Senate Panel Endorses Sotomayor
Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor, moved closer to taking her seat on Tuesday as the Senate Judiciary Committee overwhelmingly approved her nomination and sent it on to the full Senate.
But the contentious public hearings this month and Tuesday’s largely partisan committee vote demonstrated that judicial confirmations remain a hotly contested political and ideological battleground with implications for Mr. Obama’s future choices for the courts.
The committee’s vote was 13 to 6, with Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina the only Republican joining the panel’s 12 Democrats in voting for the nomination.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/29/us/politics/29confirm.html?_r=1&ref=politics
Democrats Say House May Miss Deadline on Health Care
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. House Democrat leaders, struggling to reach an accord with party dissidents on health care, said they’re likely to miss President Barack Obama’s August deadline for legislation overhauling the medical system and imposing government-run healthcare.
Obama, who has made revamping health care the centerpiece of his domestic agenda, had urged the House and Senate to each pass versions of the bill before their month long August recess so negotiations on a compromise could begin when they return.
The House would only stay in session a few days after the start of the August break if an agreement can be reached to allow the bill to clear the Energy and Commerce Committee, where the Blue Dogs are holding up the legislation, Hoyer said earlier.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=am77.VJg3JqU
Hillary says running for office isn't on her "radar," but she still has an eight-person political team and sports two overflowing campaign war chests.
Clinton's failed presidential bid is now $1 million in the black, and her old Senate campaign committee has $2.1 million in the bank, much of it transferred in from the presidential account.
The former First Lady paid eight staffers nearly $100,000 in the second quarter of the year to tend to the remains of her political empire.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2009/07/29/2009-07-29_hillary_camp_is_election_ready.html
Opinion:
Congressmen must take care in how they deal with public meetings during the upcoming recess.
Incumbent Congressmen and Senators often look forward to their summer recess such as the one due to begin the end of this week. This year, they should take care and consider far more care in planning just how they approach giving their people back home a chance to voice their feelings.
In the immediate wake of his vote in favor of the huge tax increase contained in the Democrat “Cap and Trade” scam, Blue Dog Democrat Allen Boyd was ambushed by 300 angry constituents. He was so slammed by the angry Panama City people – 300 who joined spontaneously to express their fury – that he was forced to sneak out a back door to avoid honestly facing them. Boyd was humiliated. Trying to give him cover, a California-based environmental firm (one almost certainly expecting hefty contracts if the Cap and Trade scam passes) ran paid TV commercials for three full weeks – claiming Boyd’s vote benefits locals.
It wont. The vote of Boyd, Democrats, other Blue Dogs, and eight turncoat Republicans, will impose several thousands of dollars each and every year in new taxes and even more in increased prices of many products – such as gasoline at the pump.
The Boyd ambush has gotten a lot of attention nationwide, and the uprisings by tax payers grow. Within the past 48 hours, staffers for Missouri Democrat SenatorClaire McCaskill were badly shocked when a participant in a town meeting criticized the Obama healthcare scam and the meeting turned into a tea party protest itself. That those Missouri voters vehemently oppose the healthcare plan was more than obvious.
There’s a ton of disenchantment with the healthcare plot of Democrats.
Seniors are particularly terrified by Democrat plans disguised as “end of life planning” – a scheme that in plain words can be considered “euthanasia”.
Of course, Democrats don’t allow plain words wherever they can control the conversation.
Congress has long had a perk known as the “Franking Privilege” – a plan through which Congressman can send mail without postage, to the folks who sent them to Washington. The idea is facilitation of communications between the grass roots and Washington.
Democrats are having none of that – or at least only a little of it and then only if it is done their way.
Censorship by Democrats, forbid Republicans discussing “government-run healthcare” – demanding Republicans use the term “public option” healthcare. Those who fear honesty, are up to something.
Democrats wont even allow Republicans to call them Democrats. Pelosi-speak corruption insists Democrats be referred to as “the Majority Party”. Of course, “a rose by any name remains a rose”.
So Republicans are hampered in efforts to tell the truth about liberal healthcare schemes using their traditional mail back home. Media failure to honestly cover the issue goes without saying.
