“An entire year has gone to waste,” Brown said in the weekly GOP radio and Internet address. “Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, and many more jobs are in danger. Even now, the president still hasn’t gotten the message.Sen. Scott Brown Trashes Obama’s ‘Bitter’ Push For Health Care Take... more
It only took him a couple of days in office for him to betray the people who elected him. The truth is that Scott Brown is a RINO - a Republican in name only. He has already shown that he has far more in common with Barack Obama than with anyone in the Republican Party.It only took him a couple of days in office for him to betray the people who elected... more
Image courtesy of Flickr user seiuhealthcare775nw, under Creative Commons LicenseToday, President Barack Obama will deliver a speech to Congress outlining his plan to move forward on health care reform. The president is expected to advocate the use of budget reconciliation.
Art Levine of Working In These Times warns that some centrist Democrats are already getting cold feet on reconciliation. Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, went on TV to declare reconciliation impossible. These guys just don’t get it. It’s reconciliation or defeat. There is no other way. Without reconciliation, the bill dies. Without a bill, the Democrats get massacred in the mid-term elections.
Health care reform to date
Quick recap: The House and the Senate have both passed health care reform bills. The original plan was to merge those two bills in a conference committee and send the final version back to both houses of Congress for a vote. However, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority in the Senate when Republican Scott Brown defeated Martha Coakley in the special election in Massachusetts.
Once they recovered from their shell shock, Democrats reluctantly converged around Plan B: Let the House re-pass the Senate version of the bill, thereby skipping the step where the Senate votes on the conference report. However, the Senate bill could not pass the House in its current form. So, the Senate needs to tweak the bill to make it acceptable to the House—either before or after the House re-passes the Senate bill. In order to make those changes without getting filibustered, the Senate Democrats will have to insert the modifications through budget reconciliation, where measures pass by a simple majority. Whew!
Of course, the Republicans trying to paint Democrats as tyrants for using reconciliation. Nevermind that 16 of the 22 reconciliation bills passed since reconciliation was invented in 1974 were passed by Republican majorities.
Whither the Public Option?
Reconciliation would appear to give the public health insurance option a new lease on life. The House bill has a public option, but the Senate bill doesn’t. The public option was traded away on the Senate side to forge the original filibuster-proof majority. As a procedural matter, the public option could easily be reinserted during reconciliation because it has such a direct impact on the federal budget, i.e., it would save the taxpayer a lot of money. The White House claims to support a public option. Yet Obama didn’t propose one in his health care plan last week.
Some observers take that as a sign that the White House doesn’t think the votes are there. (Cynics say it’s proof the White House never cared about the public option in the first place.) Even Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) told radio host Ed Schultz that he can’t support a public option for fear of killing the health care bill, according to Jason Hancock of the Iowa Independent. Harkin has been taking a lot of heat from progressives for refusing to join with other senators in signing a letter calling for a public option.
Abortion Storm Clouds
Speaker Nancy Pelosi had little to say about how she plans to overcome resistance within her own caucus on abortion and immigration issues within health reform, as Brian Beutler reports for TPMDC. Pelosi needs 216 votes to pass a bill. The original House bill only passed by 5 votes. Rabid anti-choice Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI) claims to have assembled a coalition of like-minded Dems who consider the Senate’s slightly less restrictive rules for abortion funding “unacceptable.” There is no reliable public vote count on how many of these representatives, if any, would vote to kill health care over abortion. If they do, it would be purely out of spite. Abortion language can’t be tweaked in reconciliation because it doesn’t directly affect the budget.
Stupak and the myth of federal funding for abortions
In The Nation, Jessica Arons takes a closer look at Stupak’s radical and misleading anti-choice rhetoric. The federal government is already legally barred from funding elective abortions, and nothing in the Senate bill would change that. Arons explains that the Senate bill would allow plans that participate in the federally-subsidized exchanges to offer abortion coverage provided that customers buy that coverage with their own money, not with subsidized federal dollars. If the government pays 30% of the cost of the policy and the consumer pays 60%, the money for abortion coverage comes out of the consumer’s end.
