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Behind Harry Reid's Bid for a Public Option

11:11 AM, Tuesday 17 November 2009 .. 0 comments .. Link

As the battle to shape the health-care reform bill comes down to the wire, maneuvering in Washington is intensifying enormously. Politicians are strategizing to get the votes they need, while lobbyists and Wholesale UGG Boots ther interest groups are scrambling either to maximize what they can get -- or minimize the costs and the damage -- as push comes to shove over what each bill will contain before the Senate and House move into final conference negotiations. Now comes a surprise announcement from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-Nev.] that the Senate health-care reform bill he'll put forward will include language to create a government-run insurance option -- with an provision to allow states that don't want to sign up for the public plan to "opt-out" of it. "While the public option is not a silver bullet, I believe it's an important way to ensure competition and to UGG 5815 Classic Tall evel the playing field for patients with the insurance industry," Reid said on Oct. 26. He said that the bill would be sent to the Congressional Budget Office for a required assessment of its fiscal impact before being debated on the floor. Reid stopped short of saying he had the 60 votes needed to thwart a Republican filibuster, and it's not clear that he will have them by the time the bill reaches the floor. However Reid's math works, his support marks a surprisingly strong return for the public option and is a much more significant move than many were expecting as recently as a week ago. Most had anticipated that Reid would propose the far weaker "trigger" option that Senator Olympia Snowe [R-Me.], the only Republican to vote for any of the five bills pending in Congress, has been pushing. Snowe: "I am deeply disappointed" It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy. There are several schools of thought in Washington as to what Reid is up to -- and what will come next. In a note to clients today, Rick Weissenstein, health-care analyst with the Washington Research Group, said: "It appears that Reid's plan is several votes short of 60 at the current time." Reid may now have 5202 Baby Infant Erin Boots 0-24 Month,Pink ost the backing of Snowe, "I am deeply disappointed with the Majority Leader's decision to include a public option as the focus of the legislation," she said in a statement. One prominent theory is that while Reid doesn't have all the votes he needs among the Democrats, he is trying with this maneuver to increase the pressure on recalcitrant party members to go along. Liberal Democrats have been very vocal in the last week or so that the public option has the support of all but a handful of the 58 Democrats and two Independents in the caucus, so why should a vast majority back down and accede to the wishes of the much smaller group? Reid's move, in this sense, is a dare to those who aren't yet with him on the UGG 5245 Ultra Tall Boots ublic option; Will they be willing to buck their party over this issue -- when he's giving those who don't agree with it an out that can be taken up by states that oppose it? Enormous pressure is being applied behind closed doors to cut a deal, but no one really knows yet whether that can successfully recruit conservative Democrats who have been worried about the public plan.

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Fort Hood has felt the strain of repeated deployments

01:49 PM, Friday 6 November 2009 .. 0 comments .. Link

Fort Hood, the Texas military base that was the scene of a mass shooting Thursday, has been hard hit by the growing strain on the Army from multiple combat deployments -- with its Ugg Whitely Boots ersonnel suffering the highest number of suicides among Army installations since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, according to official data. After many years of lengthy war zone rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army personnel are experiencing record rates of suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and other mental health problems, as well as worsening alcohol and drug abuse. The psychological toll on the all-volunteer force today is unprecedented, Army officials say, acknowledging that they do not know how much the Army can sustain before it breaks -- making the health of the force a major consideration in President Obama's current deliberations over sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. It's unclear what motivated the Army psychiatrist who is thought to have opened fire on fellow soldiers Thursday, although it's clear he had worked in settings where the effects of combat stress were pervasive. A small but increasing number of soldiers undergoing the mental strain of repeated comba Panodra Beads deployments are taking lives -- often their own. This year, 117 active-duty Army soldiers were reported to have committed suicide, with 81 of those cases confirmed -- up from 103 suicides during the same period last year. Ten suicides have been reported at Fort Hood this year; more than 75 of its personnel have committed suicide since 2003. Fort Hood's high number of suicides is also linked to the fact that it is the Army's largest base, with more than 53,000 soldiers. An estimated 30 percent of those returning from combat suffer mental health symptoms such as depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. Such problems grow worse with repeated deployments and the constant exposure to danger and the sights, smells and emotions of seeing others killed or wounded, according to Army mental health surveys. Those who treat the mentally wounded, including doctors such as Hasan, are not immune from the symptoms. It is not uncommon for therapists who treat patients for post-traumatic stress disorder to experience some symptoms vicariously after hearing account after account of the horrors of the battlefield. Hasan was a psychiatry intern at Walter Reed Army Medical Center from June 2003 to July 2009, Army Ugg Ultimate Tall Braid fficials said. In that position, he probably treated soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. Violent outbursts such as shootings by soldiers at Army bases have occurred in recent years, including at Fort Hood, where several killings were reported over the past two years. Historically, one of the worst shooting incidents involving soldiers took place Oct. 27, 1995, at Towle Stadium at Fort Bragg, N.C., when a soldier opened fire on paratroopers in a formation, killing one Army officer and wounding 18 others.

