“It almost seems that nobody can hate America as much as native Americans. America needs new immigrants to love and cherish it.”

Eric Hoffer, American Philosopher (1902-1983)

WASHINGTON POST: The health package released Thursday by House leaders would increase federal spending on health care by nearly $600 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, a dramatic increase that dwarfs the expansion envisioned by the latest Senate bill.

by Capitol Confidential

BREITBART: The health care bill recently unveiled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi is over 1,900 pages for a reason. It is much easier to dispense goodies to favored interest groups if they are surrounded by a lot of legislative legalese. For example, check out this juicy morsel to the trial lawyers (page 1431-1433 of the bill):

So, you can’t try to seek alternatives to lawsuits if you’ve actually done something to implement alternatives to lawsuits. Brilliant! The trial lawyers must be very happy today!

While there is debate over the details, it is clear that medical malpractice lawsuits have some impact on driving health care costs higher. There are likely a number of procedures that are done simply as a defense against future possible litigation. Recall this from the Washington Post:

Stay tuned. There are certainly many more terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad provisions in this massive bill.

…But the tonal candidate also had a conventionally liberal policy agenda. And as that agenda has run into resistance — on spending, health care and climate legislation — the president’s tone has utterly changed.

The Obama administration has gone after both Rush Limbaugh and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — showing an inability to distinguish between the burning of heretics and the burning of bridges. It has courted insurance companies, then publicly demonized them for showing independence. Obama has tended to define all opposition, particularly on health care, as resulting from fear, cowardice and selfishness — instead of admitting genuine disagreement. At a recent fundraiser, he mocked Republicans as robots who “do what they’re told.” He has engaged in consistent, classless, self-excusing criticism of his predecessor. Other presidents have been known for a war on totalitarianism or a war on terrorism. Obama is known for a war on Fox News.

“The campaign,” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen say in Politico, “underscores how deeply political the Obama White House is in its daily operations — with a strong focus on redrawing the electoral map and discrediting the personalities and ideas that have powered the conservative movement over the past 20 years.” Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander — a conservative, but not normally an angry one — describes these tactics as behavior “typical of street brawls and political campaign consultants.” It is also behavior typical of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who called town hall protesters “evil-mongers,” and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who labeled them as “simply un-American.”

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) has named Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas) Porker of the Month for loading up her goodie bag just before Halloween as she prepares to leave the Senate to run for governor of Texas.

While claiming to be a fiscal conservative, the four-term senator requested 149 pork-barrel projects costing $1.6 billion in authorization and appropriations bills for fiscal year 2010. On September 28, 2009, she told the Austin American-Statesman, “I’m proud of being able to garner Texans’ fair share of their tax dollars.” “Sen. Hutchison is repeating the same old insidious quackery about the earmarking process: that it can be made accountable and that it somehow levels the spending playing field,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz. “The only fair way to distribute the taxpayers’ money is to eliminate the practice altogether and instead work to ensure that every dime of taxpayer money is spent using the budget laws and rules that [members of Congress] themselves established.”

For personifying the tiresome hypocrisy of some members of Congress who want to claim the badge of fiscal conservatism while continuing to abscond with billions of dollars in wasteful pork projects, CAGW names Sen. Hutchison the October Porker of the Month.

(Washington, D.C.) - Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) today once again reiterated its strong opposition to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) intention to embark on a regulatory goose chase. Starting tomorrow, (October 22,)the FCC begins its ill-conceived venture into drafting new rules and regulations to dictate how broadband companies must manage access to the internet.

In an October 20, 2009 Broadcasting & Cable article, John Eggerton reported that “[T]he key will be how the FCC ends up defining network management and what practices that definition allows or appears to foreclose. Some conservative Democrats have expressed their own concerns that the FCC not produce rules that discourage private investment and boost the price of broadband, thus widening the economic divide between Internet haves and have-nots.”