There’s a long tradition of segregating government money. Both Planned Parenthood and Catholic hospitals get federal funds. By law, Planned Parenthood can’t use that money to perform abortions, but it can use it to do pap smears and offer other health care. By the same token, a Catholic hospital can take federal money to provide medical care, but not to proselytize to patients. Arons ably satirizes Stupak’s extreme position:
If everyone thought like Bart Stupak, a woman seeking an abortion:
(1) would not be able to take a public bus or commuter train to an abortion clinic, even if she paid her own fare;
(2) would not be able to drive on public roads to a clinic, even if she drove her own car and paid for her own gas;
(3) would not be able to walk on public sidewalks to the clinic, even though she paid property taxes;
(4) would not be able to put her child in childcare while she was at the clinic if she received a tax credit that offset the cost of childcare;
(5) would not be able to take medicine at the clinic that was researched or developed by the government, even if she paid for the medicine herself.
Bunning backs down
In other health care news, AlterNet reports that yesterday Sen. Jim Bunning (R-KY) ended his one-man filibuster of the extension of a bill that would have prevented a 21% cut in Medicare reimbursement rates and extended unemployment benefits while the Senate finalizes the jobs bill. Bunning caved under pressure from his own party. Even Republicans realized that there was no political percentage in stiffing doctors and the unemployed.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care by members of The Media Consortium. It is free to reprint. Visit the Pulse for a complete list of articles on health care reform, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy, environment, health care and immigration issues, check out The Audit, The Mulch, and The Diaspora. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of leading independent media outlets.By Lindsay Beyerstein, Media Consortium blogger
Image courtesy of Flickr user... more
Ayla Brown says dad can’t stop her from posing nude
GOP Senator Scott Brown embarrassed his daughters Ayla and Arianna on national television during his victory speech after winning the Massachusetts senatorial race.
During his raucous speech after his stunning upset win, Brown said that both of his daughters were “available,” before amending his statement to say only Ayla was.Ayla Brown says dad can’t stop her from posing nude
GOP Senator Scott Brown... more
Today Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.) was one of five Republican Senators to vote for a procedural motion on the jobs bill in the Senate. The motion ended up passing 62-30 which ends debate on the bill allowing it to go forward for a simple majority vote.
This vote is actually more important than the final vote on the bill since Brown, along with other Republicans, could have effectively killed the bill by sustaining a filibuster with their 41 votes. Now the Democrats are almost sure to be able to pass the bill since they only need 50 votes for the final vote (V.P. Joe Biden would break a tie).Today Senator Scott Brown (R-Mass.) was one of five Republican Senators to vote for a... more
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's $15 billion jobs bill cleared a procedural hurdle today with a 62-30 vote. Five Republicans voted with the Democratic majority, including the Senate's newest member, Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown.
The four other Republicans voting with Democrats: Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins; Ohio Republican George Voinovich; and Missouri Republican Kit Bond.
So much for the lockstep repubs we've been going on about. What exactly does this mean? Are the some Independents and Liberals in 'ol taxachusets reaping revenge on Brown staff maybe? But according to the article Four other Republicans and two independents joined fifty-five democrats to hurdle over stalling procedures.
From the article:
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A modest job-creation bill advanced in the Senate on Monday as the chamber's newest Republican bucked his party and sided with Democrats on a $15 billion package of tax cuts and highway spending.
Republican Scott Brown joined four other Republicans, 55 Democrats and two independents to overcome a procedural hurdle that sets up a final vote later this week.
Brown was widely hailed as a conservative hero after his surprise victory in Massachusetts last month gave Republicans enough seats to block most Democratic legislation.
His election prompted President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats to call for increased bipartisanship, and an earlier version of the bill was written with Republican input."
More at link of course.
