dropdeadpolitics

In a landmark agreement the pro life Democratic caucus led by Congressman Bart Stupak agreed to switch their vote in favor of  health care, pushing past the 216 votes needed to pass the bill. The deal was brokered directly with President Obama and the White house, structuring an executive order to reinforce the existing Hyde amendment that prohibits federal funding of abortions. Stupak and other pro-life Democrats were concerned about the possibility of loopholes and the executive order put their concerns at ease.

The executive order seems to be going over fairly well with the pro-choice caucus and should not bubble into an internal debate within the Democratic party. The order only reiterates existing laws and by no means steps on the existing rights woman have over their bodies. This was a savvy, pragmatic move by President Obama to secure the needed votes.

This is the difference between the two parties and clearly shows the Democratic party to be the big tent party. The Democrats have positioned themselves well and can credibly offer a sensible alternative to the GOP with regards to pro-life politics. While the GOP is narrowing their base and playing to the extremes the Democratic party is quietly moving to the middle with a centrist health care bill.

The bill being passed is not perfect but clearly moves us in the right direction. It expands coverage to 95% of all Americans or roughly 31 million additional people. It strengthens insurance regulations by protecting the patient from annual and life time caps awarded. It ends the insurance company practices of banning people with pre-existing conditions or rescinding policies the minute you become an expensive liability.  The bill has many other great provisions like increasing the age a student can stay on their parents insurance from 21 to 26 provided they are still in school as a full time student.

This is a major victory for Obama and the Democrats setting the stage for a reconciliation vote in the Senate to make amendments to the bill they already passed. The GOP will undoubtedly attack the Democrats on a completely legal Senatorial procedure to no avail. Health care reform is closer to passing now than at any point in the last several decades. Obama’s primary policy is all but certain to pass regardless of the GOP’s objections handing them a stunning political defeat. Once the bill is passed and the country realizes that all the scare tactics by the GOP were lies and actually feel the benefits history shows that the bill will become very popular. This victory by the Democrats and Obama may have squelched the political momentum the GOP was counting on going into 2010. The GOP will run on repealing this bill to their peril and may have already painted themselves into a political corner to which there is no escape.

Senior Democratic aides Thursday provided a snapshot of what they say the Congressional Budget Office has found after evaluating the latest revised version of the health care bill — including the package of fixes.

House Democrats say the legislation will cost $940 billion over 10 years and will reduce the deficit by more than $100 billion in that first decade.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the legislation will deliver the biggest reduction in the federal deficit since the 1990s, while providing access to health care coverage for nearly all Americans and prohibiting insurance companies from denying coverage to the sick.

Hoyer also said Thursday that the chamber is on track to vote on the overhaul bill on Sunday.

It’s the same day Obama plans to leave for an overseas trip. The president has already delayed the trip once so he can be present for the vote and help with the 11th-hour arm-twisting that inevitably will precede it.

“You’ve got to realize how complicated this is and how focused we are on getting it right,”  Hoyer said Wednesday near the end of a long day of meetings on the legislation. “We’re waiting to get a real confidence level.”

Obama expressed optimism in an interview with Fox News Channel. “I’m confident it will pass,” he said. “And the reason I’m confident that it’s going to pass is because it’s the right thing to do.”

Democrats are seeking to make sure the legislation would reduce federal deficits annually over the next decade and are revisiting details of a planned tax on high-cost insurance plans that’s been a sticking point for organized labor. Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, met with Obama at the White House on Wednesday, and officials said the labor leader raised concerns. Obama has proposed significantly softening the tax in keeping with an earlier deal with organized labor, and labor leaders want to preserve that accord, at a minimum.

Trumka was to brief members of the AFL-CIO’s executive council on Thursday, and the federation was expected to announce whether it would support the legislation.

The long-anticipated measure is actually the second of two bills that Obama hopes lawmakers will send him in coming days, more than a year after he urged Congress to remake the U.S. health care system. The first cleared the Senate late last year but went no further because House Democrats demanded significant changes — the very types of revisions now being packaged into the second bill.

Together, the measures are designed to extend coverage to more than 30 million who now lack it and prohibit insurance industry practices such as denying coverage on the basis of pre-existing medical conditions. Obama also has asked lawmakers to slow the growth of medical spending generally, a far more difficult goal to achieve. The total cost is around $1 trillion over 10 years.

