67-29 which is a veto sustaining majority in the Senate. President Bush has already declared an intention to veto, with some extremely masterful language:
Today, the Senate passed a State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) reauthorization bill that fails to focus on poor children, and instead creates a new entitlement program for higher income households. In fact, the bill specifically eliminates the requirement that states enroll 95% of children in households under 200% of the federal poverty level.
The President will veto this bill because it directs scarce funding to higher incomes at the expense of poor families.
We encourage Congress to send the President a continuing resolution extending SCHIP so coverage for the children who rely on the program will not be threatened. We should take this time to arrive at a more rational, bipartisan SCHIP reauthorization bill that focuses on children in poor families who don't currently have insurance, rather than raising taxes to cover people who already have private insurance.
When the bill passed the House, it did not do so with enough votes to sustain a veto in that body. I would expect that the Democrats would want to put it up for another vote, just to increase the pressure "for the children." This issue is just too easy to demagogue, they won't give up that opportunity.
On the merits of the bill, I'm with the president completely. If the politicians want to do something to help working class families around health care, how about full tax credits for health care? How about coming up with a comprehensive solution to the portability problem? In my opinion this is all about fixing a problem that largely does not exist for the opportunity to beat your political opponent about the head and neck.
Pass SCHIP as it was last year and move on to a real issue.
Hillary Clinton spent some time on Fox News Sunday and told us that she would rather not be talking about MoveOn.org:
WALLACE: Senator, you have refused to criticize the MoveOn.org ad about General Petraeus. And in fact, this week you voted against a Senate resolution denouncing it.
President Bush said that you and other Democrats are more afraid - his word - afraid of irritating the left wing and MoveOn than you are about insulting the American military. Does he have a point?
H. CLINTON: No, he doesn't. But I think it's clear I don't condone attacks on anyone who has served our country with distinction and with honor, and I have been very vocal in my support of and admiration for General Petraeus.
I did vote for a resolution that made it clear I do not condone and do condemn attacks on any American, impugning their patriotism, and that includes people like Senator Max Cleland and Senator John Kerry.
I think we need to call a halt to any kind of attacks, from wherever they come, that would go after anyone based on their service to America.
Pretty standard so far, but at this point she does a perfectly disciplined Jane Hamsher pivot and attack.
But you know, this is not a debate about an ad. This is a debate about how we end the war in Iraq. That's the debate that I want to be participating in, and I think a lot of people on the other side don't want us to have that debate.
Democratic presidential nominee John Edwards is talking tough. If elected president, he promises to forth a bill that revokes congress' health benefits until they pas a universal health care package for the rest of the country. That assumes, of course, that he can convince the congress to pass a bill that would punish itself.
Yes, really. Per CNN, Edwards made the remarks before the Laborers Leadership Convention:
"To show Congress just how serious I am, on the first day of my administration, I will submit legislation that ends health care coverage for the president, all members of Congress, and all senior political appointees in both branches of government on July 20th, 2009 - unless we have passed universal health care reform."
I guess you could call it the "see how you like it" trial by ordeal method of government. You could also call it absurd to the nth degree. What is Edwards thinking?
It would seem that Hillary Clinton's $110 billion dollar a year plan for universal health care has stolen the proverbial thunder from Edwards's own undefined universal health care plan so Edwards is seeking to "one up" Hillary. However, the way you "one up" someone is to simply offer a better and more effective plan. Edwards instead tries to be melodramatic, but ends up looking ridiculous in the process.
Senator Hillary Clinton has laid out her plan for insuring everyone in the the nation and it is populist, expensive and detrimental to small business from the first word:
Addressing a crowd at a medical center in the early voting state of Iowa, Clinton laid out her proposal, with the centerpiece a so-called "individual mandate," requiring everyone to have health insurance - just as most states require drivers to purchase auto insurance. Rival John Edwards has also offered a plan that includes an individual mandate, while the proposal outlined by Barack Obama does not.
Clinton's plan builds on the existing employer-based system of coverage. People who receive insurance through the workplace could continue to do so; businesses, in turn, would be required to offer insurance to employees, or contribute to a government-run pool that would help pay for those not covered. Clinton would also offer a tax subsidy to small businesses to help them afford the cost of providing coverage to their workers.