Maybe Scott Browns victory really is not a call for Republicans to take control and ruin things like they did for the last 12 odd years. Nor are the Democrats finished. Perhaps the so-called "Stupid Americans" really aren't stupid at all and are going to elect officials that are willing to work together.
Maybe. Just maybe. . . wishful thinking?So much for the lockstep repubs we've been going on about. What exactly does this... more
It was perhaps inevitable that Senator-elect Scott Brown (R-Massachusetts), who scored a stunning upset victory over Democrat Martha Coakley in the January 19 special election to serve out the remaining two years of the late Edward Kennedy's term, would come under fire from hard-line social conservatives once they learned of his position on abortion. Brown says that a decision whether or not to have an abortion "should ultimately be made by a woman in consultation with her doctor" -- although he does support the existing federal ban on late-term abortions.
The election victory of Massachusetts Sen.-elect Scott Brown is expected to be certified Thursday, which could allow him to be sworn in as early as Thursday afternoon to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.
Brown's win stripped Democrats of their 60-seat, filibuster-proof majority in the U.S. Senate and raised fears among many congressional Democrats about a potential GOP landslide in November's midterm elections.
The Democratic president and Mr Brown are 10th cousins, genealogists said on Friday.
The New England Historic Genealogical Society said Mr Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and Mr Brown's mother, Judith Ann Rugg, both descend from Richard Singletary of Haverhill, Massachusetts.
He died in 1687 at, for the time, the unusually old age of 102.
"I think it's a really interesting thing, where you have the separation between a Democrat and a Republican, but you have one link," said David Allen Lambert, the society genealogist who co-discovered the connection with colleague Chris Child.
Mr Lambert said the work had been aided by prior research about Mr Obama, as well as Mr Brown's cooperation with the society when researchers first contacted him in December.
"I'm glad to be in such distinguished company," Mr Brown said of the findings.
In 2008, the society discovered that Mr Obama is related to seven prior presidents, including George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S. Truman and James Madison. They also learned he was related to Brad Pitt, the Hollywood actor.
Mr Brown, once a little-known state senator, jolted the national political landscape by capturing the Senate seat held for nearly a half-century by the late Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy.
When he is seated, Mr Brown will become the 41st Republican in the 100-member Senate. That means the Democrats will no longer hold the 60-vote supermajority needed to overcome Republican procedural manoeuvres to block votes on legislation such as a health care reform bill, Mr Obama's top legislative priority.
The genealogical chart shows that Mr Obama descends from Richard's eldest son, Jonathan Singletary. He later changed his surname to Dunham. Mr Brown, meanwhile, descends from Jonathan's brother, Nathaniel Singletary.The Democratic president and Mr Brown are 10th cousins, genealogists said on Friday.... more
Whenever any host on MS-NBC refers to critics of Barack Obama as racist, just keep this link handy. Chris Matthews offers up this revealing non-sequitur as praise for Obama’s “appearance” of post-racial qualities in a manner that echoes Harry Reid’s strange praise revealed in the book Game Change. I’ve puzzled over this comment since I saw in on Twitter last night in the aftermath of the State of the Union address. Exactly what does it mean that Matthews “forgot he was black” in connection to his praise of Obama’s leadership?
Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Times has written an Op Ed piece entitled Adults Only, Please in which he takes on the political elites who refuse to cooperate with each other in governing our country.
Our economy is sick we are spending mountains of money that we do not have on “defense” issues that are not vital and generally the elites are turning a blind eye to their sworn responsibility to govern, regardless of party affiliation.
I think he has the right idea. If we stopped treating these people like our favorite party’s favorite sons and daughters and started treating them as the nobles they really are and demanding our due as the serfs we really are, we might get something done.
Even nobles need to pay attention to serfs who refuse to work the manor lands. We could get their attention, but only if we treat them as the privileged group that they are and demand that the nobles pay attention to our needs. That is, if they want to head-off a serf’s revolt.