After heavy lobbying from Obama, liberal Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, announced his support Wednesday, becoming the first Democrat to declare he would vote in favor of the legislation after opposing an earlier version. Shortly after Kucinich’s announcement, a letter was released from 60 leaders of religious orders urging lawmakers to vote for the legislation.

The endorsement reflected a division within the Catholic Church. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops opposes the Senate-passed legislation, contending it would permit the use of federal funds for elective abortions.

Late Wednesday, however, retired Bishop John E. McCarthy of Austin, Texas, told The Associated Press he was urging approval of the legislation.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35928063/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

While the bill is not perfect it is a step in the right direction. The Health care bill will make major steps towards ending the bad practices the insurance companies are know for. The plan will take several years to fully implement but by 2014 we should see the full effects of the bill. It will help control the long term debt while insuring millions of new people. Hopefully this will be followed with stronger reforms in the years to come.,

We like our Presidents in this country.  We like the President, typically, more than Congress.  And given most of us can’t name the Supreme Court Justices nor what they do, the President gets a lot of our attention.  When we elect Presidents, we look for certain qualities.  Strong leader, someone who sticks to their guns, someone who will go in and change Washington, someone we’d have a beer with, and someone who can answer those important calls at three in the morning.  There are others that are more specific to each voter, but for the most part people boil Presidents down by these qualities.  The funny thing is that not ONE of our founding fathers who became president would likely live up to his list above.  The list above is a modern perversion of the presidency and it has the potential to take us down the road of tyranny.

Do we really want a strong leader?  We already refer to the president as the ‘Leader of the Free World’ and yet no where in the Constitution do we give the President such a lofty title or duty.  George Washington went by Mr. President or at least preferred to go by that title.  If it was good enough for him, why is it not good enough for us now?  Our founding fathers feared a “strong leader.”  Libya, Cuba, Iran, Iraq (well not so long ago at least), North Korea, North and South Vietnam, China, the former Soviet Union, present day Russia, most African countries, they all have “strong leaders.”  Men who command power via the perceived qualities of strength.  They decide the direction of their country and their country follows.  None of these ideals are American.  Nowhere in the Constitution does the president have the authority to do that.  Executive orders are a somewhat gray area and I find it odd that my alleged conservative friends don’t take issue with them given they are not explicitly granted power in Article Two of the Constitution.  Note that it’s Article Two, not Article One, that is for the president.  He comes second, not first, and while he balances the other two branches he does not rise above them.  Congress has largely given war powers to the President to respond to a rapidly changing world.  He is the commander-in-chief of the military (not of civilians despite us also using that powerful and strong title for him), but this does not give him the power to send us to war.  We’ve given Presidents power out of fear.  We did it after 9/11 and we’ve done it many times before.  We think we need a strong leader to make tough decisions in fearful times.  We don’t.

Sticking to their guns is something the presidency is supposed to embody though not in the manner we’ve seen lately.  The presidency was designed to be just a bit more insulated from the whims of the people than the House of Representatives or even the Senate is.  The President’s job is to run the executive branch and that ability can be hampered greatly if the whim of weekly changing public opinion gets in the way.  Of course we’ve let that part happen while at the same time voting for ideological hard heads who talk up a tough campaign and then get into office only to realize they don’t have the authority to stick to their guns.  Whoops.  But we admire them for going down in flames and taking the country with them.  Whether it’s Reagan’s supply side economics or Bush Sr.’s ‘read my lips’ promises to Clinton’s insistence on always taking the middle of the road ideology to Bush Jr’s everything.   And now Obama will show us how he intends to play healthcare reform.  He has two choices.  He can play it as a president or as partisan ideologue who feels compelled to give into his bases’ wishes for the sake of getting re-elected.  I hope for the former but expect the latter.

Why would we want one person to have the ability to change how our government works?  I know why, it’s because we watch too many movies.  We see these heroic loners who go in and shake up the whole system.  Neo in the Matrix, any Western, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, all of these movies talk about how one person can change the world.  Well that’s just not true.  It sounds very inspirational especially with Hollywood scoring in the background but our Constitution makes it virtually impossible for any one person to change how the government works.  Congress is supposed to be slow and to drag out debate.  That’s not a sign of it being broken but rather functioning as intended.  It should be hard to pass large and sweeping legislation no matter how vital it is because when you make it easy you subject it to shifts in the political winds and the possibility that someone will find a way to destroy the delicate balance of democracy we live in.  The President is not given the power to change Washington.  In fact, he has the least ability to do so.  His ability to change things without oversight is limited to the departments that report to him and they are all limited severely by the law and the courts.  The President can’t write his own bills despite our apparent desire that the President should as we expect President’s to get major legislation passed so we can score the office holder based on quantity.  It’s a stupid standard and a stupid thing to expect from the Office of the President.  Most importantly, it’s not the President’s job.

