Diesel Civil Trust

Verizon’s upgraded, fiber-driven Web capacities show that ISPs can provide much faster service to the home, but tiered pricing is likely to come, too.

tarting next week, Verizon will double the early-termination fee for smartphones. That is, if you get a BlackBerry, Android or similar phone from Verizon, and you decide to switch phones before your two-year contract is up, you’ll be socked with a $350 penalty (it used to be $175).

Read on for even more insults. Emphasis mine.

Vice-President Dick Cheney is well known for his discretion, but his official White House biography, as posted on his Web site, may exceed even his own stringent standards.

This is an old article, but one that illustrates just how deeply inter-connected are the Pentagon and private interests. Emphasis mine.

abbyjean:

The untimely disappearance of Sally Marrari’s medical coverage goes a long way toward explaining why insurance companies are cast as the villain in the health-care reform drama. “They said I never mentioned I had a back problem,” said Marrari, 52, whose coverage with Blue Cross was abruptly canceled in 2006 after a thyroid disorder, fluid in the heart and lupus were diagnosed. That left the Los Angeles woman with $25,000 in medical bills and the stigma of the company’s claim that she had committed fraud by not listing on a health questionnaire “preexisting conditions” Marrari said she did not know she had.

By the time she filed a lawsuit in 2008, she also got a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and her debts had swelled beyond $200,000. She was able to see a specialist by trading office visits for work on the doctor’s 1969 Porsche at the garage she owns with her husband. “I’ve had about 10 visits,” Marrari said of the barter arrangement that has proved more reliable than her insurance. “The car needs a lot of work.”

Rescission — the technical term for canceling coverage on grounds that the company was misled — is often considered among the most offensive practices in an insurance industry that already suffers from a distinct lack of popularity among the American public. Tales of cancellations have fueled outrage among regulators, analysts, doctors and, not least, plaintiffs’ lawyers, who describe insurers as too eager to shed patients to widen profits.

Those sentiments have become central to the health-care debate, as President Obama tries to tap into dissatisfaction with the insurance industry to build support for reform efforts. Each of the bills pending in Congress would prevent insurers from rejecting clients because of preexisting conditions.

No one claims to know how often policies are canceled — in large part, congressional investigators say, because insurance companies are regulated by a patchwork of state laws and policies. But the practice is common enough to spur lawsuits and state regulatory action. In the past 18 months, California’s five largest insurers paid almost $19 million in fines for marooning policyholders who had fallen ill. That includes a $1 million fine against Health Net, which admitted offering bonuses to employees for finding reasons to cancel policies, according to company documents released in court.

When normal people happen to “find” their own money, it might mean a twenty left in a winter coat, or discovering change beneath the sofa cushions. But if you’re Charlie Rangel, it means doubling your net worth.

Earlier this month the Chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee “amended” his 2007 financial disclosure form—to the tune of more than a half-million dollars in previously unreported assets and income. That number may be as high as $780,000, because Congress’s ethics rules only require the Members to report their finances within broad ranges. This voyage of personal financial discovery brings Mr. Rangel’s net worth for 2007 to somewhere between $1.028 million and $2.495 million, while his previous statement came in at $516,015 and $1.316 million.

Adobe announced this week that it has not tested and will not support its Creative Suite 3 line of products, including Photoshop CS3, on Apple’s new Snow Leopard operating system.

Figures. Why support “legacy” software when the Mac OS upgrade will set each user back $699.99? Emphasis mine.

ASPEN — The swimming pool is empty. The game room silent. And the only kids at the Silver Lining Ranch smile from hundreds of photographs posted on the walls.

For seven years, thousands of children suffering with cancer came to this ranch to enjoy Aspen’s mountain ambience in a swank facility owned by former child tennis prodigy Andrea Jaeger. Now, any silver lining for those cancer patients is clouded in a nasty land-use controversy.

Not many people would knowingly pay more than $35 for a cup of coffee. But far too many people are getting saddled — with no warning — with outsized bills for minor purchases, under a euphemistically labeled “overdraft protection program” that most major banks have adopted over the last 10 years.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of pages of internal e-mail and once-secret Congressional testimony showed Tuesday that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than was previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of United States attorneys.