“The Internet has flourished with a minimum of political intervention. There is no pressing need for government involvement and no good will come from the government’s creating a phony role for itself. The Internet has been a wide-open playing field for a whole host of fierce competitors and has flourished because of government’s benign indifference.

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement in government.

LONDON TIMES: Exaggerated and inaccurate claims about the threat from global warming risk undermining efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions and contain climate change, senior scientists have told The Times.

Environmental lobbyists, politicians, researchers and journalists who distort climate science to support an agenda erode public understanding and play into the hands of skeptics, according to experts including a former government chief scientist.

Excessive statements about the decline of Arctic sea ice, severe weather events and the probability of extreme warming in the next century detract from the credibility of robust findings about climate change, they said.

Such claims can easily be rebutted by critics of global warming science to cast doubt on the whole field. They also confuse the public about what has been established as fact, and what is conjecture.

“I still think Hillary has a lot of what I am looking for in a VP,” “Smarts, discipline, steadfastness. I think Bill may be too big a complication. If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship.”

Barack Obama in David Ploufe’s new book, The Audacity to win.

“It’s not a tax increase, it’s just a removal of a tax decrease”

- Nancy Pelosi Thanx Chickadee

“As an American I am not so shocked that Obama was given the Nobel Peace Prize without any accomplishments to his name, but that America gave him the White House based on the same credentials.”

- - Newt Gingrich

CHICAGO (AP) — Consumers’ confidence about the U.S. economy fell unexpectedly in October as job prospects remained bleak, a private research group said Tuesday, fueling speculation that an already gloomy holiday shopping forecast could worsen.

The Consumer Confidence Index, released by The Conference Board, sank unexpectedly to 47.7 in October — its second-lowest reading since May.

Forecasters predicted a higher reading of 53.1.

A reading above 90 means the economy is on solid footing. Above 100 signals strong growth.

The index has seesawed since reaching a historic low of 25.3 in February and climbed to 53.4 in September.

WASHINGTON (AP) - An early progress report on President Barack Obama’s economic recovery plan overstates by thousands the number of jobs created or saved through the stimulus program, a mistake that White House officials promise will be corrected in future reports.

The government’s first accounting of jobs tied to the $787 billion stimulus program claimed more than 30,000 positions paid for with recovery money. But that figure is overstated by least 5,000 jobs, according to an Associated Press review of a sample of stimulus contracts.

The AP review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

- A company working with the Federal Communications Commission reported that stimulus money paid for 4,231 jobs, when about 1,000 were produced.

- A Georgia community college reported creating 280 jobs with recovery money, but none was created from stimulus spending.

- A Florida child care center said its stimulus money saved 129 jobs but used the money on raises for existing employees….

- Colorado-based Teletech Government Solutions on a $28.3 million contract with the Federal Communications Commission for creation of a call center, reported creating 4,231 jobs, although 3,000 of those workers were paid for five weeks or less.

“We all felt it was an appropriate way to represent the data at the time” and the reporting error has been corrected, said company president Mariano Tan.

- The Toledo, Ohio-based Koring Group received two FCC contracts, again for call centers. It reported hiring 26 people for each contract, or a total of 52 jobs, but cited the same workers for both contracts. The jobs only lasted about two months.

The FCC spotted the problem. The company’s owner, Steve Holland, acknowledged the actual job count is closer to five and blamed the problem on confusion about the reporting.

The AP’s review identified nearly 600 contracts claiming stimulus money for more than 2,700 jobs that appear to have similar duplicated counts.

- Barbara Moore, executive director of the Child Care Association of Brevard County in Cocoa, Fla., reported that the $98,669 she received in stimulus money saved 129 jobs at her center, though the cash was used to give her 129 employees a 3.9 percent cost-of-living raise. She said she needed to boost their salaries because some workers had left “because we had not been able to give them a raise in four years.”

- Officials at East Central Technical College in Douglas, Ga., said they now know they shouldn’t have claimed 280 stimulus jobs linked to more than $200,000 to buy trucks and trailers for commercial driving instruction, and a modular classroom and bathroom for a health education program.