My favorite is the guy I’d like to have a beer with.  The common every-man.  A comedian whose name I can’t recall said, “Next time you’re in a bar having a beer, take a look around.  See any presidents?”  Of course not.  They are all drinking single malt 100 year old Scotch at country clubs that would never let any of us in.  Even the Reagan’s and Bush’s are.  Just because someone wears flannel instead of a suit doesn’t make him an ordinary or common man.  We elect blue blood, highly educated rich men to the presidency.  The last common man that was president was Harry Truman and it’s not to say that he was better or worse than an FDR or a JFK, but he was a common man.  Too often, we ascribe common sense as something we think Washington has little of.  But common sense has become a virtue of the ignorant, something that Sarah Palin claims to have loads of and yet I wouldn’t trust her with a potato gun much less nuclear weapons.  The Presidency requires someone who can empathize, not someone who simply looks for the common solution every time.  Harry Truman wasn’t a Harvard graduate, but he was able to see beyond the common sense solution and consider the consequences.  He didn’t drop the atomic bomb because it made sense, he did it because he had more reasons to do it than not.  Problems that our government faces don’t always have a right and wrong answer.  They often have several answers and any number of them can be acceptable though different solutions.  A president needs the ability to see that.  Not to have the stain of what they learned in the first eighteen years of their life dictate their actions as President.  I don’t care if my president drinks beer or the finest liquors.  It’s an irrelevant and silly measure of the person in office.

And then there’s the ever important three in the morning phone call.  I don’t doubt the White House gets many calls at three in the morning.  I wonder how many the president sleeps through.  Probably many more than we think.  Making those decisions, like the atomic bomb decision above, isn’t something anyone is ready for until they have to do it.  There is no litmus test for that.  A candidate can say one thing on the campaign trail and get into office only to discover that what they thought they knew is wrong or that the process won’t let them meet their prior goals.  The three in the morning phone call is a moment where there is no way to measure how someone would respond.  Anyone who can answer how they would respond is speculating at best and lying at worst.  We can only hope we vote for someone smart enough to surround themselves with people smarter than them who may have a good answer for that phone call.

So what should our president be like?  Well ever since Washington, they’ve sort of gone towards what we have today.  Adams faced bitter partisanship that paralyzed his administration at times.  Jefferson became the first of many small government promising presidential candidates to expand the powers of government as he did with the Louisiana Purchase.  This unproven theory of small government flies in the face of what most of us want from our country which is to be number one in everything.  You don’t get there by being cheap.  I prefer my presidents to be like Dwight Eisenhower.  Maybe not like him in terms of all of his politics, but his demeanor.  I don’t care if the president plays more rounds of golf than the number of bills they push through Congress.  I’d prefer the president to do their job outlined in the Constitution.  And nothing more.  I’d prefer them to be Mr. President, and no more.  They don’t need to lead the free world or even us.  They need to administrative branch and let Congress do its job.  They need to get declarations of war instead of using the War Powers Act.  They need to stop being celebrities and we need to stop making them into something more than they are.  A person we vote into a temp job.  They are an office holder, a caretaker, not a leader.  For a nation that talks up our Constitution, we need to live by it a bit more.

BAGHDAD – Iraqi coalitions and political parties jockeyed Monday for position following the country’s pivotal vote meant to usher in the next government, as the election commission reported that turnout was 62 percent — lower than a previous national vote in December 2005 but higher than in last year’s provincial ballot.

Meantime, the top U.S. military officer for Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno, said President Barack Obama’s plan to remove combat troops from Iraq by Sept. 1 is proceeding on schedule.

He told MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’ that, barring a catastrophic event, he expects the U.S. will be able to reduce its forces in Iraq from 96,000 currently to 50,000 noncombat troops by late August. “We do not see a catastrophic event on the horizon right now,” he said.

Iraqis defied a wave of insurgent attacks that killed 36 people and voted in key balloting that will determine whether they can overcome deep sectarian divides that almost tore the nation apart.

The turnout is down from the previous Dec. 2005 parliamentary election turnout of 76 percent, although it’s higher than last year’s provincial elections when just over half of voters cast ballots.

The final vote count is expected within a few days, most likely on Thursday.