Any incumbent anticipating townhall meetings, district tours, or open houses, should take care and consider the possibilities. Republicans cannot assume a good voting record or solid efforts to oppose liberal extremism in the House or Senate will be good enough.
Sadly, a mindset of “throw the bums out” has spread. Such mindless condemnation of Congress reveals an ignorance on the part of those who author such concepts, but ignorance can cost us dearly in terms of confronting the liberal juggernaut Obama and Pelosi are using against normal American ideals and institutions.
There are good people in both houses. For the purposes of the 2010 election, the good guys can be identified with the “R” behind their names. If they have a “D”, they are almost certainly a part of the problem. After all, a substantial number of “Blue Dogs” voted wrong and helped pass the new Democrat tax a few weeks back.
Never before have we faced an election in which partisan politics must be the central core. To stop the threat, those of us who are staunchly conservative, are going to have to swallow hard and not oppose RINOs. What a way to have to run a railroad!
Meanwhile, the healthcare fight goes on. If “Obama care” passes, we face an era of inferior care and care that will sometimes be rationed.
That’s not the way its supposed to happen - -but then censorship is not the American way either, but that doesn’t stop Democrats from censoring Republican mail.
Buddy
1.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072701905.html?referrer=emailarticle
Obama's Plan Isn't the Answer
Martin Feldstein
For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.
President Obama's primary goal is to extend formal health insurance to those low-income individuals who are currently uninsured despite the nearly $300-billion-a-year Medicaid program. Doing so the Obama way would cost more than $1 trillion over the next 10 years. There surely must be better and less costly ways to improve the health and health care of that low-income group.
Although the president claims he can finance the enormous increase in costs by raising taxes only on high-income individuals, tax experts know that this won't work. Experience shows that raising the top income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent -- the effect of adding the proposed health surcharge to the increase resulting from letting the Bush tax cuts expire for high-income taxpayers -- would change the behavior of high-income individuals in ways that would shrink their taxable incomes and therefore produce less revenue. The result would be larger deficits and higher taxes on the middle class. Because of the unprecedented deficits forecast for the next decade, this is definitely not a time to start a major new spending program.
A second key goal of the Obama health plan is to slow the growth of health-care spending. The president's budget calls explicitly for cutting Medicare to help pay for the expanded benefits for low-income individuals. But the administration's goal is bigger than that. It is to cut dramatically the amount of health care that we all consume.
(NOTE: Cut through the debate – especially get beyond Democrat attempts to censor what Republican Congressmen are trying to report to their people – and understand the basic issue in Obama’s healthcare scheme and scam:
It’s a simple choice: quality versus Obama’s healthcare on the cheap. Obama’s healthcare would be a government-run health system, and that means quality would be beyond reach. For seniors, Obama’s plot is even more dire – liberals have introduced “end of life planning” – a euphemistic term for euthanasia. Democrats actually speak of old people having an obligation to “just die and get out of the way”.)
A recent report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers claims that the government can cut the projected level of health spending by 15 percent over the next decade and by 30 percent over the next 20 years. Although the reduced spending would result from fewer services rather than lower payments to providers, we are told that this can be done without lowering the quality of care or diminishing our health. I don't believe it.
To support their claim that costs can be radically reduced without adverse effects, the health planners point to the fact that about half of all hospital costs are for patients in the last year of life. I don't find that persuasive. Do doctors really know which of their very ill patients will benefit from expensive care and which will die regardless of the care they receive? In a world of uncertainty, many of us will want to hope that care will help.
We are also often told that patients in Minnesota receive many fewer dollars of care per capita than patients in New York and California without adverse health effects. When I hear that, I wonder whether we should cut back on care, as these experts advocate, move to Minnesota, or wish we had the genetic stock of Minnesotans.
The administration's health planners believe that the new "cost effectiveness research" will allow officials to eliminate wasteful spending by defining the "appropriate" care that will be paid for by the government and by private insurance. Such a constrained, one-size-fits-all form of medicine may be necessary in some European health programs in which the government pays all the bills. But Americans have shown that we prefer to retain a diversity of options and the ability to choose among doctors, hospitals and standards of care.
