http://www.pakalertpress.com/2012/12/07/big-brother-your-television-is-watching-you/

Media critics and the public at large are becoming increasingly alarmed about a slew of recent technological advancements such asdrones and next-generation DVRs that pose threats to the personalprivacy rights of average citizens.

Even politicians have taken notice. On February 9th Rep. David Taylor, an Olympia, Washington legislator, introduced legislation to ban drones from the surrounding skies in order to protect the privacy rights of the city's citizens.

The "spy-in-the-sky" drone is just the latest example of a technology that could potentially be used to violate the privacy rights of ordinary Americans. One of the more egregious examples of privacy-invading technologies is Verizon's newly-patented DVR which once placed in your living room will not only record you favorite TV programs but also your every movement and word. This DVR is equipped with a TV camera aimed right at you and your family that will use your words and actions to sense your “state of mind” as well as your product preferences. This information will be sent to a program that in turn will televise a regimen of ads tailored just for you.

Verizon’s set-top box will be able to even parse words from your living room conversations and detect your moods to better market to you. For example, this next-generation DVR can sense a particular viewer’s stress-level and instantaneously order up an advertisement for a vacation or aromatherapy to be aired in the next commercial break.

Questions abound. Will consumers have the choice to opt-out of such a service? Will government agencies, including law enforcement officials, be privy to this ongoing record of your words and actions? What if someone hacks the Verizon DVR and can now have an open window on your family's most private moments?

Everyone, it seems, is being tracked, by video cameras, their own smart phones, and E-Z pass devices connected to GPS equipment. And until recently we seem to have accepted this state of affairs.

Now surveillance is taking to the skies. Soon, it will not be easy to avoid the probing eyes of drones flying over cities equipped with monitoring and sensing devices. Local and federal agencies plan to fly at least 30,000 of these unmanned planes over American cities and suburbs. These drones will be equipped with powerful cameras able to monitor ordinary citizens’ behavior.

One can thank President Obama for these "spies in the skies" that will soon be invading the privacy of every US citizen. This month Obama signed a law compelling the FAA to "fully integrate" drones into U.S. airspace by no later than 2015 as a way to fight crime and terrorism.

Thankfully, some Americans are fighting back at this latest invasion of privacy, at least

in Seattle and a few other cities. Last year the Federal Aviation Administration gave Seattle’s law-enforcement agencies approval to train operators in the use of unmanned aerial vehicles,

Many pundits are linking President Obama's sinking poll numbers to the recent rash of scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, and Benghazi.

Such poll numbers can only sink further when the public discovers that the NSA was sharing its information on Americans with a foreign intelligence organization, Britain's NSA equivalent, the GCHQ.

Public attention to these scandals has been heightened by various Congressional investigations of the administration's use of various government agencies to audit, spy on, and generally harass a range of political opponents, members of the media, and in the case of the NSA and PRISM scandals, the entire American public.

Such public scrutiny is definitely hurting the President's public image. According to pollsters, among 57% of those following the IRS, Benghazi, and AP scandals, President Obama's disapproval rating is as high as 57%.

In all of these discussion of the impact of the scandals on Obama's public image, the media is ignoring one basic fact. The President's approval ratings were already beginning to trend lower as far back as February of this year, even before these scandals caught the attention of the public. throughout much of 2013 Reuters, McClatchy-Marist, CNN and Wall Street Journal surveys have measured his standing with the American public at around 46% or 47%.

Many critics have linked President Obama's failed attempts to muster the Senate votes necessary to pass his gun control legislation and his inability to stop budget cuts, the "Sequestration" measure, to those weak early-2013 poll numbers. His push for immigration reform, although backed by a bipartisan "Gang of Eight" in the Senate, faces stiff political headwinds.

The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan senses that Americans are suffering from "Obama Fatigue" only six months into the President's second term. Democrats fret that Obama's declining "power to persuade" even members of his own party to follow his legislative lead is turning him into a lame duck leader.

Actually, the President's mediocre poll numbers over the last few months are very much where they have been for most of his time in office, going back to at least the summer of 2009.

In fact, the only time over the last few years that Obama enjoyed relatively high approval ratings,

in the 52%-54% range, were in the days immediately preceding the November 2012 election and for a month or two thereafter.