Even then, the outcome will likely be followed by protracted negotiations on who will make up the next government.

No one coalition is expected to win an outright majority in the 325-seat parliament, so the coalition that gets the largest number of votes will be tasked with cobbling together a government with other partners — a process that could take months.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35760288/ns/world_news-mideastn_africa/

The Iraqi election marks another successful step towards ending the war and bringing our troops home. We have been there too long, spilled too much blood and spent too much treasure to justify the initial invasion. That said now that we are there it is our responsibility to make an orderly transition and pull out in order to prevent a failed state and increased Iranian influence.

The proposals Obama mentioned are: sending investigators disguised as patients to uncover fraud and waste; expanding medical malpractice reform pilot programs; increasing payments to Medicaid providers and expanding the use of health savings accounts.

Obama’s announcement is not likely to win any votes from Republicans, who want the president to tear up the existing bills and start over. Nor is there any guarantee that Democratic leaders will agree to incorporate the administration’s suggestions in revised legislation. But it could give wavering Democrats political cover by showing the White House has been willing to compromise in the wake of last week’s televised bipartisan health care summit.

Obama’s letter was in keeping with the spirit of the summit. As expected, Republican leaders continued to assail the president’s health care agenda, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky arguing that “Americans don’t want the one-party bill Democrats in Washington are planning to force on them, or any variation of it — and they certainly don’t want Democrats to push it through with even more backroom deals.”

Democrats said it furthered their argument that Republicans have been unreasonably opposed to almost any compromise, justifying the White House decision to push for passage with no GOP help at all.

Obama is also expected to offer more details Wednesday on how he wants Congress to proceed, though White House press secretary Robert Gibbs indicated that the president wouldn’t delve too deeply into the process of passing the legislation.

A small number of House Democrats who opposed the legislation on the first go-round may be Obama’s most important constituency when he unveils his revised proposal.

At least nine of the 39 Democrats who voted “nay” when the House passed sweeping overhaul legislation 220-215 in November are now undecided or withholding judgment until they see Obama’s final product, according to an Associated Press survey.

“Do I think there’s a possibility of some people changing? Yes, I do,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said Tuesday. “I think that’s because it’ll be a different bill than either the House or the Senate bill; it will hopefully take some strengths of both.”

It may seem improbable that any lawmaker would want to switch his or her vote on the measure, courting the flip-flopper label after a year of controversy over legislation that’s slid ever downward in polls.

But it will almost certainly have to happen in order for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to round up the votes necessary to pass the Senate’s version of the legislation, along with a package of changes that Obama proposes. The changes — designed to make the Senate bill more palatable to House Democrats by rolling back a tax on high-value insurance plans, among other things — would get through the Senate under controversial rules allowing for a simple majority vote.

That’s the only option for Democrats because they no longer control a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate, and Republicans are unanimously opposed.

With four vacancies in the House, Pelosi will need 216 votes. She would command exactly that many if all the remaining Democrats who voted “yes” in November did so again. But many lawmakers expect defections, especially of members who oppose federal funding for abortion and feel the Senate language is too permissive in that regard.

For every yes vote that switches to no, Pelosi and the White House must persuade one of the 39 Democrats who voted no in November to switch to yes.

Some of the top targets may be the nine lawmakers who told The Associated Press directly or through spokesmen that they’re undecided or undeclared. Three are retiring and don’t have to worry about getting punished by voters, and five others are freshmen, mostly in competitive districts — lawmakers whom Pelosi will give a pass on tough votes when she can, but might call on when a major piece of legislation hangs in the balance.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35656271/ns/politics-health_care_reform/

This is a great move by Obama to call the GOP bluff. He lured them to the health care summit and now is adopting 4 specific measures that the GOP called for. Once they inevitably refuse to vote for the bill even with these additions Obama and the Dems should be freed up to pass health reform with 51 votes.

If the Democrats end up passing health care using reconciliation they should make it a truly Progressive bill which includes a public option. This is the only way to break the insurance industry’s grasp on our health care system and instill choice and competition into the market. This is home stretch and we are closer to passing reform than we have been in decades. This is the time for the Democrats to make good on their promise even if the bill is imperfect. This should be the first step towards real reform, not the last.

There’s one quality of Americans that isn’t as talked about as the others.  We talk about our patriotism (defined as blind devotion to the government regardless of their choices), our love of liberty (for the most part), our sense of individualism (unless you’re a failing big business), and our optimism (well, maybe this one has expired).  However it’s our love of all things abundant that is both our most consistent and somewhat insidious trait.