At a time when medical science offers the hope of major improvements in the treatment of a wide range of dread diseases, should Washington be limiting the available care and, in the process, discouraging medical researchers from developing new procedures and products? Although health care is much more expensive than it was 30 years ago, who today would settle for the health care of the 1970s?
Obama has said that he would favor a British-style "single payer" system in which the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are salaried but that he recognizes that such a shift would be too disruptive to the health-care industry. The Obama plan to have a government insurance provider that can undercut the premiums charged by private insurers would undoubtedly speed the arrival of such a single-payer plan. It is hard to think of any other reason for the administration to want a government insurer when there is already a very competitive private insurance market that could be made more so by removing government restrictions on interstate competition.
There is much that can be done to improve our health-care system, but the Obama plan is not the way to do it. One helpful change that could be made right away is fixing the COBRA system so that middle-income households that lose their insurance because of early retirement or a permanent layoff are not deterred by the cost of continuing their previous coverage.
Now that congressional leaders have made it clear that Obama will not see health legislation until at least the end of the year, the president should look beyond health policy and turn his attention to the problems that are impeding our economic recovery.
Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard University and president emeritus of the nonprofit National Bureau of Economic Research, was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984.
2.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203972704574316290482234198.html
Those Wild and Crazy Fords
Ford hasn’t taken taxpayer dollars directly, but it’s certainly benefiting from the auto bailout.
Ford is the only U.S. auto company not to land in bankruptcy and need rescue with taxpayer money. It’s also the only company in which control remains with a tight-knit founding family.
Coincidence? No.
Moral: complicated.
Ford’s press coverage lately portrays Ford as almost a character from an Ayn Rand novel—bravely, disdainfully waving away government money. This is, ahem, an exaggeration. Ford just received $6 billion in Energy Department loans. As the only domestic company with growing market share, it stands to benefit most from Washington’s new cash-for-clunkers subsidy.
Under chief executive Alan Mulally, moreover, Ford is dutifully shifting its focus to green cars more likely to please the government than the marketplace.
(A Randian hero would have damned the politically correct cars and turned Ford into what it should have been all along—an immensely profitable pickup truck company.)
Yet, for all that, there’s something Randian about the family’s decision to defend its legacy at all costs. Here’s where the dynamics of family control, plus blind luck, set Ford apart.
Public shareholders and corporate governance nudges chafed for years under the voting rights lockup that allows the family to control Ford while holding (at last count) barely 2% of the stock. In 2000, with Ford sitting on a hoard of $23 billion in cash, the company wouldn’t engage in share buybacks because, in order to benefit, the family would have had to sell down its voting stake.
(NOTE: Ford is moving past its competition among American automakers, primarily through the fault of its American competitors. GM began producing a line of less than stellar cars back in the early 80s. Chrysler has failed to provide engineering necessary for honest competition. My own family had one Chrysler mini van that went through five transmissions. It seems things could not get worse for either company, but Obama has seen fit to let the government run GM and force Chrysler into a shot gun marriage with Fiat – an Italian firm not known fir high automobile quality. GM’s new management – the government – may rival Fiat in its inability to produce something of quality.)
The gimmicky solution? A “special dividend” that allowed shareholders to receive either cash or newly issued shares, which family members could sell to raise cash without reducing their voting control. Two reputable pension funds, powerless to stop the maneuver, could only grump at what they called an “ominous precedent . . . to preserve the Ford family’s voting power.”
“Ominous” was the right adjective. No sooner were the family’s cash needs taken care of than Ford quickly hit hard times, while one white knight after another was spurned because the family refused to relinquish control. Chairman Bill Ford himself reportedly cut short feelers to Toyota, saying he would rather pour gasoline on Ford and burn it to the ground.
Even after Mr. Mulally, the Mr. Fixit from Boeing, was brought aboard to right the ship, some family members had had enough. They argued for diversifying out of Ford stock even if it meant giving up control. But instead a decision was made to roll the dice on a turnaround, mortgaging everything in sight, including the Blue Oval emblem, to raise $23.5 billion to invest in new cars.