“It was an error on someone’s part,” said Mike Light, spokesman for the Technical College System of Georgia. The 280 were not jobs, but the number of students who would benefit, he said.

- The San Joaquin, Calif., Regional Rail Commission reported creating or saving 125 jobs as part of a stimulus project to lay railroad track. Because the project drew from two pools of money, the commission reported the jobs figure twice, bringing the total to

250 on the government report. Spokesman Thomas Reeves said the commission corrected the data Tuesday.

UNITED NATIONS (AFP) – US drone strikes against suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan could be breaking international laws against summary executions, the UN’s top investigator of such crimes said.

“The problem with the United States is that it is making an increased use of drones/Predators (which are) particularly prominently used now in relation to Pakistan and Afghanistan,” UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston told a press conference.

“My concern is that drones/Predators are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” he said.

US strikes with remote-controlled aircraft against Al-Qaeda and Taliban targets in Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan have often resulted in civilian deaths and drawn bitter criticism from local populations.

“The onus is really on the United States government to reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary extrajudicial executions aren’t in fact being carried out through the use of these

BREITBART: Carnage in Pakistan and America’s bloodiest month in Afghanistan are sharpening President Barack Obama’s dilemma on troop deployments while stoking political demands for swifter action.

“We watch this situation continue to deteriorate while this long protracted process of decision making goes on,” Republican Senator John McCain told CBS on Wednesday.

“We are not operating in a vacuum. The president of the United States needs to make this decision and soon. Our allies are nervous and our military leadership is becoming frustrated.”

BREITBART: CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) - A storm that brought the first heavy snow of autumn to a large portion of the Rockies and western plains prompted officials to close schools in Wyoming on Wednesday and was blamed for dozens of accidents in the state and in neighboring Colorado.

Up to 18 inches of snow was forecast in Denver and along the northern Colorado Front Range. As much as 4 feet was possible in the Colorado mountains. Cheyenne was expected to get at least 14 inches before the storm moves off Thursday afternoon.

WASHINGTON POST: Long-sought changes to the pay and benefits structure for current and former federal employees await President Obama’s signature.

The defense authorization bill passed by the Senate on Thursday night included alterations to benefits and practices first announced earlier this month. Perhaps the biggest change is that members of the Federal Employees Retirement System will be able to get credit for unused sick leave when they retire. The provision will be phased in over the next four years.

WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration has allowed drugs for cancer and other diseases to stay on the market even when follow-up studies showed they didn’t extend patients’ lives, say congressional investigators.

A report due out Monday from the Government Accountability Office also shows that the FDA has never pulled a drug off the market due to a lack of required follow-up about its actual benefits - even when such information is more than a decade overdue.

When pressed about that policy, agency officials said they have no plans to get more aggressive.

The GAO says the FDA should do more to track whether drugs approved based on preliminary results actually have lived up to their promise.

The FDA responded that the report paints an overly negative picture of its so-called “accelerated approval” program, which is only used to approve drugs for the most serious diseases.

WASHINGTON POST: It takes a while for most start-up companies to gain the confidence of a U.S. congressman and the promise of federal funds. But last year, a small Illinois company accomplished its goal in 16 days with the help of Rep. Peter J. Visclosky, a little-known Indiana Democrat who sits on the House committee that funds the Pentagon….

A Post review shows that the K&L Gates clients winning Visclosky’s support, along with their lobbyists and investors, donated almost $200,000 to Visclosky and an additional $130,000 to the House Democratic campaign committee since 2005. The donations often came in clusters, around the time Visclosky’s committee was crafting its annual earmarks, which are added to the budget by committee members and do not go through the competitive or approval processes required for most government contracts….

