California-based Molina Healthcare discovered in February that it lost its contract to manage health care for Medicaid beneficiaries in Missouri. The company has filed a lawsuit alleging that state officials violated competitive bidding laws and changed the rules to favor another company, Centene Corp., which was a major donor to Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat.
Molina, which has held a contract with Missouri for 16 years, was effectively replaced by Centene, a company based in the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, which has not held a Medicaid contract in Missouri since it withdrew from the market in 2006.
Centene’s attorney in Molina’s lawsuit against the state is Chuck Hatfield, who for 10 years served as Nixon’s chief of staff during his tenure as attorney general.In an interview last week, Hatfield called the lawsuit “sour grapes,” arguing that Molina didn’t object to capping the number of companies that would provide managed care until it didn’t win a contract. Read more…
This is so pathetically phony that it’s really sad. How convenient that “moderate” Claire’s staff found a constituent to interview that is a female “registered Republican who has democratic leanings” that is a business owner “outraged at Rush Limbaugh’s comments.” Every group that Claire is losing badly in her quest for re-election is represented in one constituent! (Note to staff. Missouri doesn’t require you to register your party affiliation)
Fortunately for our funny bones, this is not Claire’s first attempt at populist propaganda:
Great update today on the St. Louis Lambert Field China Hub boondoggle.
Air Cargo News:
In early April 2012, the St. Clair (Illinois) County Public Building Commission demanded that former Wall Street executive John Hewitt return a $250,000 taxpayer-funded incentive originally intended to facilitate development of what was to be a $6 million, 62,500 square-foot warehouse at MidAmerica St. Louis Airport (located in Mascoutah, Illinois). How the deal came to the point of collapse is a story of consistently failed accountability at the airport, county, and federal levels…
Updating a story reported extensively in FlyingTypers last year, the chairman of the Midwest China Hub Commission told St. Louis radio station KMOX that St. Louis had likely already missed its opportunity, blaming Missouri lawmakers for not passing a $360 million incentive package. The Commission’s vice chairman Dan Mehan (president and CEO of the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry) quickly countered that the group would continue its effort. In a St. Louis Business Journal article , Mehan stated “I think there’s no doubt flights would be landing weekly at Lambert at this point if not for what happened in Jefferson City this past fall.”
To the astonishment of the Missouri Chamber and their cronies in and around St. Louis, enough of the Missouri legislature took advantage of a second chance to perform due diligence and having recognized the project’s obvious faults, rejected the Aerotropolis Trade Incentive and Tax Credit Act. Hub commission chairman Mike Jones suggested the cost to date had been $4 million dollars—much of it public. Jones commented to St. Louis’ CBS affiliate KMOX radio “How can Illinois do that when they’re broke? They may be broke, but in Missouri, we’re cheap. When you’re broke sometimes that makes you able to come up with a plan. But when you’re cheap, when you’re trying to get something for nothing, then you usually come out a loser.”
Labeling as “cheap” the waste of $4 million dollars of public money spent on first-class travel and consulting fees for the likes of ex-Senator Kit Bond’s former staffers is illuminating both in characterizing the entitlement mentality of politicians and cronies living large on public money and in explaining why such efforts never properly die. Some of the same legislation language is being reintroduced in the form of the $60 million freight forwarder incentives package intended to narrow the gap between shipping costs at Chicago O’Hare and Lambert. In early April 2012, the St. Louis County Council approved acceptance of a $3 million state grant that replaces local casino tax money intended for a flood control project, allowing those funds to be redirected to subsidize international shipping costs. The Council Chair sought assurance that the money would not go to administrative costs or consultants—a seeming acknowledgment of the excesses of this same effort in the recent past. To past critics, it is illuminating that Mehan and others who once declared $360 million inadequate are now trawling for $3 million. Read more…
President Obama is taking more and more criticism over the gimmicky tax hike, the Buffett Tax, he’s been pushing all week. Of course, the tax would barely make a dent in the massive Obama deficits, will do absolutely nothing to help with high gas prices and certainly “won’t get you a job,” as a National Journal analysis piece declared. But today, more observers are calling out the president for how his Buffett Tax is far more politics than substance.
In a blistering column, The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, certainly not someone considered a conservative flatly declares the Buffett Tax “a gimmick.” He writes, “President Obama admits it: His proposed ‘Buffett Rule’ tax on millionaires is a gimmick. ‘There are others who are saying: “Well, this is just a gimmick. Just taxing millionaires and billionaires, just imposing the Buffett Rule, won’t do enough to close the deficit,”’ Obama declared Wednesday. ‘Well, I agree.’ Actually, the gimmick was apparent even without the president’s acknowledgment. He gave his remarks in a room in the White House complex adorned with campaign-style photos of his factory tours. On stage with him were eight props: four millionaires, each paired with a middle-class assistant. . . . And if that’s not enough evidence of gimmickry, after his speech Obama’s reelection campaign unveiled an online tax calculator ‘to see how your tax rate stacks up against Mitt Romney’s — and then see what the Buffett Rule would do.’”
