St. Mary’s Women’s Wellness Center is offering Tai Chi Community Classes for midlife and senior men and women every Wednesday in May from 3:00 – 3:35 p.m. in the St. Mary’s Community Room at Washington Square Mall.
There are many health benefits to Tai Chi for all age groups, but particularly for the aging population. Tai Chi:
• Reduces the risk of falling
• Helps treat osteoarthritis in the knees
• Reduces pain associated with rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia
• Reduces stress and blood pressure
• Improves sleep quality and aerobic capacity
• Boosts the immune system
The cost is just $5 per class. No pre-registration is required, and participants do not need to attend each class. For more information, please call 812-485-5725.

America’s Just Not That Into Obama

By Jonah Goldberg – April 19, 2013

“You know, I actually believe my own bull****.”

That’s what President Obama once told a reporter. If the man ever uttered a statement that spoke more to his approach to politics, I haven’t heard it.

Whether it stems from a grandiose overconfidence in his own powers of persuasion, or the lessons he took from his years as a community organizer, or his own messianic conviction that he is on the right side of everything, including history itself, the president has always operated under the theory that he can move the American people to his causes. And he can’t. He just can’t.

Yes, he got elected and reelected, and that’s saying something. But whatever personal popularity the man has doesn’t transfer to domestic policy.

It’s as if the American people are saying, “Mr. President, we’re just not that into you.”

“What about health-care reform!?” his fans invariably respond.

Well, what about it? Sure, it passed. But the Affordable Care Act didn’t become law because Obama ignited a populist prairie fire in favor of it. He dedicated vast, vast swaths of his time and energy trying to sell the American people on Obamacare. He never made the sale (and still hasn’t). The misbegotten law’s passage is attributable entirely to the fact that Democrats rammed it through Congress — with a 60-vote majority in the Senate — using the sorts of backroom deals and corporate giveaways the American people despise.

Ironically, the only populist mass movement on domestic-policy issues Obama can claim credit for creating is the Tea Party, which I think we can all agree isn’t what he had in mind.

Indeed, if Obamacare had been popular, the Democrats wouldn’t have been dealt a “shellacking” — Obama’s word — in the 2010 midterm elections. But they were: Democrats suffered a defeat of biblical proportions, despite Obama’s relentless campaigning.

In 2012, after scoring an impressive reelection win, Obama apparently thought he solved the puzzle. He needed more organization, like he had in the election. Obviously everyone loves what he has to say, Obama reasoned, but he needed to translate that love into action. And so he rebranded his presidential campaign into his own personal grassroots operation, Organizing for Action. Action item No. 1? Gun control.

It’s worth remembering that when Obama took up gun control in his State of the Union address, he set the bar at shin level for himself and for Senate Democrats. He didn’t demand victory; he demanded a mere vote on the issue.

Running through a list of victims he was all too eager to politicize — “The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote,” etc. — he brought the Democrats in the audience to their feet. Many in the press hailed it as one of the most moving moments of his presidency.

With the sort of willingness to politicize tragedy that is always denounced as the vilest cynicism when Republicans do anything of the sort, Obama and his paid OFA subalterns took to the streets and the airwaves waving the figurative bloody shirt of Newtown for months (with nary a peep of complaint from the same press corps that routinely denounced President Bush for politicizing 9/11).

But when it came time to clear the shin-level hurdle he set for himself and OFA, they face-planted in the ground, well short of the target.

And now the president is going to run the same play, again. “If this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters,” he said in one of several bitter promises to turn gun control into an issue to win back Congress in 2014.

As Josh Kraushaar of National Journal noted, Obama couldn’t misread the political environment heading into 2014 any worse. Why? Because the places where the Democrats need to win to take back the House — the South and mountain West — are precisely those areas where even many Democrats disagree with the president on gun control. Making it a central issue in 2014 is a boon to Republicans.

The upshot of this is that we will now endure nearly another two years of Obama haranguing us about how it’s him and “the people” against special interests and other evil forces who don’t care about murdered children. Washington will become more shrill and get even less done, all because Obama’s only play is a populist charade made possible by the fact he still believes his own bull****.

Source: Real Clear Politics

A snapped power pole has brought down power lines near Virginia and Hwy 41. The down lines have caused power outages in the area. This includes several traffic control lights. Use caution in the area and treat the impacted intersections as 4-way stops. No word on what caused the pole to break or how long repairs will take.