Both Visclosky and K&L Gates declined interview requests. Visclosky’s attorney, Reid Weingarten, said in an e-mail: “Congressman Visclosky proudly helped many companies doing innovative and important work receive federal funds. Some of these companies chose to support his campaigns with legal and public contributions. This is traditional, open and utterly normal activity on the Hill that is protected by our laws and Constitution.” …

“While Members of Congress may lawfully seek campaign contributions from our clients, and some of our clients have attended their fundraisers, we have always been clear that campaign contributions cannot be a condition for any appropriation or official action,” the statement said. …

The chief lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce alleged Sunday that there is a White House campaign of “invectives” and “name-calling” against his organization, and said the business group is eager to ignore the heated rhetoric. Well, of course they are name calling; they are the 4th grade class!

“In inner-party politics, these methods lead, as we shall yet see, to this: the party organization substitutes itself for the party, the central committee substitutes itself for the organization, and, finally, a “dictator” substitutes himself for the central committee.”

Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) Communist revolutionary

WASHINGTON (AP) - Quick quiz: What do these enterprises have in common? Farm and construction machinery, Tupperware, the railroads, Hershey sweets, Yum food brands and Yahoo? Answer: They’re all more profitable than the health insurance industry. In the health care debate, Democrats and their allies have gone after insurance companies as rapacious profiteers making “immoral” and “obscene” returns while “the bodies pile up.”

Ledgers tell a different reality. Health insurance profit margins typically run about 6 percent, give or take a point or two. That’s anemic compared with other forms of insurance and a broad array of industries, even some beleaguered ones.

Profits barely exceeded 2 percent of revenues in the latest annual measure. This partly explains why the credit ratings of some of the largest insurers were downgraded to negative from stable heading into this year, as investors were warned of a stagnant if not shrinking market for private plans.

Insurers are an expedient target for leaders who want a government-run plan in the marketplace. Such a public option would force private insurers to trim profits and restrain premiums to compete, the argument goes. This would “keep insurance companies honest,” says President Barack Obama.

The debate is loaded with intimations that insurers are less than straight, when they are not flatly accused of malfeasance.

BREITBART: Japan’s major nuclear reactor manufacturers have begun developing small nuclear power systems for both developed and emerging countries, a report said on Saturday. I want one.

Friday, October 23, 2009

Rahm Emanuel once sent a dead fish to a live pollster. Now he’s put a horse’s head in Roger Ailes’s bed.

Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn’t scare easily.

The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is “opinion journalism masquerading as news.” Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox “not really a news station.” And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to “be led [by] and following Fox.”

Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration — from exposing “green jobs” czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 “truther” to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health-care legislation — the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.

The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry — finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.

At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House “pool” news organizations — except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.

This was an important defeat because there’s a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they’re engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

There’s nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.

Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand “the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties.” They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other — and an otherwise imperious government.

Factions should compete, but they should also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than those of CNN and MSNBC combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a “Saturday Night Live” skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark that CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

Defend Fox from whom? Fox’s flagship 6 o’clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I’m not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She’s been attacked for extolling Mao’s political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one’s own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book? The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?

Speaking of the $247 Billion payment to Medicare doctors, that bill appears to be dead. Reid is whining that the AMA misled him on the number of republicans they could deliver. That is total BS. The payment was in return for the AMA’s support of the Obamacare bill. It was a bribe, pure and simple.

Well, republicans, together with a bunch of democrats voted to block the 10years of cuts to Medicare reimbursement of doctors. That put the $247Billion bill on the trailer.

Reid says now that he will be back with this after the health care bill passes.

Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican and No. 2 Republican Senate leader, recently identified a key issue that is likely to complicate the administration’s plan: Russia for years has been violating the current Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which is set to expire Dec. 5.

Mr. Kyl said that Russia’s development of a new multiple-warhead RS-24 missile that was tested as recently as May 2007 violates the current treaty.

“That would be illegal for the Russians to deploy under START. So why are they testing it?” Mr. Kyl asked.

