From the New York Times:
Category: Politics
“The country wants Congress to focus on jobs and the economy, not on pushing an extreme agenda against birth control,” – Dawn Laguens, EVP, Planned Parenthood Federation of America
House Republicans have included a so-called “conscience clause” in the government funding bill in a plan they approved early Sunday.
The House voted 231-192 on a bill that would delay much of the 2010 health care reform package for a year. The bill also would try to repeal a tax on medical devices that helps finance the health care law.
The stated purpose of the measure is to allow employers and insurers the opportunity to opt out of providing health care services that they find morally or religiously objectionable, reigniting the debate over a portion of the health care reform law that requires most insurers to cover women’s preventative health care, including contraception. The provision would allow them to opt out of coverage for the next year.
House Republican leaders confirmed that the provision was added into the one-year delay of Obamacare during a House Rules Committee meeting on Saturday evening.
Planned Parenthood Federation of America Executive Vice President Dawn Laguens called the move “desperate, misguided, and extreme”.
In an interview today on MSNBC, this rookie Congressman apparently thought he was talking to Fox News, and he opened his mouth and the truth slipped out. His name is Trey Radel, a Republican Congressman from Florida. In the interview, the MSNBC host asked what was to be gained from delaying the implementation of ObamaCare.
Mr. Radel answered that the whole plan was to delay the full implementation in the hopes that Republicans win the Senate in 2014, and with a Republican controlled House, they will then be able to repeal the law fully.
Anything to keep the American people from having healthcare. This is ridiculous!
Video.
For what it’s worth, Mitt Romney jumped into the fray on Friday offering his two cents on the Republicans proposed government shutdown coming in a few days. Said Romney, who developed a flip flopping character during the 2012 presidential election cycle…
“We’re more effective tactically not to use a shutdown of some kind to pursue the … anti-Obamacare objective. I don’t think that will be as effective.”
Romney also admitted that the proposed idea to delay the full implementation of ObamaCare by a year is “a better way” to get rid of the healthcare law.
“I think there’s a better way of getting rid of Obamacare – my own view – and that is, one, delaying it by at least a year. That was Senator (Joe) Manchin’s idea, the Democrats’ idea,” Romney said.
Manchin said Thursday that he would support delaying the individual mandate by one year. The Senate passed a continuing resolution Friday that was free of any defunding legislation, sending the bill back to the House where its fate is uncertain. The fiscal year deadline is set for Monday at midnight, at which time the federal government is due to run out of money.
Mitt Romney ran his presidential campaign on a platform of ending ObamaCare. The American people disagreed, offering his a tremendous loss for his efforts. Republicans have voted over 40 times to repeal ObamaCare, failing each time. And now, they are setting the stage to shut down the government on Monday if ObamaCare is funded.
Why are these people in office? They’re clearly not doing what a majority of the American people are demanding!
The Minnesota Congresswoman went on CNN and had a rather heated discussion with host Wolf Blitzer over ObamaCare and the Republican push to shut down the government.
SIDENOTE: My sympathies go out to Mr. Blitzer for thinking that he was going to get a straight answer from the robot-like-talking-points queen.
In the clip below, Blitzer asked a set of reasonable questions about Obamacare:
- Do you really believe if this law — and it is a law passed by the House, passed by the Senate, signed into law by the president, approved by the Supreme Court — goes into effect that women, seniors, children are going to die?
- Don’t you realize that millions and millions of Americans will now have health insurance earlier they didn’t have, health insurance.
- Is it good or bad that children can now be on their parents’ health insurance policies until they reach the age of 26?
- If you have a pre-existing condition, should you be allowed to buy health insurance?
- Should an insurance company be able to deny you insurance coverage?
All great questions. But Bachmann is a master of the Shake and Bake She should be playing basketball with the Minnesota Timberwolves. Bachmann was able to steer clear of any real answers to Blitzer’s questions by sticking to what she does best – the Republican talking points… in other words, she lied her way out of the studio.
See the encounter below.
After his success with getting Syria to agree with the United Nations to give up their Chemical weapons, President Obama took on another challenge, a task over 30 years in the making. President Obama spoke with President Rouhani of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Could this be the start of Iran agreeing to turn over their nuclear ambitions? Time will tell…
Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) had a blunt message for House Republicans on Friday.
The Reid-led Senate passed a bill that would institute a short-term measure to keep the government funded, while stripping the House’s provision to defund Obamacare. With a 54-44 party-line vote in hand, Reid said the House needed to “accept what we just passed,” while adding some choice words on Obamacare being untouchable.
“Here’s a president, who less than a year ago, won the election by five million votes, five million votes,” Reid said. “Obamacare has been the law for four years. Why don’t they get a life and talk about something else? People deserve better.”
Hours after Reid spoke, President Barack Obama echoed his sentiments, accusing Republicans of “political grandstanding.” He also vowed that a repeal of the Affordable Care Act is “not gonna happen.”
