I will be attending next week’s bipartisan health care summit. I hope there will be an open exchange of ideas. Instead of bringing another bill to the table, the President should bring in a blank piece of paper so we can start over! The White House has developed its own version of a merged House-Senate health care reform package and plans to have it online for public review by Monday in advance of a bipartisan health care summit scheduled for Feb. 25. |
However, a senior Democratic aide said Thursday evening that the bill was assembled without any input from House and Senate Democratic leaders, and cautioned that it should not be viewed as an agreement to reconcile the two chambers’ bills. The $1.2 trillion House package was approved before Thanksgiving; a competing $871 billion Senate package cleared the floor on Christmas Eve. |
“The White House took the best of both bills and came up with their own proposal. But to be clear: We don’t have a deal,” the senior Democratic aide said. “While I’m sure we will be generally supportive of what is in it, I wouldn’t call it a joint House-Senate-White House product.” Read more at www.rollcall.com |
Apparently the White House continues to ignore the voices of the American people. We need to ditch the public option and focus on real health reform. The White House is willing to make a push for the public option if Senate Democrats decide to bring it up for a vote, Health and Human Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said tonight.
Eighteen Senators have signed a letter asking Harry Reid to push for the public option using reconciliation, which would allow Democrats to pass it with just 51 votes. (Republicans may be able to slow or halt the processing with procedural objections.) Read more at thehill.com |
Mr. Pearlstein is correct. We need to increase our production and use of natrual gas, but let’s not stop there. Republicans support an “All of the Above” energy policy - one that includes coal, wind, nuclear and other available sources of energy. As a rule, it is always best to adopt an attitude of enhanced skepticism whenever people tell you they have a simple solution to a complex problem. |
But the more I look into it, the more I’m beginning to think there is a fairly simple way to meet President Obama’s short-term pledge of reducing carbon emissions in the United States by 17 percent over the next decade. |
The silver bullet: Decommission about two-thirds of the electric-generating capacity fueled by cheap and plentiful coal, and replace it with power generated from cheap and plentiful natural gas, which emits half as much carbon for each megawatt of electricity. Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
The top climate-change official at the United Nations is leaving to become a private consultant, a move that follows the failure of a U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen to produce a binding agreement to curb global greenhouse-gas emissions. |
Yvo de Boer said he will leave his post as the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change on July 1 to take a job as a climate-change adviser with consulting firm KPMG. His term had been scheduled to end in September. |
It suggests that the world’s biggest emitters are willing to curb their output of those so-called greenhouse-gases only to the extent that they believe doing so will help them in more immediate ways, such as fighting smog and creating jobs. Those economic realities will continue to face Mr. de Boer’s successor. Read more at online.wsj.com |
‘Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it,” wrote Saul Alinksy in his “Rules for Radicals.” The White House would appear to have a copy. |
His agenda stymied and his approval numbers sinking, President Obama has realized this year’s midterm election is shaping up as a referendum on failed Democratic governance. The new White House plan? Change the discussion, talk about Republicans, and frighten the nation about GOP ideas. |
This is the way to read Mr. Obama’s sudden re-embrace of his opposition—his unexpected appearance at the House Republican retreat, and his more recent invitation to Republicans to a “bipartisan” health-care summit. And it’s the way to understand the recent Democratic targeting, freezing, personalizing and polarizing of Rep. Paul Ryan. Read more at online.wsj.com |
Seems like a lot of President Obama’s campaign promises are falling by the wayside. | Barack Obama the candidate repeatedly vowed no tax increases for those making under $250,000. As president, he has changed his tune. But cheer up: He now tells us he’s a “fierce” free marketer. |
| The rest of us, especially those in the middle class, could rest easy, he said. |
Today, those promises have gone the way of the candidate’s Styrofoam pillars. Government spending has trebled from the prior administration’s outlays, and instead of doing something about that, Obama has suddenly gone all “agnostic” on his tax promise. In an interview this week with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the president said he no longer ruled out tax hikes on those making less than $250,000 a year. “What I can’t do is set the thing up where a whole bunch of things are off the table,” he said. “Some would say we can’t look at entitlements. There are going to be some that say we can’t look at taxes, and pretty soon you can’t solve the problem.” Read more at www.investors.com |
Months after Congress abandoned any hopes of a broad bipartisan deal on health care reform, President Barack Obama said Thursday the “next step” on health care reform involves going back to the negotiating table with Republicans. |
Obama told supporters at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser that he wants to have a meeting with Republicans, Democrats and health care experts to go through the bills “in a methodical way.” |
“And then, I think that we’ve got to go ahead and move forward on a vote,” he said. |
A White House aide could not provide any further details on whether such a meeting was in the works. |
The president’s suggestion to go back to the negotiating table with Republicans, even for a day, conflicts with the partisan path that congressional Democratic leaders have been developing for the last two weeks to pass a bill. It is also likely to prove fruitless: House and Senate Republicans say the bill just needs to be scrapped. Read more at www.politico.com |
The number doesn’t even seem real - $14.29 trillion - until you think of it this way: your portion of the debt is roughly $46,000. That is $46,000 for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. It is mind boggling.
For months the American people have been telling Washington to stop its reckless spending, but the Democrats are ignoring those pleas.
Congress approved a record $1.9 trillion debt ceiling increase Thursday together with Democratic-backed legislation to reinstate “pay-go” rules credited with helping to rein in deficits in the 1990s. |
Final passage took two highly partisan House votes, but the end product was something of a coup for the embattled leadership cheered on by a flash from their past: former President Bill Clinton. |
With new unemployment numbers out Friday, Democrats now can afford to turn their full attention back to the economy without fear of Republicans bleeding them to death with more painful debt votes before the November elections. By adding statutory pay-go rules, the leadership also hopes to have found a new message — and budget compass — by which to steer in the sea of red ink facing them and President Barack Obama. Read more at www.politico.com |
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to scale back some border security programs set up after the 9/11 attacks and ramp up aviation security following the attempted Christmas bombing, in what some conservative lawmakers say is a dangerous priority shift. Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., the top Republican on the House panel overseeing the Department of Homeland Security’s budget, says the border security funding in President Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2011 is “woefully inadequate” and “as dangerous as it is indefensible.” Read more at www.usatoday.com |
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