Next we have an Op Ed piece by Maureen Dowd who tires of both the Democratic messiah Barack Obama and the new-found Republican messiah, Scott Brown. She finds them both phony, inexperienced for Washington politics and completely out of touch with the needs of Americans like you and me. Good for you Maureen…as they say…out of the mouths of Babes!
Her Op Ed is entitled Bringing Sexy Back .
And in an Editorial to the late, great Republican Senator Charles Mathias, we can read of the kind of Republican politician that this country needs again. This man was a real Republican. There is no doubt. And he was a real American hero whose stature we now understand was much greater than we realized at the time he served.
The article is an appreciation piece on his passing of two days ago. It is entitled A Responsible Man and it is a must read. Where did these type of solid American politicians go? How do we get them back?
CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Times has written an Op Ed piece entitled... more
I have a handful of conservative friends. Not so many that I could be considered a sympathizer. Just a few.
Being friends with them isn't always easy, but maintaining the relationships make me feel better about myself. After all - if I can look past something as ominous as conflicting political views - I must be a truly enlightened individual, right?
So we eat lunch together. We go out for drinks. One of them gave me a handjob. It's fine.
Yesterday, while sitting with a group of the right-wingers, I hear: "It's a fact. The people of Massachusetts have spoken."
Of course that person was referring to the GOP special election win by Scott Brown, the new pickup-driving Senator and former pin-up model, who had enough decency to cover up his junk but not his tangled mess of pubic hair in an '82 edition of Cosmo:
So - right then and there - I decided to drop a bombshell on their elephant-loving asses.
"Facts are for suckers," I said. "I don't believe in them."
The group let out a boisterous laugh. The handjobber blushed. Surely she hoped it was just another one of my super-engaging conversation starters.
"What is that supposed to mean?" someone asked. "It doesn't even make sense."
"Doesn't it?" I challenged back. "You show me a fact and I'll show you someone trying to prove a point. Facts are for suckers. I believe in the truth. It's universal."
Their collective jaw dropped. The Sereno legend lives on.
And it's no joke. Facts are bullshit. They're used to motivate people and support points of view. The next time you hear someone say "in fact ...," listen to what follows. It'll no doubt be a direct attack on what you know to be true.
On Dragnet, when Joe Friday asked for "just the facts, ma'am," did he get the truth? No. He received a borderline-useless eyewitness account of what happened. The whole show was spent searching through the misleading facts that plagued his investigation.
When the FDA releases facts on cigarette smoking is it to fuel its own agenda? Yep. That agenda may be loosening the stranglehold tobacco has on the United States, but it's still an agenda. And it'd be nowhere without those eye-opening and strategically-placed facts.
... So is it a fact? Have the people of Massachusetts spoken? Depends who you ask. As for me, I'll be sipping a margarita and floating in a pool of the truth. You should join me.
There isn't a gratuitous pubic hair in sight.I have a handful of conservative friends. Not so many that I could be considered a... more
~y2010m1d25-Obama-to-force-feed-Obamacare-on-Americans
"We're going to keep working to get this done with Democrats."~y2010m1d25-Obama-to-force-feed-Obamacare-on-Americans
"We're going to... more
From YPNation contributor Ewan Watt, some thoughts on Scott Brown's win, health care reform and a new opportunity for Obama to become a true post-partisan president:
"Quite simply Republicans could not believe they had a chance of winning, which most certainly aided Brown. Let there be no bones about it, the Republican Party brand is still most certainly toxic. Brown won the election by hardly mentioning the fact he was a Republican and called on baseball players rather than political celebrities to pitch for him (no pun intended). Had Brown mounted a challenge early on and had the baggage of, say, a vociferous Newt Gingrich and his endorsement, he may well have lost. It was a silent victory. ...