This plan forces businesses to pay for employee health care even though many small businesses can't afford it. I provide my employees with health care and pay 100% of the employees while they pick up the costs for their families, if I were forced to pay the entire cost, I would have to pull the plug and work for someone else because I could never afford it.
The single most important change to existing health care pricing would be to limit the amount someone can recover for malpractice. Such legislation has been enacted in California and other states and should be considered nationally. The trial lawyers are making a killing and it's costing the rest of us in increased premiums.
Senator Hillary Clinton has announced a new universal health care plan and she is making this a major campaign promise in her run for the White House. (Based on her lead in the polls, she is a lock for the nomination.) Of course, Clinton also realizes that there will be stiff opposition to such a huge government program. Clinton commented on potential opposition in an AP report:
"A plan is necessary but not sufficient. We've got to have a political consensus in order to withstand the enormous opposition from those interests that will have something to lose in a really reformed health-care system."
The re-launching of the universal health care plan is somewhat curious. Imagine if a motion picture company produced a film that was such a box office failure that the executives and board of director members were fired left and right. Now, imagine if one of the people working at the studio during that time period announced the decision to remake the film that bombed miserably and remake it only a little over a decade after the debacle. How would that be received?
In the early 1990's, Hillary Clinton's health care plan led to the outright devastation of the Democrats in the election of 1994 and, to a significant degree, crippled much of President Bill Clinton's legislative agenda. The House and the Senate ceded control to the Republicans for over a decade as a result. Why would she opt to bring this back to the table? Does she feel the climate changed that much? Will it help her on the campaign or will it derail her? Only time will tell.
On a side note, the original film version of Dr. Doolittle was a major failure for 20th Century Fox and nearly bankrupted the studio. The Eddie Murphy remake was a mega hit.
Hidden in the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark. are boxes of documents that would shed some light on Hillary Clinton and her role in the two Clinton terms. From health care to impeachment, these are important documents as they'll show the decisions she made, the advice she gave and her thoughts about the daily events that shape a presidency. Hillary is making sure they don't see the light of day until after the 2008 election:
But even in the healthcare documents, at least 1,000 pages involving her work has been censored by archives staff because they include confidential advice and must be kept secret under a federal law called the Presidential Records Act. Political consultants said that if Hillary Clinton's records were made public, rivals would mine them for scraps of information that might rattle her campaign.
"Those files -- that's the mother lode of opposition research," said Ray McNally, a Republican political consultant in Sacramento. "Opposition researchers would be very hungry to see what's there." Robert Shrum, senior political strategist in Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, said: "In 2 million pieces of paper, would opposition researchers hope to find one where she wrote a memo saying, 'I wish I'd never gotten involved in healthcare?' Sure. That's what they'd love to find."
Among other things not involving health care, I would like to know her response (if any) to the attacks on the African embassies, the USS Cole and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. We know that Bill Clinton's response was tepid at best and led Osama bin Laden to believe that we didn't have the will to strike back. What was Hillary's advice in those situations?
Poor kids, to be specific. In other words, kids whose parents do not have the means to afford private insurance. The White House wasted no time and promised to veto the bill. A slippery slope, they say. Once you start insuring uninsured kids, it's only a matter of time before Stalin, Marx, Mao, and Lenin will rise from the grave and take away every luxury that capitalism still affords us. House Republicans, unlike their Senate counterparts, were also vehemently against what they decried as an unwelcome sign of creeping socialism:
But in the end, the Democrats has weapons that were just too powerful--a promise to insure 5 million more children who otherwise would have no access to health care, adding to the 6 million children already covered--and the backing of Republican and Democratic governors, the American Medical Association, AARP, the March of Dimes, the Catholic Health Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and even cyclist Lance Armstrong. And the prospects are good in the Senate, where a key Republican, Orin G. Hatch (Utah) said, "It's difficult for me to understand how anyone wouldn't want to do this."
You better believe it. Especially with Lance Armstrong on board. But seriously, we already have 6 million kids covered under the current plan. So if, as some Republicans insist, we look at this from a purely ideological point of view, shouldn't they be suggesting that we strip those kids of their coverage? Dennis Hastert put his opposition to the new bill this way, "Folks, that's the bottom line: It's a government-paid health care." How scary is that?