“In this case, it appears the Russians have cheated - if not in the letter of the START agreement, at least in its spirit - by converting one of their existing missiles to this new multiple-warhead variant,”

The argument of Mr. Kyl and others concerned with the administration’s rush to conclude a new treaty is over how a new agreement can be reached when there is evidence that the Russians failed to abide by the old one.

POLITICO: The Senate must soon increase the national debt limit to above $13 trillion — and Democrats are looking for political cover.

Adding it to the defense bill would allow Democrats to argue that they voted for the measure to help troops in harm’s way — and downplay that their vote also expanded the limit for how much money the country can borrow.

The strategy has not yet been finalized, aides and senators said. The House already approved a debt limit increase of $925 billion — above the $12.1 trillion ceiling Congress approved as part of the economic stimulus package last February — but Democrats may seek to increase the limit further so they don’t have to revisit the politically treacherous issue until after the 2010 midterm elections.

The Treasury Department reported last week that the annual deficit for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 stood at a record $1.4 trillion, with that number likely to balloon under Obama’s policies.

With the debt limit about to be eclipsed, Republicans are eager to force Democrats to find the votes to increase it among themselves, putting the majority party in a lose-lose situation and searching for a way to minimize public backlash.

“Regardless of the political treachery, I’m more worried about the economic treachery and the monetary aspects of it with devaluing the dollar,” said Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.).

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) and the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), both told POLITICO that appropriators may add the language to must-pass spending legislation.

Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.), whose committee is in charge of the debt increase, said “oh yeah, it’s a possibility” of adding the debt-ceiling increase to the spending legislation.

And Conrad said he wants any debt increase to be coupled with language that would create a “comprehensive” process to force Congress to begin making tough choices to cut the debt — something akin to legislation he and Gregg proposed that would establish a commission to study ways to cut the deficit, whose recommendations would be fast-tracked through Congress.

WASHINGTON POST: Sensing that victory in the race for Virginia governor is slipping away, Democrats at the national level are laying the groundwork to blame a loss in a key swing state on a weak candidate who ran a poor campaign that failed to fully embrace President Obama until days before the election.

This is so sad, but true…so many people didn’t “catch on” to this. You will laugh your butt off. Democratic Math If you traded in a clunker worth $3500, you get $4500 Off for an apparent “savings” of $1000.

However, you have to pay taxes on the $4500 come April 15th (something that no auto Dealer will tell you). If you are in the 30% Tax bracket, you will pay $1350 on that $4500. So, rather than save $1000, you actually pay an Extra $350 to the feds.

In addition, you Traded in a car that was most likely paid for. Now You have 4 or 5 years of payments on a car that you did not need, That was costing you less to run than the payments that you will now Be making..

But wait, it gets even better: You also were ripped off by the dealer. For example, every dealer here in LA was selling The Ford Focus with all the goodies including A/C, auto transmission, Power windows, etc for $12,500 the month before the “cash for Clunkers” program started. When “cash for clunkers” came along, they Stopped discounting them and instead sold them at the List price of $15,500. So, you paid $3000 More than you would have the month before. (Honda, Toyota, and Kia played the same list price game That Ford and Chevy did).

So let’s do the final tally here: You traded in a car worth: $3500 You got a discount of: $4500 ——— Net so far +$1000 But you have to pay: $1350 in taxes on the $4500 ——– Net so far: -$350 And you paid: $3000 more than the car was selling for The month before ———- Net -$3350 We could also add in the additional taxes (sales Tax, state tax, etc.) on the extra $3000 that you paid for the car, Along with the 5 years of interest on the car loan but let’s just stop Here.

So who actually made out on the deal? The feds collected taxes on the car along with taxes on the $4500 They “gave” you. The car dealers made an Extra $3000 or more on every car they sold along with the kickbacks From the manufacturers and the loan Companies.

The manufacturers got to dump lots of cars they Could not give away the month before. And the poor Stupid consumer got saddled with even more debt that they cannot Afford.

Obama was trying to whip up excitement at a $30,000 per couple fundraiser yesterday.