“Any Republican in Congress who’s currently watching, I’d encourage you to think about who you’re hurting,” Obama said.
Why Republicans would take advice from an ex convict who recently received his get out of jail card is beyond me. But the likes of Tom DeLay are stepping up to the plate, telling Republicans to hold firm on their threat to shut down the government.
In an interview on CNN, DeLay told host Chris Cuomo that the Republican Party would not take the blame if the Republican Party forced the government to be shut down over President Barack Obama’s health care reform law.
“This notion that it hurts the Republicans is totally wrong,” he explained. “Because in 1995, we won. We won the budget cuts we wanted. We showed Bill Clinton that we’d take him off the cliff and we got welfare reform and a balance budget. And we won seats in the next election. So, I don’t know where they come up with this notion that a shutdown hurts Republicans.”
Cuomo pointed out that then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) took a beating in the polls and Clinton’s popularity improved after Republicans forced the government to be shut down in the 1990s.
“What is your advice to your colleagues in Washington, D.C., looking at the debt limit situation, knowing what it can do to the country, what do you give them as advice?” the CNN host wondered.
“Hold firm, stick to your guns, stand strong — and you’ll ultimately win,” DeLay insisted.
“Even if you wind up screwing up the credit of the United States of America?” Cuomo pressed.
“It won’t end up screwing up the credit of America,” DeLay laughed. “That is all false notion. Every shut down — and there’s been many shut downs — frankly, the American people never miss the government.”
The wedge between the establishment GOP and the Tea Party gets driven deeper with each passing day, and got a good whack yesterday when House Republican media darling Peter King had something to say about the Senator from Calgary:
“My sound bite is to say he’s a fraud,” Mr. King said. “I start with that, and then I go on. It takes me two or three minutes to explain it.”
Jumping ahead to that third minute, Mr. King said precisely what he thought of the Cruz tactic: “It is just a form of governmental terrorism.”
C’mon, Congressman, tell us how you really feel!
We already hold the record for the most guns on iur streets with an armed population like no other in the world. And naturally with all those guns floating around, we also hold the record for the most gun-related deaths worldwide with mass shootings quickly becoming the norm.
These disturbing distinctions and the record setting gun related deaths are problematic and require sensible solutions. Here’s the solution from gun group called Armed Citizen Project – Give away more guns.
A gun advocacy group has announced plans to give away shotguns to homeowners in Florida about 20 miles from where 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed by former neighborhood watch captain George Zimmerman.
WESH reported that members of the Armed Citizen Project had gone door-to-door in Orlando passing out fliers to advertise the free firearms.
Armed Citizen Project program director Ron Ritter explained that giving away shotguns was “perfectly legal” in Florida because the guns were being transferred by dealers with a Federal Firearms License (FFL).
But not every resident who got a flier thought that the program was a good idea.
“That doesn’t mean we should all have a firearm,” Robin McLaughlin told WESH. “I would not need to have a shotgun.”
The Armed Citizen Project announced earlier this year at the National Rifle Association conference that it intended to give away shotguns in 15 U.S. cities, including Chicago and Houston.
There are some Republican voters out there praising Ted Cruz for his one man “filibuster” of Obamacare. These poor uninformed folks think that what Cruz is doing will eventually result in the law being dismantled, or straight up voided by the Democrats and the President. Ted Cruz is their hero. As far as they are concerned he is the only one standing up for them.
But what Cruz is doing is not a filibuster, although he recently called it a filibuster when he explained that he would do everything he could to defund Obamacare. This antic is nothing more than a speech. A speech engineered to guarantee the self infatuated Cruz with as much publicity and as much donations from the uninformed Republican voter as possible.
The Senate Leader Harry Reid, has already laid out the rules to Cruz, and Senate business on the very amendment Cruz is trying to fight will be voted on before the month is out.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is expected to introduce an amendment at some point which will restore the funding of Obamacare to the continuing resolution. A final vote on passage of the stop-gap spending measure is expected to come late Sunday if all the time for debate is used. This leaves the House of Representatives with less than a day to work on the continuing resolution before the Oct. 1 deadline at which point the government would shut down.
But don’t take my word for it Republicans, send in your donations to Cruz today before time runs out! This Cruz missile needs your finances to completely destroy Obamacare!
Broke Dummies!
Dr. Seuss may have written Green Eggs and Ham, but Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Tuesday that his dad invented them.
Cruz was well over an hour into his symbolic filibuster of a government spending bill that would defund Obamacare when he made the surprising claim.
He was fondly reminiscing about how his father had been a cook at the now-defunct Toddle House chain and how his dad would entertain his son later in life by flipping pancakes in the air. That apparently sparked Cruz to recall another bit of family lore.
“I will credit my father: He invented — this wasn’t for the restaurant, but he did it anyway — he invented green eggs and ham,” Cruz said, adding that his dad could make the now-famous storybook dish with either food coloring or a green vegetable like spinach.