Any rational investor would have sold down his stake to reduce excessive exposure to Ford and kicked himself for not doing so long ago. The family decision was an odd one. Even more so because the Ford family, under Ford’s peculiar bylaws, would be entitled to $1 billion of the first $1.5 billion of any cash left over after a bankruptcy filing. Piling on debt, they made it very much less likely that any cash would be left over if Ford ended up in Chapter 11.
It’s no stretch, however, to say Ford is in better shape today because it was in crisis before the crisis, so to speak. Its giant borrowings serendipitously were clinched just months before the subprime disaster shut down lending markets. Had banks seen what was coming, they never would have handed billions to the company just so it could bleed them away to protect the family’s position during the worst economic downturn in 80 years.
In almost every respect, this was luck, not design, except for the fact that family pride drove the Fords to do what every book of sensible investing told them not to do, which was double down.
But the story is far from over. Ford continues to lose money at a rapid rate despite an impressive reduction in its cash burn since last year. Plenty of smart investors believe the global financial crisis is only in remission—which means the family could yet lose control to the government.
Nevertheless, let’s write a provisional epilogue, one that won’t please the Randians but is more true to life.
The family’s real accomplishment, thanks partly to its own grim determination to remain atop the Ford Motor Company no matter what, was to position itself to benefit from the same political imperatives that spelled doom for GM’s and Chrysler’s owners. Many facets of the taxpayer auto bailout are indeed working in Ford’s favor, including handouts to the supplier base, without so far costing the family ownership and control.
They might even win their all-or-nothing bet. If so, it will be as remarkable a chapter in the family history as any that went before.
3.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.printable&pageId=105270
WorldNetDaily Exclusive
Left rises to squash CNN's Lou Dobbs
E-mail campaign to get 'stupid, overpaid, racist wingnut off air once and for all'
Drew Zahn
WorldNetDaily
CNN anchor Lou Dobbs has come under fire for having the audacity to question on air why President Barack Obama hasn't released his long-form birth certificate.
Now members of the Daily Kos website, which bills itself as "the largest progressive community blog in the United States," have turned up the heat even more by listing CNN executives' email addresses in a campaign to get Dobbs fired from the network.
"Lou Dobbs is an idiot and he should be booted off CNN for his obsession with President Obama's birth certificate," writes Daily Kos diarist kerouacforobama. "We need to get these far-right haters off the air."
Join in WND's Fedex campaign and tell Obama you don't buy his state-run media coverup!
The piece, titled "CNN should be pressured to discipline/fire Lou Dobbs," then lists the following as email addresses for the "top brass" at the network, so people can voice their displeasure with Dobbs:
• Jim.Walton@turner.com (president of CNN Worldwide)
• Susan.Grant@turner.com (executive vice president of CNN News Services)
• Jon.Klein@turner.com (president of CNN/US)
• Rena.Golden@turner.com (senior vice president and executive producer of CNN.com)
• David.Payne@turner.com (senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com)
• Mitch.Gelman@turner.com (senior vice president and senior executive producer of CNN.com)
"Wouldn't it be nice if the blogosphere could get this stupid, overpaid, racist, xenophobic wingnut off the air once and for all ?" asks kerouacforobama. "Dobbs belongs at Fox – he would make a great toilet cleaner for Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity."
As WND reported, Dobbs has stated he already believes Obama is a U.S. citizen, and all he wants is for the president to produce a copy of his birth certificate, but even that request has generated a full-scale attack on several fronts.
According to the Los Angeles Times, CNN President Jon Klein wrote an email to staffers of "Lou Dobbs Tonight" addressing the issue of the legitimacy of President Obama's birth certificate.
"It seems this story is dead," Klein wrote, according to the Times, "because anyone who still is not convinced doesn't really have a legitimate beef."
J. Richard Cohen, chief of the left-leaning Southern Poverty Law Center, went even further. He wrote a letter to CNN suggesting, "Respectable news organizations should not employ reporters willing to peddle racist conspiracy theories and false propaganda. It's time for CNN to remove Mr. Dobbs from the airwaves."