There was an article posted on CQ.com Thursday that I think was meant to mock Republicans, but might be thought of as suggesting a great way forward for both the House and the Senate:
Much of the rest of America might have been sneaking peeks on a workaday afternoon at the new 759-page Harry Potter best seller, but House Ways and Means Committee Republicans settled into their own long read after lunch on Thursday when they forced a delay of the markup of the Children's Health and Medicare Protection Act by exercising their right to have the 481-page bill read out loud
One of the biggest complaints I have about Congress is that most of the time they have no idea what they are voting on. Senators and Representatives don't write these bills -- their aides do. Most of the time, when questioned, individual Congressional members admit that they haven't read the bills being voted on. Add to that non-transparent earmarks and pork spending, and it's easy to see why the legislative process, more often than not, is a disaster either in process or waiting to happen.
This move by the Republicans was obviously a political tactic designed to buy more time to review the bill. But it's actually not a bad idea to do it all the time. If this type of public reading was mandatory for every bill that gets voted on, along with their amendments and all clearly defined final earmark attachments, perhaps it would limit the thousand page spending behemoths that get passed literally minutes after being introduced on the floor. Pardon my libertarianism, but less bills passed means less government in our lives.
When more bloggers regularly read bills than do the elected representatives that actually vote on them, we've got a serious problem.
Maybe they feel that they need to go left to win, but John Edwards and Barack Obama are making huge unforced errors that may score them a few points, but ultimately would doom them in a potential general election.
...Obama spoke about his intentions to expand people's access to health insurance, which would include universal coverage for "reproductive-health services." An Obama spokesman clarified that this did indeed include abortion.
...Elizabeth Edwards, speaking for her husband, presidential candidate John Edwards, said that he proposed a "true universal health-care plan," the Tribune Reports. Specifically referring to abortion, she stated that this plan would cover "all reproductive health services, including pregnancy termination."
Universal health care all by itself is a tough sell to the American people, but universal health care that funds a procedure that half of all Americans view as murder is something else altogether. Either they haven't thought it through or they are not at all serious about passing universal health care. It's a tough sell and you're going to need every vote. By including abortion you've just aligned yourself against all the libertarians, plus the pro-lifers, plus the business interests. Congratulations, you've just killed any possibility of passage.
Despite appearances, the looming battle over CHIP is not just about health insurance for poor kids. The Children's Health Insurance Program funds money that individual states can match to help provide health insurance for poor kids. It's the kind of program that politicians love to pass (for the kids and all that) and it has the side benefit of being a foot in the door for government healthcare. But Bush says he will veto any large expansion of the program. The NYT reports:
Tony Fratto, a White House spokesman, said: "The president's senior advisers will certainly recommend a veto of this proposal. And there is no question that the president would veto it.
For the Bush administration, nothing is sacred, except, that is, for partisan allegiance. Truth? Justice? Human rights? Forget about it. Well, add to that list the physical health of the nation itself. So says Dr. Richard Carmona, the nation's most recent surgeon general, who appeared before Congress today to detail the politicization of his office, and the outright muzzling of scientific knowledge that would benefit the American public.
"The reality is that the nation's doctor has been marginalized and relegated to a position with no independent budget, and with supervisors who are political appointees with partisan agendas," said Carmona.
Ronald Reagan's Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop concurs, and finds Carmona's treatment under the Bush administration an embarrassment. Same old story, it seems. Either you fall in line with the president's ideological game plan, or you will be discounted. Never mind if you have science on your side on issues like the effectiveness of condoms at stopping the spread of AIDS, the dangers of second-hand smoke, or the woeful results of abstinence-only sex-education. President Bush (and Karl Rove) know what's best for the country's health.
I remember the last time Michael Moore came out with a new movie. It was 2004, the summer of the Democratic National Convention in Boston . Earlier that year, we'd passed the one-year mark in Iraq; when the fall began, we would recognize the three-year anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. The link between the horrific events of that day, and the war this nation entered in Iraq, hadn't been questioned that much. Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" deserves credit for getting people talking.
