[McClatchy Report] In its newsletters and magazines, in congressional testimony and on its website, AARP warns seniors about deceptive direct mail and other dubious marketing come-ons as part of its mission to protect members from financial abuses.
But the huge lobbying group’s own aggressive efforts to coax seniors to join or renew their memberships also have drawn a burst of criticism this year.
Angry members say AARP’s barrage of solicitation letters and social media posts can mislead or confuse aging consumers, some of whom struggle with memory and managing their financial affairs. Hundreds have complained about getting false warnings that their memberships would soon expire, and at least some people have unwittingly paid for duplicate memberships.
The critics include Kathy Portie, senior editor of the Big Bear Grizzly weekly newspaper in Southern California. In January, she received a sponsored post from AARP in her Facebook feed that read: "Your membership is about to expire. ... ACT FAST ‐ Time is running out."
Her terse reply, mirroring the grievances of dozens of others who received the same post, was, "No it’s not. It is valid through 2020. So stop it."
Wendi Fein fumes about the experience of her octogenarian parents, Ruth and Richard Schwartz. She said the two, who live in Nevada City, Calif., have cognitive issues but, like many in their generation, pay their bills promptly without asking questions.
#5
I get a call from these pricks at least once a month (and everybody else) - that's the price to pay for still having a published landline.
Check with you land line provider to see if they have a way to block unwanted calls. Mine does. It's not perfect but we've experienced a drastic decline in the number of robot calls and other annoyances. Now, if I could just tell the Post Office that I don't want to see any more junk mail...
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/30/2018 11:02 Comments ||
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#6
Abu, my basic rule for mail is that if it is not first class or presorted first class, it goes in the trash unopened.
Posted by: Rambler in Virginia ||
03/30/2018 12:06 Comments ||
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In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was an epic fight of so-called muckrakers ‐ journalists and novelists such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, and Ida Tarbell, along with trust-busting politicians like Teddy Roosevelt ‐ against rail, steel, and oil monopolies. Whatever one thought of their sensationalism and often hard-left socialist agendas, they at least brought public attention to price fixing, product liabilities, monopolies, and the buying of politicians.
No such progressive zealotry exists today in Silicon Valley and its affiliated tech spin-offs. And the result is a Roman gladiatorial spectacle with no laws in the arena.
In the last two elections, Facebook has sold its user data to Democratic and, apparently more controversially, Republican campaign affiliates. Google, Twitter, and Facebook have often been accused of censoring users’ expression according to their own political tastes. Civil libertarians have accused social-media and Internet giants of violating rights of privacy, by monitoring the shopping, travel, eating, and entertainment habits of their customers to the extent that they know where and when Americans travel or communicate with one another.
Continued on Page 49
#8
As soon as I found out that Google was giving data to the Zero campaign for free, I quit using Google. I have ceased using Facebook (the only reason I have a facebook page is because a headhunter recommended it).
I have minimized my LinkedIn profile also.
I've gone to eliminating location indicators on my phone for navigation purposes and I refuse to use any of the App Stores.
I do not buy anything on line except office supplies...I avoid Amazon, even with their extremely low prices...like the plague.
Don't trust any of them.
#9
What is needed is some sort of bipartisan national commission that might dispassionately and in disinterested fashion offer guidelines to legislators...
Well, VDH, you can dream can't you?
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
03/30/2018 11:18 Comments ||
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[Manhattan Institute] It wasn't doomsday and the sky wasn't actually falling.
As all doomsday cults eventually learn, you can predict the end of the world only so many times before everybody stops listening to you.
We were told that repealing net neutrality would bring the "end of the internet as we know it." Pulling out of the Paris Climate Agreement was supposed to kill the final chance to truly combat global warming (or climate change, or whatever it's called this week). The confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Education secretary was going to bring about the end of public education in America.
And yet the internet is not shutting down; the Paris Climate Agreement was exposed as virtually irrelevant to global temperatures; and America's public schools look basically the same as they did back in 2015.
To this list of failed doomsday predictions, we can now add the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), which modernized the corporate tax code and gave tax relief to the vast majority of families.