Firefighters responded to a house fire at 1301 S. Evans at 10:00 a.m. this morning and upon arrival found smoke coming from the front of the structure. The fire was quickly extinguished with minor fire damage to the structure itself although the contents in that area were totally destroyed by the fire. There was moderate smoke damage to the adjourning rooms with minor to none throughout the rest of the house.

Fire Investigator Richard Howard stated that the occupant had been home approximately 30 minutes prior to the blaze. His investigation revealed that the fire started in the corner of the living room near a computer desk and he believes it was caused by an overloaded electrical circuit in that location.

The Red Cross was called to provide shelter for the occupant.

Monday, April 22

1:30 – 2:40 p.m.

Harrison High School

Indiana Attorney Greg Zoeller will stop by the EVSC’s Randall T. Shepard Academy for Law and Social Justice to talk with students about the roles and responsibilities of the Indiana Attorney General as well as engage students in a question and answer session.

The Attorney General is one of many speakers that visit the Shepard Academy, which is a half-day program for juniors and seniors who are interested in law and social justice. The program integrates social studies and English curriculum and is named the former Chief Justice of the Indiana Supreme Court Randall T. Shepard.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., scolded Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on Wednesday over the implementation of President Obama’s health care law. Complaining about confused individuals and small businesses in his state and warning of a coming “train wreck,” at times Baucus sounded more like a Tea Partier than one of the key authors of the legislation that would become known as Obamacare. But his posture during the Finance Committee hearing is also a telling sign that Democrats up for reelection in 2014 are increasingly worried that mangled implementation could put their jobs in jeopardy.

In 2009, five different health care proposals made their way through the relevant committees in the House and Senate. The Finance Committee bill that Baucus authored was the closest to the finished product that Obama signed. Go back and look at Baucus’s bill, and you’ll see most of the law’s key components there – taxes on insurers, drug companies, medical device manufacturers and high value health care plans; exchanges; the Medicaid expansion; IPAB. Also significant is what wasn’t in the Baucus bill – a public option, which had been a central component of the other proposals circulating through Congress, but was ultimately abandoned.

Yet despite his intimate involvement with crafting the legislation, when Sebelius appeared before his committee to discuss the health care provisions in Obama’s latest budget, Baucus used it as an opportunity to rip into her and other administration officials for what he described as the bungled implementation efforts.

Under the timeline of the law, health care exchanges are supposed to be open for enrollment on Oct. 1 and ready to dole out benefits at the start of 2014. But Baucus expressed skepticism that exchanges would actually be open in every state, including Montana. He also spoke of the confusion about the law he encounters when he goes back home.

“The administration’s public information campaign on the benefits of the Affordable Care Act I think deserve a failing grade,” Baucus told Sebelius. “You need to fix it.”

He continued, “I am very concerned that not enough is being done so far. Very concerned. When I am home, small businesses have no idea what to do, what to expect. They don’t know what affordability rules are, they don’t know what penalties may apply, they just don’t know.”

Baucus said that a CPA told him that small business clients are “throwing their hands up” and the CPA doesn’t know what to tell them.

“I just see a huge train wreck coming down,” Baucus warned. “You and I have discussed this many times and I don’t see any results yet.”

The key context is that Baucus is up for reelection in Montana next year in a state that went for Mitt Romney by a more than 13 percent margin and Cook Political Report rates him as vulnerable. Though the race is still considered to lean in his direction, if the implementation of Obamacare goes as disastrously as many expect, it could put him at risk.

Because his fingerprints are all over the law, Baucus cannot really run away from it. So what’s happening now is that Baucus is laying the groundwork to blame any failures on implementation, rather than design. Though the “train wreck” comment drew the most headlines, more telling may have been his comment that, “If the administration implements it correctly, millions more Americans will gain access to health care as a result of the law.” In other words, the law itself is fine, but the bureaucrats are screwing it up.

Politically, the strategy is similar to the one many Republicans who voted for the Iraq War pursued when the public soured on the war. They’d defend their support for the war effort while finding a way to distance themselves from elements of President Bush’s strategy, such as troop levels. Ultimately, this didn’t shield many Republicans from the Democratic wave in 2006 and I imagine if Obamacare implementation fails, a Baucus-style pivot won’t save vulnerable Democrats.

Source: Max Baucus Watch