Now he has another film, "Sicko," a critique of the American health-care system. Once again, Moore is on message: Former Gov. Mitt Romney helped create a system that ostensibly provides health insurance for all in my home state of Massachusetts, while one of Mitt's rivals for the 2008 nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, tried to establish, but could not bring about, universal health care as first lady.
I plan on seeing the film in Boston and hope to have a review forthcoming ...
Approval ratings for President Bush are at a record low of 26 percent. And that still makes him almost twice as popular as the Nancy Pelosi/Harry Reid-led Congress, according to the latest Newsweek poll:
But the White House cannot pin his rating on the war alone. Bush scores record or near record lows on every major issue: from the economy (34 percent approve, 60 percent disapprove) to health care (28 percent approve, 61 percent disapprove) to immigration (23 percent approve, 63 percent disapprove). And-in the worst news, perhaps, for the crowded field of Republicans hoping to succeed Bush in 2008-50 percent of Americans disapprove of the president's handling of terrorism and homeland security. Only 43 percent approve, on an issue that has been the GOP's trump card in national elections since 9/11.
I don't understand the low economic rating, with unemployment is at historic lows and theeconomy is expanding. Health care I can see, the costs are skyrocketing and that is an issue that Congress and the next president will have to hash out starting with tort reform.
Immigration is the one issue that is destroying Bush at this point. Republicans are against the current bill as a bloc and Democrats are none too happy either. Bush has chosen to fight against those who support him and we are not rolling over. He has enlisted the repugnant Trent Lott and Lindsey Graham to assist him as well as candidate John McCain and they're being dragged down as well.
As for the 43 percent on fighting terror, that can change quickly, especially now that the surge is in full effect and we are taking offensive actions. Americans know full-well that we are threatened and that number will never recede much below where it currently is. While the nation may be weary from the War on Terror, we also know that once we withdrawal and go back into a defensive posture without victory, we are setting ourselves up in a big way.
Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore is back with a new documentary, "SiCKO," which lambastes the American health-care system. During an interview with "Democracy Now!" activist Amy Goodman, Moore also discussed his views on where Democratic presidential candidates stand on health care. Moore seemed frustrated on their stances in general – and especially upset about Hillary Clinton's position.
Clinton, "at least last year, in last year's Congress (sic) -- was the second-largest recipient of health industry money, next to Rick Santorum," Moore said. "He's gone now. So she may be number one at this point, for all I know. It's very sad to see that she's very much -- they're into her pocket, and she's into their pocket. And I don't expect much from her."
Will Moore's harsh words for Hillary hurt her candidacy during the 2008 primaries? It depends on the national mood. In 2004, Moore's backing of Wesley Clark may have cost Clark support, particularly after Moore called President Bush a deserter. If Americans continue to sour on President Bush and the Iraq war, however, Moore and his opinions might find more approval, and pave the way for a Clinton loss in the primaries.
DiMaggio's name, evoked in these timeless lines, reminds listeners of a different era. Lost in the tumult of the Sixties, Americans needed the values and virtues of DiMaggio's America to return to greatness.
Similarly, Republicans should turn their lonely eyes to Mitt Romney in the 2008 presidential election if they want someone who best represents the party. The Democrats are lucky. Their candidates say the right things: The Iraq War is bad, we need better health care, Bush is evil. But on the Republican side, the candidates are tweaking their positions like Paul Wolfowitz with his hair in the infamous scene in "Fahrenheit 9/11."
Romney's flip-flopped as much as anybody else, but he seems to have started taking pages from the party playbook more recently than Rudy Giuliani or John McCain. Romney's battled gay marriage in Massachusetts and welcomed Ann Coulter at CPAC. Given such an inconsistent field, these developments show Romney's riding a streak as formidable as Joltin' Joe's 56-game hitting streak in 1941.
In New Jersey, Republican Chris Christie defeated Democratic Governor Jon Corzine. The Republican victory deals a blow to President Barack Obama as he readies for next year's midterm elections. Obama campaigned heavily for Corzine. (Nov. 3)
Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics says Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia was a failure for President Barack Obama's campaign efforts, but not a direct referendum on his job performance.
