You want some brie with that whine?
The new health care plan will be written by a committee whose Chairman says he doesn’t understand it,
passed by a Congress which hasn’t read it,
signed by a President who smokes,
funded by a Treasury Chief who did not pay his taxes,
overseen by a Surgeon General who is obese,
and financed by a country that is broke.
What could possibly go wrong?
Harry does another Washington show-and-tell about how to win friends and influence people and properly represent your constituents. This one is titled: It’s only wrong when someone else does it.
“Of course, nobody can see the managers’ amendment. It is composed of over 40 amendments. How could anyone vote for a piece of legislation such as that — a managers’ amendment with 42 separate amendments?
“Now, these amendments were not put in in a conference committee. People complain about that. But at least in a conference committee, you have people working together, sticking things in. Sometimes Democrats complain and sometimes Republicans complain — whoever is in the minority here. Well, we didn’t get enough consultation; you cut us out of the process. But at least you had a group of Democrats and Republicans in the process. Here, you have one person making a decision as to what is going to be in the managers’ amendment. There is no way to know what is in it. How could anyone say: ‘OK’? You have taken care of me, but I don’t want to see the other 40 amendments — -because with this legislation, similar to all legislation, you put something in one spot, and you have to take something out someplace else.”
(Senator Harry Reid, 2/9/06)
Flash forward to October 2009:
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.
…after weeks of Senate Finance Committee public hearings, the Senate negotiations are now an invitation-only affair in Reid’s office. The majority leader is unlikely to expand his group, even as some senators unhappy with parts of the legislation, such as John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), have asked to be in the room.
“Neither I nor any other senator has the luxury of passing a perfect bill — I wish we could — that conforms exactly to his or her beliefs. But we must act.”
(Harry Reid)
And again in December 2009:
Sen. Dick Durbin’s job as majority whip is to count votes, but don’t ask him for the current tally on the health care bill.
“I don’t know,” Durbin said earlier this week. “Sen. Reid is the one who has been keeping it pretty close.”
Early on in the process — when Reid was still trying to reconcile bills moving through two different Senate committees — Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked him about the progress he was making.
Reid pointed both of his index fingers to his head and said: “I got it all figured out how we’re going to do this.” And then he walked away.
And they said His Transparency didn’t do anything for the country during his Christmas vacation in Hawaii.
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release December 30, 2009
Executive Order — Medical Countermeasures Following a Biological Attack
ESTABLISHING FEDERAL CAPABILITY FOR THE TIMELY PROVISION OF
MEDICAL COUNTERMEASURES FOLLOWING A BIOLOGICAL ATTACK
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to plan and prepare for the timely provision of medical countermeasures to the American people in the event of a biological attack in the United States through a rapid Federal response in coordination with State, local, territorial, and tribal governments.
This policy would seek to: (1) mitigate illness and prevent death; (2) sustain critical infrastructure; and (3) complement and supplement State, local, territorial, and tribal government medical countermeasure distribution capacity.
Sec. 2. United States Postal Service Delivery of Medical Countermeasures. (a) The U.S. Postal Service has the capacity for rapid residential delivery of medical countermeasures for self administration across all communities in the United States. The Federal Government shall pursue a national U.S. Postal Service medical countermeasures dispensing model to respond to a large-scale biological attack.
(b) The Secretaries of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, in coordination with the U.S. Postal Service, within 180 days of the date of this order, shall establish a national U.S. Postal Service medical countermeasures dispensing model for U.S. cities to respond to a large-scale biological attack, with anthrax as the primary threat consideration.
(c) In support of the national U.S. Postal Service model, the Secretaries of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and Defense, and the Attorney General, in coordination with the U.S. Postal Service, and in consultation with State and local public health, emergency management, and law enforcement officials, within 180 days of the date of this order, shall develop an accompanying plan for supplementing local law enforcement personnel, as necessary and appropriate, with local Federal law enforcement, as well as other appropriate personnel, to escort U.S. Postal workers delivering medical countermeasures.
Sec. 3. Federal Rapid Response. (a) The Federal Government must develop the capacity to anticipate and immediately supplement the capabilities of affected jurisdictions to rapidly distribute medical countermeasures following a biological attack. Implementation of a Federal strategy to rapidly dispense medical countermeasures requires establishment of a Federal rapid response capability.
(b) The Secretaries of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, in coordination with the Secretary of Defense, within 90 days of the date of this order, shall develop a concept of operations and establish requirements for a Federal rapid response to dispense medical countermeasures to an affected population following a large-scale biological attack.