Appearing on MSNBC this morning, Politico’s Jim VandeHei didn’t mince words: “It’s total gimmickry. It’s 1% of what you need to actually take care of the deficit. There’s a big danger for President Obama in that they become so insanely political in an insanely political culture. Almost everything they do now is … targeted at a very specific subset of voters that they want to win.”
In a must-read column today, Charles Krauthammer lays out just why President Obama’s Buffett Tax proposal that the Senate will be voting on on Monday is so unserious and gimmicky.
“Let’s do the math,” Krauthammer writes. “The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this new tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year. If we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years — a span longer than the life of this republic — it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone. As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett Rule is a farce.”
Further, he explains, “It’s a substitute for tax reform, an evasion of tax reform. In three years, Obama hasn’t touched tax (or, for that matter, entitlement) reform, and clearly has no intention to. The Buffett Rule is nothing but a form of redistributionism that has vanishingly little to do with debt reduction and everything to do with reelection.” Krauthammer notes, “It perfectly pits the 99 percent against the 1 percent. Indeed, it is OWS translated into legislation, something the actual occupiers never had the wit to come up with.
Clever politics, but in terms of economics, it’s worse than useless.”
Yesterday’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinelelaborated on Krauthammer’s point: “The Buffett Rule would raise less than $50 billion over 10 years – a drop in the bucket that would do little to solve the nation’s long-term problem with red ink. And targeting taxpayers who make most of their income from investments, as the Buffett Rule appears to do, risks discouraging investment at a time when such money flows are critical to providing capital to growing companies that create jobs. On the contrary, the government ought to be encouraging investment: It’s how businesses grow and jobs are created. For individuals, investing is the path to economic security. And there is this little matter: The money invested already has been taxed once before at the marginal rates. The Buffett Rule also would make the tax code more complicated.”
Meanwhile, National Journal reports today, “President Obama earned $789,674 in 2011, the White House announced on Friday. However, with this income, he does not even qualify for the so-called Buffett Rule that he has promoted relentlessly and the Senate will take up on Monday.”
As Krauthammer concludes, “The [Buffett Tax] enterprise is an exercise in misdirection — a distraction not just from Obama’s dismal record on growth and unemployment but, more important, from his dereliction of duty in failing to this day to address the utterly predictable and devastating debt crisis ahead.”
Below is a great article in National Review on the “Missouri Plan” for choosing judges. Currently, the governor chooses a new judge from a panelist of three finalists. We’ve been following this issue closely after we posted this exclusive.
The Missouri legislature is considering a constitutional amendment to modify the way judges in Missouri are selected. The legislation under consideration, sponsored by conservative Missouri Senator Jim Lembke, would significantly improve the judicial selection process by making some slight changes to the commission that nominates judges. Under the state’s current method of selection, known as the Missouri Plan, a seven-member commission sends the governor a list of three nominees from which he must select a judge to fill any appellate vacancy. The structure and left-wing dominance of the nominating commission (the distinctive feature of the Missouri Plan) has led many to argue that the state should amend the constitution to either directly elect judges or have them selected under something mirroring the advice/consent model set forth in the U.S. Constitution.
The proposed constitutional amendment before the Missouri Senate falls short of either of those alternatives, but it would make some very important improvements. Primarily, it would increase the number of citizens who serve on the nominating commission and restagger the terms of those commissioners so that they would serve concurrently with the sitting governor. The governor’s judicial nominee would then go before the Missouri Senate, where the Senate would have the option to reject by a two-thirds vote. In short, whereas the balance of the authority over judicial selection currently resides in the unelected and left-leaning legal guild, these reforms would shift some authority to the chief executive and the legislature, in accordance with the principles articulated by the founding fathers in the debates over the U.S. Constitution.
Unfortunately the amendment is currently bottled up in the senate judiciary committee. Read more…
Former Missouri Gov. Roger Wilson and a St. Louis lawyer were indicted on a federal misdemeanor charge late Wednesday for allegedly laundering campaign contributions to the Missouri Democratic Party through a St. Louis law firm, the U.S. Attorney’s office said Thursday morning. Read more….
These pictures seem to confirm the worst kept secret in St. Louis politics. Rumors have been flying for weeks that Representatives Jamilah “Lil’ Niecey” Nasheed and Jeanette Mott Oxford have cut a clandestine deal to help Nasheed defeat 5th district senator Robin Wright Jones. The deal: Mott Oxford runs in the majority African American district and if Nasheed wins, she becomes Lil’ Niecey’s in district staff person.