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12:31 PM, Wednesday 4 November 2009 .. 0 comments .. Link

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A Decadent Nobel

01:52 PM, Friday 16 October 2009 .. 0 comments .. Link

So Donald Rumsfeld was right about Old Europe. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has taken it in the neck for awarding this year's Peace Prize to a nine-month old American presidency. There's been much mockery of pencil-necked Norwegian academics in faraway Oslo. This is unfair. The committee said it chose Barack Obama for his "vision of . . . a world without nuclear weapons" and for "meeting the great climatic challenges the Silver Jewelry world is confronting." I'd say that completes the argument over old and new Europe. This is a Nobel of decadence. Let's be clear. This decadence isn't primarily about Roman Polanski or Silvio Berlusconi's playboy club or French culture minister Frederic Mitterrand's adventures in Thailand. Though these are not irrelevant. This Nobel is about political decadence. "Decadence," an enduring word, emerged from the Latin "de-cadere," which means "to fall down." Decadence stripped bare means decay. The unanswered question at the center of this odd Nobel is whether Barack Obama admires Old Europe for the same reasons it admires him. When it was a vibrant garden of ideas, Europe gave the world more good things than one can count. Then it discovered the pleasures of the welfare state. Old Europe now lives in a world of unpayable public pension obligations, weak job creation for its youngest workers, below-replacement birth rates, fat agricultural subsidies for farms dating to the Middle Ages, high taxes to pay for the public high-life, and history's most crucial proof of decay—the inability to finance one's armies. Only five of the 28 nations in NATO (the U.K., France, Turkey, Greece and Spain) achieve the minimum defense-spending benchmark of 2% of GDP. The effect of arriving at a state of political decadence, of no longer being able to rise in the world, is that many people increasingly discover that soft Ugg Boots moralism is a more congenial pastime than producing answers for the hard questions. As when David Cameron, the Tory leader and likely next British prime minister wonders: "The insatiable consumption and materialism of the past decade; has it made us happier or more fulfilled?" This isn't to say that soft moralism is about nothing. But when matters such as climate change become life's primary concerns, it means one is going to spend more time preaching, which is easy, than doing, which is hard. One thinks of Nobelist Al Gore's unstoppable sermons. Among the hardest questions Europe faced after World War II was the placement of anti-Soviet Pershing missiles on Europe's soil in 1983. Led by Helmut Kohl and Maggie Thatcher, Europe did something hard: It overcame its pacifists. A decade later, with the siege of Sarajevo, old Europe came to understand that making the hardest decisions was now beyond its reach. Current hard questions include Pakistan and Afghanistan. Darfur is a hard question. Where to hold captured terrorists is a hard question. Americans heard often the past four years how much Europe "hated" us because of that most complex of hard questions, the Iraq war. Unpopular wars cause Panodra Jewelry bad feelings to be sure, but past some point Europe's antipathy toward the U.S. over Iraq began to sound a lot like moralistic decadence. It is a neurotic resentment of a superpower merely because it possesses the resources to do something Europe can no longer do, for good or ill.

Ethics Panel Widens Rangel Investigation

12:10 PM, Friday 9 October 2009 .. 0 comments .. Link

WASHINGTON -- The House expanded its yearlong ethics probe into Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel on Thursday, the latest blow to the embattled New York Democrat. The House Ethics Committee said it would broaden its inquiry to determine if Mr. Rangel filed inaccurate forms with Congress disclosing his personl Pandora Jewelry assets. This summer, Mr. Rangel updated his personal-financial-disclosure forms for the past few years, revealing more than $500,000 in assets he hadn't before made public. Emile Milne, a spokesman for Mr. Rangel, called the announcement a "technicality," saying that "as a practical matter, today's announcement is nothing new." He said the ethics panel was already conducting a wide-ranging review of Mr. Rangel. Lawmakers are required to file annual reports with Congress disclosing their assets and liabilities. If the Ethics Committee finds that Mr. Rangel intentionally sought to hide assets, the panel could refer the matter to the Justice Department, which could pursue a criminal case. But the ethics panel, staffed by fellow lawmakers, has traditionally been more lenient. The broadened investigation could nonetheless pose problems for Mr. Rangel and other congressional Democrats. "This is just one step, but there have been Panodra Beads a number of steps already," said Robert Walker, an ethics lawyer with Wiley Rein LLP who recently was the staff director for the House and Senate ethics panels. On Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans engaged in a heated fight on the House floor over a Republican effort to force Mr. Rangel to step down as chairman of the tax-writing panel until the ethics panel completes its probe. Democrats defeated the measure soundly, but for the first time in three similar votes over the past year, two Democrats voted with Republicans, signaling a possible softening of Democratic support for Mr. Rangel. The Ethics Committee said it has authorized nearly 150 subpoenas, interviewed 34 witnesses and reviewed 12,000 pages of documents in the probe. Mr. Rangel is already being probed for a Wholesale Watches range of allegations, from failing to disclose income on a rental property to using his official House letterhead when asking for donations to an educational center that bears his name. He has denied any willful wrongdoing.