The notion of abundance is easy to see.  We used to have abundant everything.  We would say things like, “we’ll never run out of trees,” and you can insert whatever you like in place of trees be it water, food, money, it doesn’t matter because they were all seen as so abundant we could never use them up.  We were founded on and sold on an idea of abundance from day one and it’s the one trait of this country we will likely give up the hardest.  We believe it’s a right, though it’s hard to find in the constitution.  If we can afford it, then we can afford to waste it should be printed just below “In God We Trust” on our currency.

It’s everywhere from our breakfast to our healthcare.  Bacon and eggs was a traditional English breakfast designed to add energy and protein first thing in the morning before people went out to work the fields.  Today, a full English breakfast comes with fried mushrooms, fried or grilled tomatoes, fried bread or toast and sausages.  In America, it can come with steak, pancakes, French toast (not sure how the English feel about that), chicken fried steak, hash browns, fried potatoes, and/or corned beef hash.  In addition to three eggs and four strips of bacon.  Oh and sausages are available too.  Following this breakfast, we then either go to work where most of us sit in a chair or at best stand and walk a bit, or on our days off sit on the couch and watch other people play sports that barely burn off all the calories we just consumed.  And we have the gall to wonder why we’re getting fat.

It’s in our energy policies too.  Last year, Barack Obama had the audacity to suggest that perhaps we couldn’t go forward with the notion that we can always have our houses cooled and heated to those two magic numbers, 72 and 68 degrees.  Of course “conservatives” (funny how conserve is in their namesake) lampooned him for saying it.  But he was noting, having lived in Indonesia and seen just how much abundance we truly have, that perhaps we have to give a little too.  We all know that all six billion people on the planet cannot live like we do.  There aren’t enough resources for that.  And yet, we pretend as if we want the whole world to have what we have.  In reality, we don’t realize that in order to do that we have to give up some of our abundance.

The worst offense of Continue reading “America’s Abundance” »

The massive stimulus package passed last year to blunt the impact of the worst U.S. recession in 70 years created up to 2.1 million jobs in the last three months of 2009, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.

The package boosted the economy by up to 3.5 percent and lowered the unemployment rate by up to 2.1 percent during that period, CBO said.

The report comes as President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats are pushing further measures to bring down the 9.7 percent unemployment rate before the November congressional elections.

The $787 billion price tag of the package, officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, has prompted a growing backlash from voters worried about record budget deficits. Republicans have labeled the package a failure, though economists on the left and right say it helped ward off a depression.

CBO’s new report closely resembles its initial estimates from March 2009, shortly after Obama signed the bill into law.

Though the economy performed more poorly than predicted, that was not due to the ineffectiveness of the stimulus package, CBO said.

“In CBO’s judgment, that outcome reflects greater-than-projected weakness in the underlying economy rather than lower-than-expected effects” of the stimulus, the research office said.

The package is likely to have the greatest impact this year, according to CBO. It is expected to boost GDP by between 1.4 percent and 4 percent and bring down the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percent and 1.8 percent in 2010, higher figures than last year when many of its programs were being set up. The impact is expected to trail off over the next two years.

Direct purchasing of goods and services by the federal government and states have been the most effective provision of the act, CBO said. Among the least effective: a tax credit for first-time homebuyers and a tax cut for the wealthy.

Since the start of the recession in December 2007, 8.4 million jobs have been lost. Though the economy started growing again last year, CBO chief Doug Elmendorf said at a congressional hearing that any recovery was likely to be slow.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35543310/ns/business-economy_at_a_crossroads/

Not one Republican in either house voted for the Recovery Act that has now been shown to have created up to 2.1 million jobs. The CBO which is a non-partisan budget office in charge of deriving these statistics concludes that the much maligned stimulus bill has been successful with much of it’s impact expected this year. The stimulus is a classic Keynesian economic tactic to temporarily drive demand when the private sector is incapable of doing so. The bill provided tax relief to 95% of Americans, balanced state budgets stemming layoffs, invested in many infrastructure and energy projects and extended unemployment benefits for millions of Americans hurting from the recession. With half the money yet spent we should see continued growth well into this year hopefully bridging the gap to better economic times.

The GOP should pay a heavy penalty for voting against a bill providing so many American’s with relief all while taking credit for the state projects the bill funded. The GOP hopes to capitalize this November on a weak economy and anemic job growth but their vote against this bill may come back to haunt them.