Now folks, I am not a greedy man, and I believe that we have a certain responsibility to the less fortunate to teach them to fish. But if I could afford to go to a $30,000 a couple fundraiser, I don’t think it would be for a party that plans to confiscate a good share of my earnings and has made no bones about it. Would you?

I can understand the denizens from Hollywood throwing in on this deal because they are mentally, with some notable exceptions, the seven dwarfs of humankind. But business people? I don’t think so.

That only leaves two types of people. Those that feel that they will get an exemption from Obama for their income, because they think the fix is in and those who inherited their wealth and never worked a day in their lives…Well, John Kerry didn’t exactly inherit his wealth, he married it…twice.

In any case, these children could get a real rude awakening if Obama gets his way.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) has locked the republicans out of House Oversight and Government Reform committee room so they can’t meet when the dems aren’t there. Sort of like the dem Senators locking out the republicans so they can’t see how the health care bill is being crafted. The dems don’t let good ideas go to waste.

In any case, this action by Towns appears to be in retaliation for the leading republican on the committee ridiculing him repeatedly over Towns refusal to launch an investigation into the Countrywide Mortgage sweetheart mortgage deals for VIP’s.

Apparently, Towns has been stonewalling republican requests to subpoena records in the case. (Ya think the fix is in?). Then last week, the republicans were going to force an open vote at a mark-up meeting. The dems found out and cancelled the meeting at the last minute. So far, the dems have given two conflicting excuses for cancelling the meeting at such a late date; neither one that they were trying to avoid a vote on the subpoena.

A GOP committee staffer captured video of the dems leaving their separate meeting in private chambers after the mark-up meeting was scheduled to begin. He then spliced it to video of the dems empty chairs in the committee room, set the whole thing to music (Hit the Road, Jack) and put it on the minority website.

Apparently Towns developed a pretty severe emotional rash from the ridicule, especially since the dems were caught in a lie on tape, and let the republicans know that he was not happy with video in the committee room, even though the rules allow videotaping. The dems readily acknowledged that they changed the locks on the committee room in retaliation for the videotape.

THE RASMUSSEN REPORT: The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 27% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty percent (40%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -13. That’s just a point above the lowest level ever recorded for this President. It’s also the sixth straight day in negative double digits, matching the longest such streak.

Just 31% of voters believe that Congress has a good understanding of the health care proposal.

BOULDER, Colo. (UPI) — Patients at highly rated U.S. hospitals have a 52 percent lower chance of dying, an independent healthcare ratings organization says. The 12th annual HealthGrades Hospital Quality in America Study examined almost 40 million Medicare hospitalization records from 2006, 2007 and 2008. The 2010 ratings for individual hospitals are available at www.healthgrades.com, designed to help patients compare the quality of care at their local hospitals for 28 different procedures and treatments, from hip replacement to bypass surgery. The researchers said the nation’s 5,000 non-federal hospitals have a wide gap in quality between the best hospitals and all others. “The fact is, patients are twice as likely to die at low-rated hospitals as at highly rated hospitals for the same diagnoses and procedures,” Dr. Rick May, an author of the HealthGrades study, says in a statement. “With Washington focused on rewarding high-quality hospitals and empowering patients to make more informed healthcare choices, this information comes at a turning point in the healthcare debate.” The study says across all 17 procedures and diagnoses in which mortality was studied, there was an approximately 71.64 percent lower chance of dying in a five-star rated hospital compared to a one-star rated hospital. Across all 17 procedures and diagnoses studied, there was an approximately 51.53 percent lower chance of dying in a five-star rated hospital compared to the national average.

http://www.healthgrades.com/media/DMS/pdf/HealthGradesTwelfthAnnualHospitalQualityStudy2009.pdf

The Nancy Pelosi held forth yesterday that new estimates on the health bill would cut the deficit and only cost $900,000,000,000.00. Well, now I am getting excited! If Pelosi said it, you can take it to the bank…the food bank; because that is where you are going to end up if you listen to her.

