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POPSJoe Lieberman must go. Sen. Lieberman has indicated he plans to join with Republicans to filibuster any health care bill that contains a public option. Alone, the Republicans don't have the votes for a filibuster. So by joining with them, Lieberman would be tipping the balance of power in order to sink health care reform. We need to push the leaders of the Democratic caucus to take a tough stand against Lieberman. "We need every vote. He's with us on everything but the war." Sign the petition
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POPSWhy does Joe Lieberman oppose healthcare reform? Ask his wife
But her stint at Hill & Knowlton was merely one episode in a professional lifetime devoted to the corporate health sector. For most of the past three decades, Hadassah Lieberman has been employed by either pharmaceutical companies or the lobbying firms that represent them -- starting with nearly a decade in the "public affairs department" at Hoffman-LaRoche from 1972-81, followed by stints at Pfizer, where she spent four years as "director of policy, planning and communications," and APCO Associates, a major lobbying firm where she served as a "senior associate" in its large healthcare division before retiring in 1998. She went back to work when she joined H&K, an outfit that became notorious for its billion-dollar defense of the tobacco industry. Not long after her contract began, Sen. Lieberman introduced legislation vastly extending patent protection for pharmaceutical companies -- notably including GlaxoSmithKline, a top client of his wife's firm.
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POPS Keith Olbermann Helps Raiise $1.2 Million For Free Health Care Clinics Wednesday night on "Countdown," Olbermann announced that, thanks to the generosity of "Countdown" viewers, a health fair would take place in New Orleans on November 14. This is on top of health fairs already planned for November 9-10 in Kansas City and November 21 in Little Rock. How did this idea come about? "We were looking for something to relieve the frustration so many people felt," Olbermann told the Huffington Post. "I thought of an insurance strike, but insurrectionist as that might sound, it would endanger lives. So Rich Stockwell, one of my Senior Producers, suggested that the Free Health Clinics group turns every dollar donated into five in services. Thus if we helped them stage clinics in the key cities, we'd get help to thousands of people, we'd relieve that sense of near-paralysis, and we might even put some pressure on those Democratic Senators who won't even commit to precluding a filibuster. So this one was Rich's."
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POPSCongress has the votes to pass a public option And passing it with 51 votes in the Senate - a majority - abides by the same rule Republicans used to pass the Bush tax cuts and fund the Iraq war. Any bill passes with 51 votes unless the minority party filibusters it. Bills with significant budgetary impact can be shielded from a filibuster by the reconciliation process
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POPS14 Things You Need to Know About Obama Heckler, Rep. Joe Wilson 2. Wilson is a member of the organization, Sons of Confederate Veterans, reports Dave Niewert of Crooks and Liars, which "as the Southern Poverty Law Center has detailed assiduously, has been taken over in the past decade by radical neo-Confederates who favor secession and defend slavery as a benign institution." (Not that Wilson's affiliation has anything to do with his unprecedented heckling, during a presidential address before a joint session of Congress, of our first African-American president.) 3. Wilson served as an aide to the late segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond, who is credited with conducting the longest filibuster in Senate history -- against the 1957 civil rights bill. Rest of article at site
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POPSHow the Senate's 'reconciliation' process works It's protected from filibuster for the sake of doing critical business, but can only be used if a) the matter has a large budgetary impact, and b) it can't be shown to increase the long-term deficit. If a deficit is projected, the matter must include a sunset provision. An example: Bush tax cuts of 01 were passed by reconciliation but, since a deficit was the projected result, had to be renewed after 5 years.
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POPSGOP Senators used to defend 'reconciliation' process "The fact is, all this rule of the Senate does is allow a majority of the Senate to take a position and pass a piece of legislation, support that position," said Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH), who now bemoans the idea, in 2005. "Is there something wrong with majority rules? I don't think so."
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POPSPhony recession..from a blog We have the technology now, to make it unnecessary for any one who doesn't want to, to have to work. We could feed the world forever with the cost of ONE stealth bomber.. We could send every college aged student in America through college.. room and board and tuition with the cost of ONE stealth bomber. So why don't we? Big business is too busy lining their profits making stealth bombers, Abrams tanks, helicoptors, etc. We have the technology for electric cars. Nikola Tesla invented electric power that could be sent out like radio waves. Free. But big business killed that. Why? They couldn't meter it and charge for it. Make executive pay in private industry sensible and reasonable. Stop excessive and ruinous profits.. e.g., gas prices, pharmaceutical prices, real estate prices, etc. Roll back prices to 1949 levels and freeze them there. Make all wages sufficient for everyone to be able to have a nice car, a nice home, a good vacation every year. Not ju
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POPSReconciliation and Healthcare
The trick here is that reconciliation rules limit discussion on the bill in question to 20 hours of debate— So all you need is 50 votes plus 1 to pass the bill. The premise is that healthcare reform will have a tremendous impact on our deficit, so therefore it needs to be passed so that its terms—which affect national budgets for the next few years—can be incoporated into the 2010 fiscal budget. Clever, eh? Kill the filibuster, and squeak the bill through the Senate. And then the House of Representatives will (with a substantial Democratic majority) almost certainly pass it into law. The Democrats believe this is justified because so much of the bill involves funding the enormous expense and expanse of the bill. Pass those under reconciliation procedures (since they impact the budget), and you’re home free. The rest of the bill won’t matter since the most dangerously socialist elements are now law. We get that stuff in later when we have time to deal with any filibusters.