Sec. 4. Continuity of Operations. (a) The Federal Government must establish mechanisms for the provision of medical countermeasures to personnel performing missionessential functions to ensure that mission-essential functions of Federal agencies continue to be performed following a biological attack.
(b) The Secretaries of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security, within 180 days of the date of this order, shall develop a plan for the provision of medical countermeasures to ensure that mission-essential functions of executive branch departments and agencies continue to be performed following a large-scale biological attack.
Sec. 5. General Provisions.
(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) authority granted by law to a department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity, by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE,
December 30, 2009.
On the surface, this sound so very noble. But if Obama’s lips are moving or he’s signing his name to a piece of paper, rest assured it’s not what it might seem. H/T to Greg Howard for pointing out the dots.
It is, of course, in the bubble world of the Obama administration, sheer and serendipitous coincidence that the following contract modification was issued the day before the Executive Order:
FBO DAILY ISSUE OF DECEMBER 31, 2009 FBO #2959
SPECIAL NOTICE
And why this extremely lucrative contract to one company? All-too-familiar Democrat paybacks, courtesy of Tara O’Toole. As reported last September in the Washington Times:
President Obama’s nominee at the Department of Homeland Security overseeing bioterrorism defense has served as a key adviser for a lobbying group funded by the pharmaceutical industry that has asked the government to spend more money for anthrax vaccines and biodefense research.
But Dr. Tara O’Toole, whose confirmation as undersecretary of science and technology is pending, never reported her involvement with the lobbying group called the Alliance for Biosecurity in a recent government ethics filing.
Now, while it wasn’t exactly illegal, it does run directly counter to the spirit of ethical disclosure laws. And when you dig down deeper, it becomes clear why.
Ethics rules require nominees to report any paid or unpaid positions held outside of government, including but not limited to those of “officer, trustee, general partner, representative, employee or any consultant of any corporation, firm, partnership or other business enterprise ….” Dr. O’Toole signed a letter on behalf of the group sent to the White House as recently as March.
In written testimony to Congress, Dr. O’Toole said the alliance was “created to protect the Center for Biosecurity’s status as an honest broker between the biopharma companies and the U.S. government.”
Dr. O’Toole was nominated less than four years after the alliance was formed in 2005. She has served as the group’s unpaid strategic director and has signed her name on more than a dozen letters sent to Congress and federal agencies.
The group’s letters to policymakers often seek more money for research and vaccines. She signed the letters as the group’s strategic director, in addition to listing her full-time paid job as director of the Center for Biosecurity, which is affiliated with the University of Pittsburgh.
The letters, including one that Dr. O’Toole sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, last fall, describe the Alliance for Biosecurity as a “collaboration” among the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, pharmaceutical companies and biotechnology companies “working to develop vaccines, medicines and other medical countermeasures for the nation’s Strategic National Stockpile.”
Members include companies such as Pfizer Inc., Sig Technologies and PharmAthene Inc. The group discloses the letters and list of members on a Web site.
In an Oct. 31 [2008] letter to Mrs. Pelosi signed by Dr. O’Toole and two other alliance officials, the group called on Congress to include more than $900 million for the “advanced development of medical countermeasures” to be administered by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority.
The letter also was signed by the chief executive officer of member company PharmAthene, David Wright, who was one of the two first co-chairmen for the alliance after its creation in 2005.
Mr. Wright’s company has a big financial interest in securing work from the authority, according to investor filings. A Securities and Exchange Commission filing last summer disclosed that PharmAthene has been trying to win a contract administered by the authority to supply 25 million doses of an anthrax vaccine to the national stockpile, which is overseen by the Department of Health and Human Services.
The Weekly Standard points it out in a bit more simple English:
PharmAthene is a company founded and run by Murtha cronies who have extremely close ties to O’Toole. In fact, O’Toole was head of the Center for Biosecurity, which is connected to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), and both Murtha and O’Toole’s friends are working feverishly to position UPMC for a major biosecurity, vaccine-production contract that would result in billions flowing to Murtha’s district, and O’Toole’s private equity and lobbyist friends. According a recent report, this facility would be run by a mysterious unnamed biotechnology company. Anyone care to guess who that unnamed company is rumored to be?
PharmAthene was founded by Joel McCleary, who also happens to be a founding partner at a DC-based private equity firm, Four Seasons Ventures, and an advisor to UPMC. Partnered with McCleary at Four Seasons is none other than James Ervin, a former Murtha aid and the man one goes to for a Murtha earmark, a favor PharmAthene has benefited from in the past. Ervin lobbies for PharmAthene and Four Seasons is heavily invested.