“We’re in an excellent place with the cost, given the information that we have,” she said.

The following is an excerpt from a Chicago Sun Times article under the heading, “Excuses wearing thin for Obama, Media pals”.

The MSNBC blast against the chamber appears to dovetail with what the Politico newspaper reports is a White House and Democratic effort “to marginalize” the business organization. That echoes the administration assault on the Fox News Channel: It says Fox isn’t a news organization.

Remember me telling you about the $247 Billion that the dems hurriedly put in a bill for immediate passage to up the payments of Medicare Dr’s so they wouldn’t quit taking Medicare? (A 2008 congressional study found that 30% of Medicare patients looking for a new doctor were having a difficult time finding one)

Well I got chummed. The $247 Billion is a payoff to doctors to support the health plan. I must be getting soft in the head to think the yellow rats would do something compassionate for their constituents.

Except, the AMA is a little cool now on supporting the health plan and reportedly is not backing off on their demand for tort reform. Not too good for the 4th grade class.

I see where the Washington Post/ABC News released a new poll yesterday afternoon which, according to them, shows that the nation is now wondrously and overwhelmingly for the national health care plan.

Here is the lowdown on the above mentioned poll that I received this morning.. An article in our left wing rag bragged that the public health option has rebounded from summertime lows; especially with Independents and seniors. Sounds tragic, doesn’t it? Well it is.

What the poll shows is that the rebound is subject to certain conditions.

1. It has to be administered by the states, not the feds.
2. It is limited to those without access to affordable private insurance.

Currently the poll shows that 45% now favor the bill that is moving through the congress, while about 48% are opposed, about the same division as in August during the town hall meetings. (That certainly doesn’t sound to me that the public is appreciably warming)

ST. PETERSBURG TIMES: More than $2.3 million in federal economic stimulus grants have gone to eight Tampa Bay area cosmetology and massage schools to pay tuition for the hairdressers, masseuses and nail technicians of tomorrow.

That’s swell news for those who see the beauty trades as a way to gain a firmer footing in the job market. But is there truly demand for more beauty school graduates at bay area salons?

Not really, said Monica Ponce, owner of Muse The Salon in Tampa.

“Instead of encouraging more people to go to beauty schools,” Ponce said, “they should probably help the stylists who are unemployed.”

WASHINGTON POST: Three months before he was elected president, Barack Obama vowed not only to reform health care but also to pass the legislation in an unprecedented way.

“I’m going to have all the negotiations around a big table,” he said at an appearance in Chester, Va., repeating an assertion he made many times. He said the discussions would be “televised on C-SPAN, so that people can see who is making arguments on behalf of their constituents and who are making arguments on behalf of the drug companies or the insurance companies.”

But now, as a Senate vote on health-care legislation nears, those negotiations are occurring in a setting that is anything but revolutionary in Washington: Three senators are working on the bill behind closed doors.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) sits at the head of a wooden table at his office as he and Sens. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) work to merge two competing versions of health-care legislation into one bill. The three men will be joined by top aides as well as by members of President Obama’s health-care team, led by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. The sessions started on Wednesday and could be completed this week.

Oct. 17 (Bloomberg) — The Canadian dollar rallied for a third straight week, touching a 14-month high and moving closer to parity with its U.S. counterpart as signs of economic recovery pushed commodities and stocks higher.

Canada’s currency gained as crude oil, the nation’s largest export, surged 10 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 10,000 for the first time in a year. The Bank of Canada will keep interest rates at a record low level when it meets on Oct. 20, according to all 23 economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

The Canadian currency, nicknamed the loonie for the aquatic bird on the C$1 coin, appreciated 0.5 percent to C$1.0370 per U.S. dollar yesterday in Toronto, from C$1.0422 on Oct. 9. One Canadian dollar buys 96.44 U.S. cents.

Employment in Canada rose last month six times more than forecast, unexpectedly reducing the jobless rate to 8.4 percent, the government said on Oct. 9.