So where does that leave the vote for the landmark health care bill? The unwelcome overhaul being pushed by Obama, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is dead, and the Democrats can either continue to flog a dead horse or choose to be serious about looking for a bipartisan solution to what is a pressing issue. If they choose the former, they’ll suffer in the midterms and Obama will be all out of what little political capital he has only halfway through his first term. If they choose the latter, Obama can attempt to rebuild the image of himself as a uniter, a post-partisan President, and--most crucially--hang clearly to the center of the unpopular Pelosi."From YPNation contributor Ewan Watt, some thoughts on Scott Brown's win, health... more
Picking up where the network left off in 2009, Fox News jumped into its first political campaign of the year, this time setting its sights on the U.S. Senate to help elect Republican Scott Brown to the seat previously held by Democrat Ted Kennedy. Fox News and other media conservatives anticipated and celebrated Brown's election with a hyperbolic fervor that would redden the faces of the "Obamaniacs" they most despised in 2008. As conservative media saw it, in defeating Democratic challenger Martha Coakley in Massachusetts, Scott Brown took down Goliath, the 1980 Soviet Olympic hockey team, the Berlin Wall, and the British Empire. Before Brown assumed his seat in the Senate, he had been nominated by Drudge and Fox News to be our next president.
Fox News didn't simply cheer from the sidelines of this contest. Indeed, the network actively aided Brown's campaign. Fox News repeatedly hosted Brown in the days leading up to the election, and during each appearance, Brown directed viewers to his website to find out "how to help with donating and volunteering." Fox News political analyst Dick Morris took it upon himself to urge viewers to "go to DickMorris.com ... to help elect Brown," because if "we win this fight, then there will never be another victory for Obama." When asked at a rally about "ethical questions" raised by Fox News' advocacy for Brown, chief political correspondent Carl Cameron fled, saying he didn't have time to answer. But he did have the time to autograph "Brown for Senate" campaign materials and pose for pictures with Brown's volunteers, as Think Progress documented.
Fox News also did Brown the favor of repeatedly misrepresenting remarks Coakley made to portray her as incompetent. America's News HQ anchor Gregg Jarrett stated on January 17, "Martha Coakley is out of step when she says things like terrorists are no longer in Afghanistan, or in the debate saying, quote, 'We need to get taxes up.' " Interpreting Coakley's remarks in this way requires a willing suspension of basic verbal reasoning skills; and that was Fox's "straight news" programming. On Fox & Friends, Steve Doocy actually claimed that Coakley "suggested the Taliban [are] gone from Afghanistan," and Michael Scheuer declared that Coakley "doesn't seem to mind" that "we are losing there." For his part, Glenn Beck accused Coakley of "religious bigotry" for saying that those who would "deny emergency contraception to a woman who came in who had been raped" probably "shouldn't work in the emergency room."
In case boosting Brown while attacking Coakley wasn't a sufficient strategy, Fox News baselessly fomented fears that Democrats would "cheat" to steal the election. Warning Fox News viewers not to become complacent before Election Day, Beck stated, "[Y]ou can imagine how ugly this thing will get if -- oh God help us all -- if it's too close to call." Beck displayed the ACORN logo and added, "[T]hey have friends in low places." Invoking the Florida recount, Beck asserted that Democrats "were so incompetent they didn't even know how to cheat. But don't worry -- they've gotten good at it now."
Fox even told viewers that they could strengthen their 401(k)s by electing Brown.
On Tuesday night, Scott Brown’s wife pleaded with her husband to stop advertising his “available” daughters, but a video we’ve dug up reveals that Gail Huff wasn’t always so prim and proper.
The Massachusetts senator-elect’s wife, who now works as a reporter for Boston station WCVB-TV, starred in singer Digney Fingus’ 1984 video for a song called “The Girl With The Curious Hand.”
Though the tea party movement has attracted criticism for its supposed lack of diversity, minority activists who are involved say the movement has little to do with race, and that it is attracting a more diverse crowd every day.
His family had just moved out of the “ghetto” to a brand-new high rise in Baltimore — within months, he said, the “dream come true” turned into a nightmare, as the building of welfare-collecting black residents became a den of crime.Though the tea party movement has attracted criticism for its supposed lack of... more