(NOTE: Beware – the Southern Poverty Law Center is not only “left leaning” – it’s a downright radical left wing conspiracy. It is notable that its originator, Morris Dees, came to fame through his writing a 16 page fund raising letter for left wing presidential candidate George McGovern. Fortunately, for America, McGovern was soundly rejected, but his political cancer lives on and has eaten away the once patriotic core of the Democrat Party.)
Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly, however, has come to Dobbs' defense against those that want the CNN host fired. Though O'Reilly called the questions around Obama's birth certificate "bogus" and "patently absurd," he nonetheless invited Cohen onto his show and suggested the SPLC, in calling for Dobbs' termination, was "overreacting":
"I don't understand why you want his head," O'Reilly argued, pointedly implying that the SPLC was "paying [Dobbs] back" for his statements on illegal immigration that run counter to the SPLC's objectives, not just his recent questions about Obama's birth certificate.
Dobbs has raised the issue several times, qualifying his requests with a multitude of affirmations that Obama is a U.S. citizen, but he believes the proof should be available to the nation.
Dobbs has raised the issue several times, qualifying his requests with a multitude of affirmations that Obama is a U.S. citizen, but he believes the proof should be available to the nation.
Want to turn up the pressure to learn the facts? Get your signs and postcards asking for the president's birth certificate documentation here.
WND has produced hundreds of stories reporting on dozens of legal challenges to Obama's status as a "natural born citizen" and other issues. The Constitution, Article 2, Section 1, states, "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President."
Some of the challenges question whether he was actually born in Hawaii, as he insists. If he was born out of the country, Obama's American mother, the suits contend, was too young at the time of his birth to confer American citizenship to her son under the law at the time.
Other challenges have focused on Obama's citizenship through his father, a Kenyan subject to the jurisdiction of the United Kingdom at the time of his birth, thus making him a dual citizen. The cases contend the framers of the Constitution excluded dual citizens from qualifying as natural born.
Additionally, questions have been raised about Obama's move to Indonesia as a child and the passort he used to travel to Pakistan as a young man.
Complicating the situation is Obama's decision to spend sums estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to avoid releasing a state birth certificate and other documentation. Obama's birth certificate is not the only document at issue. WND has reported that among the documentation not yet available for Obama includes his kindergarten records, his Punahou school records, his Occidental College records, his Columbia University records, his Columbia thesis, his Harvard Law School records, his Harvard Law Review articles, his scholarly articles from the University of Chicago, his passport, his medical records, his files from his years as an Illinois state senator, his Illinois State Bar Association records, any baptism records and his adoption records.
Dobbs' questioning has been straightforward: Where's the birth certificate?
"When this could be dispelled so quickly, and simply by producing it, why not do it?" he has asked.
He's pursued the query even though on a day when he was absent, his staff wrote a script that called the questions about Obama's birth "the discredited rumor that won't go away."
On that day, guest host Kitty Pilgrim said CNN had investigated, and there was "no basis for questions about the president's birthplace."
In an interview cited by the Los Angeles Times, Klein appeared to back off somewhat. He said Dobbs has 30 years experience, and he would trust his judgment.
But the Southern Poverty Law Center's Cohen, in a letter to Klein, took a hard line.
"We have written to you before about our concern that Lou Dobbs repeatedly fails to live up to this standard in his reporting on immigration. Now, Mr. Dobbs is again trading in falsehoods and racist conspiracy theories, questioning President Obama's American citizenship," he claimed.
The SLPC asserted the online Factcheck.org and "many other serious news organizations" had resolved the issue.
Dobbs' questioning, Cohen wrote, "is both deplorable and an embarrassment to all serious journalists."
Cohen claimed the "conspiracy theory" was started by "an [unidentified] open anti-Semite and circulated by right-wing extremists."
NOTE: Cohen is hardly a viable witness. His resorting to inane insults contrary to the truth should be labeled as such. His organization is as alien to normal America as the conspirators of the ACLU. In Alabama, Cohen’s group is often described as “ACLU-lite”. Neither group is good for this country or for its people. -- Buddy
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