The real riddle is this: What factors or events in late-October 2012 caused Barack Obama's approval ratings to suddenly ascend to the uncharacteristically high levels that helped get him re- elected to a 2nd term?

It is unlikely Obama's economic record--historically high unemployment rates, shrinking incomes, and rising food and energy prices--caused that temporary leap in the polls in late- October. Similar economic conditions turned Presidents Carter, George H.W. Bush, and Ford into one-termers. Throughout his campaign Obama largely avoided discussing his foreign policy record, plagued as it was by his handling of the Benghazi assault and the "Arab Spring."

In my next column I will examine the factors that led to to Obama's election to a second term as President in 2012.

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Will this economic malaise ever end, Americans are asking? As we enter the fifth year of what many pundits and economists are calling the Great Stagnation, the employment situation in the US seems to be getting progressively worse.

The March jobs report contains very little good news. Only 88,000 jobs were created, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the April 8th Wall Street Journal reported that

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to help millions of the uninsured to enroll in private health programs. However, the great majority of Obamacare enrollees are signing up for government-supported Medicaid programs instead.

Ironically, some of the enrollees are not willingly choosing Medicaid.Rather, they are being shifted onto Medicaid because their current private insurance policies, falling short of the new Obamacare law requirements, have been unexpectedly canceled, and their income levels automatically make them "Medicaid-eligible."

According to Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, "We're seeing a huge spike in terms of Medicaid enrollments."

CBS News has reported that in Washington State, 87 percent of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled were signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, 82 percent of new enrollments were in Medicaid. In New York, that figure is 64 percent. Other states running their own exchanges report similar results.

This rapid growth in Medicaid's rolls has led economists and health care analysts to examine more closely the quality of medical care under the Medicaid program.

Unfortunately, studies conducted over the last several years have demonstrated that on balance people on Medicaid often receive medical treatment markedly inferior in quality than the treatment they can expect in private plans. In many cases, it was found that being uninsured was a better alternative to being covered by Medicaid.

An article in the Wall Street Journal summarized a host of clinical studies demonstrating that in many cases Medicaid can be hazardous to your health. A 2010 study of 1,231 patients with throat cancer revealed that that Medicaid patients were 50% more likely to die than patients insured privately. Medicaid patients had an 80% greater chance of having tumors that spread to at least one lymph node than those with private insurance. Studies reveal similar poor outcomes for Medicaid patients suffering from breast and colon cancer.

When compared to those with private insurance as well as the uninsured, patients covered by Medicaid were almost twice as likely to die during their hospital stay. One study revealed that Medicaid patients undergoing coronary angioplasty were 59% more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes, compared with patients with private insurance. In another recent study, Medicaid patients who underwent lung transplants, when compared with both the privately insured and uninsured, were 8.1% less likely to survive 10 years after the surgery. Medicaid patients had a higher chance of suffering a major heart attack after angioplasty than uninsured patients.

The researchers conducting these studies controlled for the cultural and socioeconomic factors that might negatively impact the health of Medicaid's poorer patients.

Medicaid patients suffer poor medical outcomes for a number of reasons. The program has been drastically reducing payments to doctors and other healthcare providers for a variety of treatments. These payouts will shrink even more under Obamacare, further reducing the pool of doctors willing to service Medicaid patients. Meanwhile, Medicaid patients have problems gaining timely access to both specialized and routine medical treatment. Many researchers have concluded that the best and the brightest practitioners and specialists are choosing not to participate in a program that sets fees so low.

Truth be told, the growth of the Medicaid patient pool will lead to long waits for medical service that over time will get worse, not better, as the number and quality of doctors serving the growing patient pool shrinks. The tragedy is that many who were shifted from private insurance to Medicaid because of Obamacare regulations will experience a brand of medical care inferior to the service they previously enjoyed.

Clearly, Medicaid is broken and needs to fixed. With over a hundred million Americans predicted to lose their employer-based medical insurance in 2014, the situation will only get worse,

It is imperative that Congress begin examining Medicaid's track record as well as the medical fate awaiting the millions who could suddenly and unexpectedly find themselves on this program.

Expect Obamacare to be the central issue of the 2014 Congressional elections.