And that’s where O’Toole comes in. In addition to running the Center for Biosecurity, O’Toole advised the Alliance for Biosecurity, which we now know PharmAthene basically runs.
And slap my ass with a hairless cat if anthrax hasn’t popped up in New Hampshire, and was considered a possible threat just today in the Alabama offices of several of its Congress critters.
Will wonders never cease? Or will the cease come to only more and more of our freedoms as these spawns of a meth-crazed whore’s douche bag continue to lie, cheat, and steal our hard-earned tax dollars?
Why does it come as no surprise that the final version of health care “reform” legislation is going to be prepared by only Democrats? More specifically, in a revolting little three-way behind closed doors by that nauseatingly loathesome, unholy trinity of Obama, Pelosi, and Reid.
WASHINGTON — House and Senate Democrats intend to bypass traditional procedures when they negotiate a final compromise on health care legislation, officials said Monday, a move that will exclude Republican lawmakers and reduce their ability to delay or force politically troubling votes in both houses.
The unofficial timetable calls for final passage of the measure to remake the nation’s health care system by the time President Obama delivers his State of the Union address, probably in early February.
Democratic aides said the final compromise talks would essentially be a three-way negotiation involving top Democrats in the House and Senate and the White House, a structure that gives unusual latitude to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California.
These officials said there are no plans to appoint a formal House-Senate conference committee, the method Congress most often uses to reconcile differing bills. Under that customary format, a committee chairman is appointed to preside, and other senior lawmakers from both parties and houses participate in typically perfunctory public meetings while the meaningful negotiations occur behind closed doors.
It’s going to be another headlong rush into unconstitutional, crushing ruin.
Bypassing a formal conference committee enables Democrats to omit time-consuming procedural steps in the Senate and prevents Republicans from trying to delay the final negotiations.
Under Senate rules, three separate votes are required before negotiators for the two houses may hold a formal meeting. While the three normally are agreed to within seconds, each may be filibustered, and Democrats would then have to produce 60 votes to cut off debate.
Additionally, Republicans would have the right to demand votes on nonbinding proposals once negotiators for the two houses were appointed. That could, in turn, require Democrats to vote on political controversies such as wiping out the legislation’s proposed cuts in Medicare, the type of issue that could easily be turned into attack ads in next fall’s campaign.
Congress plans no formal sessions until Jan. 19, but Pelosi intends to meet this week with key committee chairmen and other leaders, and a separate meeting is also planned for members of the rank and file.
There are no words to describe the disgust I feel for the Democratic party this evening. But there are two words that may put a big monkey wrench in their plans.
This one takes the cake.
Scratch that. This one takes the minutes. Your unused calling card minutes, that is.
I have no adjectives to describe how this makes me feel. But visions of plantations and Communist Russia come to mind.
Washington, D.C. is suing AT&T because some customers who buy its prepaid calling cards don’t always use up all the minutes. The city isn’t suing on behalf of the customers, of course (though even that would be sort of silly). It’s suing on the notion that when a customer doesn’t use up all of a product or service they purchase, the remainder belongs to the government. So they want the company to pay what the minutes are worth to the D.C. government, where they might be better used on, oh I don’t know, maybe to pay overtime for Mayor Adrian Fenty’s mountain bike detail.
Next up, D.C. sues Burger King for stray fries that go uneaten after falling to the bottom of the drive-thru bag.
Since when does buying anything and not using it all up constitute anything more than perhaps wastefulness on the part of the consumer? It’s not as if the government is loaning our purchases to us with some caveat we are to return any unused portion.
Someone needs to be slapped soundly upside the head.
Courtesy of two commenters at HotAir on the question of terrorism and profiling :
(SouthernGent) – Simple solution: If you refuse to eat a bacon/lettuce/tomatoe sandwich before boarding a plane you can’t board the plane.
(TXUS) – Got some Jewish friends who love this country as much as I, so I’d rather put a simpler requirement on passengers…
“Here’s the Koran and here’s the U.S. Constitution. Pee on one or the other.”
And they wonder why we call California the land of fruit and nuts?
Faculty members at the University of California, San Diego are using federal dollars to develop a GPS-enabled cell phone that would direct illegal border crossers to drinking water. The “Trans-border Immigrant Tool” would allow users to follow arrows on the screen to nearby water stations.
With $15,000 from a federal grant [stimulus dollars], the designers hope to hand out the phones for free in Mexico.
University of California, San Diego faculty member Brett Stalbaum dismisses critics who say this will encourage illegal immigration, arguing: “There are many areas in which every American would say— I don’t like the way my tax dollars are being spent. Our answer to that is an in-your-face, so what?”
