

Friend, Add your name today! I was very troubled by the Supreme Court’s recent decision in the Hobby Lobby case. The idea that for-profit corporations can stand in the way of employees accessing basic health care is outrageous. That’s why I’m supporting legislation that would reverse the negative consequences of the Hobby Lobby case. But it’s going to take all of us working together to ensure it passes. Will you join me in calling on Congress to undo the effects of the Hobby Lobby decision? Let me be very clear: a woman should be trusted to make her own healthcare...

Has President Obama’s use of the “pen and phone” to circumvent Congress gotten out of hand? Some members of the GOP seem to think so. [...] a mounting chorus of Republicans are calling for impeachment. Here’s a list of the high-profile Republicans who want to kick the president out of office:

The Memphis VA Medical Center has yet another medical records backlog, The Daily Caller has learned — this one estimated at three to five months long. According to the whistleblower, who provided the photo of this second set of medical records piling up at the Memphis VA Medical Center, the individual responsible for scanning in these records is Carnell Clark, an employee at the facility who is currently busy helping to catch up on a backlog TheDC exposed in June. Sandra Glover, the spokeswoman for the Veteran Integrated Services Network 9, told TheDC the records are for “Intensive Care Unit...

The VA’s defenders insist that the wait-list scandal demonstrates a need for better funding, but how does the agency ensure that its current funding levels are used efficiently? After all, the VA has seen a 78% increase in funding over the last six budget cycles, and its budget has grown more on a percentage basis than any other Cabinet-level agency during that time. All of that cash got used properly and effectively, right?Wrong. Huffington Post’s David Wood does solid work in analyzing a recent audit of the VA, which found that as many as 13,000 employees have been misclassified...

Issac Sims left Iraq alive, but not unscathed. The lingering effects of a serious head injury and the emotional trauma wrought by the sights and sounds of war never left him. On Sunday, with the demons of untreated post-traumatic stress disorder roiling his mind, Sims grabbed a rifle and started firing off shots in and outside his family’s modest home on Kansas City’s East Side. ******* Officers summoned tactical teams to surround the area. After a standoff of about five hours, police said, Sims emerged and pointed the rifle at officers. They fired. And Sims was dead at the age...

There's triple trouble with electronic health records: patient safety, medical privacy, and data security. And there are at least eight hazards. But much taxpayer money has been thrown at the highly speculative, untested EHR for political and profit purposes. And there are at least eight hazards. But much taxpayer money has been thrown at the highly speculative, untested EHR for political and profit purposes. England has already tried and failed. The National Health Service, which serves a population of 53 million, began building a national EHR system in 2002. By 2007, it missed key deadlines. In 2011, the $20 billion...

As the death toll at the nation's VA hospitals continues to mount, the Obama administration has shown that it is not completely incapable of changing the insides of those facilities. According to an e-mail from a dentist in the scandal-plagued department, the hospitals could not see veteran patients on time or effectively care for them, but they managed to promote gay, bisexual, and transgender political issues last month. The Catholic group TFP Student Action received this e-mail: I am a dentist at the VA [U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs] in (name withheld). Yesterday as I was leaving work, I noticed...

The Department of Veteran Affairs is coming under mounting pressure from Democrats and Republicans to take back bonuses for senior staff who were in charge at VA medical centers when appointment times were falsified to cover up treatment delays for patients, The Washington Post reported. House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller said the VA secretary has the authority "to rescind these bonuses" within a year after they were paid. "I am calling on him to take this action where he deems appropriate," said Miller, a Florida Republican. Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/VA-veterans-bonuses-hospitals/2014/07/08/id/581433#ixzz36u25oGwt Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed?...

Federal investigators are probing a whistleblower's allegations that applications for veterans seeking health care benefits may have been improperly purged from the VA's Health Eligibility Center in suburban Atlanta. Eligibility Center program specialist Scott Davis .. that health benefit applications for more than 10,000 veterans may have been improperly purged from ... Davis said the VA placed him on paid administrative leave after he filed the complaints

<p>While it is just a tragic anecdote, the latest story surrounding the chronic and too often fatal inefficiency of Veterans Affairs hospitals is illustrative of a much larger problem.</p> <p>“A veteran who collapsed in an Albuquerque Veteran Affairs hospital cafeteria, 500 yards from the emergency room, died after waiting 30 minutes for an ambulance,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. “Officials at the hospital Thursday confirmed it took a half an hour for the ambulance to be dispatched and take the man from one building to the other, which is about a five minute walk.”</p>

In another indicator of how low a priority veterans have with this administration, a whistleblower in Atlanta has revealed that VA employees were switched from processing VA applications to those of the Affordable Care Act, aka ObamaCare.

"...we actually put incoming applications aside so we could focus on the ACA related applications that came in over last summer."

The head of the Office of the Medical Inspector for Veterans Affairs has retired, just over a week after a scathing letter and report criticized that office for failing to adequately respond to complaints from whistleblowers and downplaying the severity of problems at some VA facilities. (Snip)Pierce had come to the VA as Deputy Medical Inspector in January 2002 and served as Medical Inspector since November of 2004, according to his VA bio. He served on active duty for thirty years in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. A letter and report sent to the White House last Monday by Carolyn

Believe it or not, it was 10 years ago this month that Barack Obama, then a candidate for the U.S. Senate, introduced himself to America with a speech that shook the Fleet Center in Boston. The main theme of that Democratic convention was the litany of George W. Bush's failures — an unpopular and unending war in Iraq, a faltering image abroad, a stagnating middle class. Obama gave eloquent voice to those frustrations, arguing that all of them could be addressed if only we reunited the electorate. Probably Obama himself would not have guessed then that he would ascend to...

Attention, veterans: Ignore your 2014 Department of Veterans Affairs calendar. Independence Day does not fall on July 3 this year. About 357,000 VA calendars given to veterans across most of Florida, southern Georgia and Puerto Rico mistakenly label Thursday, July 3, as Independence Day and remind veterans that VA outpatient clinics are closed today for the holiday. Apologies to the Founding Fathers. The Fourth of July still falls on July 4. So VA clinics actually will be closed Friday, not today. A VA spokeswoman said the error was not noticed by agency proofreaders before the calendar went to the printer...