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POPSNew Rx for Health Plan: Split Bill Is that what it is all about? "help President Barack Obama meet his goal of getting a final measure by year's end." The Dems are so concerned about being competitive with private insurance companies. How can that happen when they are forcing cost increasing rules on these companies plus the government plan is subsided with taxpayers money? What kind of competition is that?
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POPSExcerllent Opinion Piece Please click the link - article too long for inclusion here, but makes really good points/comparisons that make you think.
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POPSRepublicans see themselves in the backseat for YEARS to come. More: Recently named counselor to the Senate Republican leader, Martinez has been a factor in GOP leadership meetings. As the lone Hispanic among Senate Republicans and, briefly, as chair of the Republican National Committee, he tried to move his party toward adopting a policy of comprehensive immigration reform, without success. On Thursday, he was one of only nine Republicans to vote to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, the first Hispanic to serve on the high court.
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POPSAura Dazzles, But It Takes Persuasion To Close The Deal But it turns out that Obama is not so good at argument. Inspiration is one thing, persuasion another. He created the impression on the campaign trail that he was familiar with major issues and readily ticked off his positions on them. But he has not proved so good at legislating. One reason, perhaps, is that he has had little practice. He served as a legislator for a dozen years before becoming president, but was only rarely an active one. He spent one of his eight years as an Illinois state senator running unsuccessfully for Congress and two of them running successfully for U.S. senator. He spent two of his years in the U.S. Senate running for president. During all of his seven non-campaign years as a legislator, he was in the minority party. In other words, he's never done much work putting legislation together -- especially legislation that channels vast flows of money and affects the workings of parts of the economy that deeply affect people's lives.
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POPSObama's long six months
Obama sold the country a false prospectus of easy, obvious, and almost painless change. The usual six honeymoon months have elapsed, and the country is nearly through rejoicing at the consolation that they have a president whom foreigners are unlikely to throw shoes at, and who speaks in sentences. But his own Environmental Protection Agency director acknowledges that his cap-and-trade bill will have no effect on the climate, and it will neither raise revenue nor reduce carbon use. It must be replaced with a straight carbon tax of bearable impact coupled with sensible conservation, and alternate-energy-source and oil-exploration incentives. The bill that limped through the House of Representatives was a Rube Goldberg contraption of Al Gore myths and Congressional vote-buying boondoggles. Its adoption would be a disaster. The president’s claim of putting millions of Americans to work making wind-mills and solar panels is a fable that extends the frontiers of quixotry.
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POPSThe Other Hispanic Nominee We keep hearing about how Sotomayor is the first Hispanic nominated for the SCOTUS. That's only because Democrats didn't allow another judge anywhere near the position....
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POPSObamaCare Rationing Board ~ More Authority Than Congress The council would be authorized to make broad recommendations for reform in Medicare, but its chief role would be to help set payment rates for Part A and Part B services for the elderly. By Dec. 31 each year, for example, it would submit a package for Part B covering physicians, home health and durable medical equipment. By Oct. 1, a package would be due for Part A covering hospitals and skilled nursing facilities. The recommendations would go the White House, and within 30 days, the president would be required to send a message to Congress reflecting his approval or disapproval. The president's discretion would be limited in that he would have to give an up-or-down on the entire package, not pieces of it. But he would have an effective veto and more leeway than Congress, which would have 30 days to summon majorities in both houses and overcome a potential Senate filibuster.
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POPS1,201 Page Climate Change Bill HR 2454 Not Read or Debated Not Voting were: Jeff Flake, AZ-6 John Sullivan OK-1 Constitutents of Jeff Flake may wish to inquire why he was not able to vote today. Cong. Sullivan was on one month’s leave for treatment of an alcohol addiction. It’s interesting to note that Cong. Patrick Kennedy (D-MA) was taken out of alcohol rehab for the purposes of voting. Dems apparently felt passing this bill was more important, or perhaps more doable, than sobering up a Kennedy. 300 Page Amendment to 1200 Page Bill Added at 3:09AM
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POPSCapping Our Economy & Trading Our Jobs To China&Co. 219-212 HOUSE PASSES 'GLOBAL WARMING' LEGISLATION... 'BILL OF THE CENTURY' VOTED ON UNREAD... Boehner Tried 'Filibuster'... 300 PAGE DUMP AT 3AM-- REPUBLICANS CRY FOUL... One of the biggest compromises involved the near total elimination of an administration plan to sell pollution permits and raise more than $600 billion over a decade " money to finance continuation of a middle class tax cut. About 85 percent of the permits are to be given away rather than sold in a ceoncession to energy companies and their allies in the House " and even that is uncertain to survive in the Senate. The final bill also contained concessions to satisfy farm-state lawmakers, ethanol producers, hydroelectric advocates, the nuclear industry and others, some of them so late that they were not made public until 3 a.m. on Friday. Supporters and opponents agreed the result would be higher energy costs but disagreed vigorously on the impact on consumers.
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POPSObama - a living waterboard torture In January 2006, then-Sen. Obama joined 24 colleagues in a futile effort led by Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of now-Justice Samuel Alito. On January 29, 2006, Mr. Obama told George Stephanopulos on "This Week" that he would "be supporting the filibuster because I think Judge Alito, in fact, is somebody who is contrary to core American values, not just liberal values, you know. When you look at his decisions in particular during times of war, we need a court that is independent and is going to provide some check on the executive branch, and he has not shown himself willing to do that repeatedly."
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