The TCJA certainly has its flaws‐I gave it only a B-, primarily due to deficit concerns‐yet many of the plan's partisan critics exaggerated its potential downside to such a degree as to be genuinely misleading. And now that families are seeing how the new law actually affects them, most of them support the cuts.
[Hot Air] That was quick! Within hours of his ouster as VA Chief yesterday, the New York Times had published an op-ed by David Shulkin trashing the Trump administration as free-market ideologues.
Shulkin’s claim that he did nothing wrong doesn’t hold up. Last August the Washington Post published a story on his 10-day trip to Europe which made clear at least half the trip was spent sightseeing: Ruinous free markets, how can we finally be rid of them ?
#1
You thought your shit didn't stink. You defrauded the US taxpayer on a junket, got caught, said 'oopsie, paid it back, all better now'.
No. Your are a self-entitled creep who now whines about the unfairness of it all.
Drop Dead.
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
03/30/2018 7:36 Comments ||
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#2
He refused to buy medical supplies medicine and hire compentent people and hire english speaking doctors that did not carry witch doctor sacks and chicken feet!
Posted by: Jack Chaiter7913 ||
03/30/2018 8:10 Comments ||
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h/t Instapundit
The Left is in hysterics over John Bolton replacing H.R. McMaster as President Trump’s national security adviser: He will start a war with Iran! He once wrote a foreword for a book written by Pamela Geller and me! He is a right-wing extremist! Back in the real world, however, Bolton replacing McMaster is a victory for realistic analysis of the jihad threat, and a defeat for the fantasy-based policymaking that has prevailed throughout the Bush and Obama eras, and beyond.
McMaster has insisted: "The Islamic State is not Islamic."
...In February 2017, according to CNN, "at an all-hands meeting of the National Security Council," McMaster "said jihadist terrorists aren’t true to their professed religion and that the use of the phrase ’radical Islamic terrorism’ doesn’t help the U.S. in working with allies to defeat terrorist groups."
...McMaster’s pollyannish views were a holdover from the Obama regime, which established fantasies about Islam having nothing to do with terrorism as the official policy of the U.S. government. This was in contrast to President Trump, who repeatedly criticized his predecessor (and his 2016 election opponent) for not being willing to call the problem of jihad terror by its right name.
...You cannot defeat an enemy that you don’t understand, much less refuse to understand. We can only hope that this change will lead to a more realistic appraisal of the jihad threat.
#1
I think it's telling when the WH changes party hands, but all the personnel remain the same. That's a pretty good indication that they view each other as opponents at all.
[Jpost] On Monday morning, the Deputy Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) Brig.-Gen. Guy Goldstein and the deputy head of the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria, Col. Uri Mandes, shocked members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee when Mandes claimed that there are three million Palestinians living in Judea and Samaria today.
Committee chairman Avi Dichter noted that if their numbers are true, then the Palestinian population has tripled in 25 years. Absent mass immigration ‐ and the PA has experienced net emigration for the past 23 years ‐ there is no way that could have happened. As Dichter said, if their numbers are true, the Guinness Book of World Records needs to be alerted.
Mandes wasn’t done. He said there are two million Palestinians in Gaza. Added together with Israel’s 1.8 million Arab citizens, if Mandes’s numbers are accurate, then there is population parity between Jews and Arabs west of the Jordan River.
Mandes acknowledged that the Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria (which COGAT oversees) isn’t the source of his data. The Palestinian Authority is the source.
What Mandes failed to acknowledge is that the PA’s demographic data was exposed as fraudulent 13 years ago. In late 2004, the American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG), an independent team of American and Israeli researchers, published an in-depth assessment of the PA’s population numbers.
But that’s the thing. His numbers are inaccurate. And, in any case, as any student of history knows - such problems are solvable. Ask the Germans of the Sudetes, or the 13+ million Russians who lived in the republics before the collapse of Soviet Union.
#2
I worked with a very messed up girl who survived the muslim pograms in Azerbaijan. She was away at college and her family and whole neighborhood was raped and beaten to death. Not a peep on any media. Stuff like that happened all over as the USSR fell.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[McClatchy Report] In its newsletters and magazines, in congressional testimony and on its website, AARP warns seniors about deceptive direct mail and other dubious marketing come-ons as part of its mission to protect members from financial abuses.