Just shorten the tool’s name to “T.I.T.” Entirely appropos for a future-vote-buying gimmick from the progressive liberals.
It reads like a bad joke.
You might be a terrorist if:
This profiling comes courtesy of our progressive liberal administration. The same progressive liberal administration that wants to change the lexicon to call terrorism “man-made disasters” and its perpetrators “unprivileged enemy belligerants” sees no hypocrisy in profiling the average American. Maybe because such a broad swath cuts across race and gender? One certainly can’t accuse them of discrimination now, can they?
But when there are significant numbers of people in this world whose only goal in life is to kill Americans, if not outright destroy America, discrimination is desperately needed. The average American practices it every single day. Children are taught to not accept candy from strangers. Women walking alone at night are taught to cross the street to avoid coming close to a strange man. When there’s a knock on the door in the middle of the night, everyone looks through the peephole before opening the door and when what they see isn’t a familiar face, most won’t open it.
Truth is our lives are made up of an endless series of judgement calls, discriminating against a combination of various oh-so-unpolitically-correct variables. It’s an inherent survival mechanism, for to blindly embrace what is radically different on the surface may mean death. (It’s why the progressive liberal cavemen didn’t survive their hugging the sabre-toothed tiger.) Sure, it can create a stubborn mindset of prejudice but more are the stories of those pleasantly surprised when they find out not everyone of a certain stripe is really all that different (caveman hugs wolf) than the stories of those who take their prejudice up like a sword and set forth to destroy their perceived enemy.
Yet is is exactly such a hard-core, prejudiced-based war that we have with Islamic extremists, those zealous jihadists the average American rightly call terrorists. They are identifiable by their ethnicity or chosen cultural identification, by their words and their deeds and to ignore them is what now tremendously endangers us. The enemy we face is without but by not recognizing them using clear, level-headed judgement for fear of being seen as racist or bigoted, or lacking in their beloved sophistication or what have you (by anyone other than the average American, that is), this administration has effectively become the enemy within.
Though Washington may be loathe to admit it, the average American knows this. They look at this administration with its endless excuses and it is slowly dawning on them that, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” And in order to survive, the average American will do what they have always done. They will create a profile to allow them to root out their enemy, and they will not hesitate to call that enemy by its real name: progressive liberal politician.
Who let the dogs out?
My question is, who let the curs in in the first place?
If Senator Ben Nelson could turn back the clock (or buy his Kool-Aid from the same distributor as Obama), he’d have us all believing that Senator Harry (the Grinch) Reid pulled a fast one on him by slipping that 100% payment-in-perpetuity of Nebraska’s expanded Medicaid costs into the Senate’s health care “reform” bill so Ben would vote for it.
Either he thinks the American people really ARE that stupid or he’s the one who’s so stupid he didn’t understand the terms by which his vote was bought.
Personally, seeing as how old Ben’s a Congress critter with his hand caught in the proverbial cookie jar, I’m going to guess it’s the former.
Politico reports:
According to a copy of a memo sent by McMaster’s [South Carolina GOP Attorney General Henry McMaster] chief of staff to other GOP state attorneys general detailing the call, Nelson asked McMaster to “call off the dogs,” a reference to recent threats by the state AGs to file a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a Medicaid provision in the bill that benefits Nebraska at the expense of other states.
“Senator Nelson insisted that he had not asked for the Cornhusker Kickback to be placed in the U.S. Senate version of the health care bill to secure his vote. Senator Nelson told the attorney general that it was simply a ‘marker’ placed in the U.S. Senate version of the bill and assured the attorney general that it would be ‘fixed,’ says the memo.
The document goes on to say: “Senator Nelson said it would be ‘fixed’ by extending the Cornhusker Kickback (100% federal payment) on Medicaid to every state.”
Let’s try some math, shall we? It is estimated that what Reid expects the American taxpayer to send to Nebraska for Nelson’s vote is at least $100 million over the next ten years. If you simply multiply that by 50 (to cover all the states), that’s a cost of $5 billion. But we all know that those illegal immigrant-loving states like California and poverty-stricken progressive liberal Democrat strongholds like Michigan will incur higher costs so it’s quite conceivable that such a (stupid) plan would cost tax-paying Americans far, far more. Billions that rather neatly erase the much-touted-though-double-dipped-savings-false Democrat claims that Reid’s closed-door bill will cut the federal deficit.
So now we’re forced to decide whether Nelson is really so stupid as to think the American people are going to believe that everyone was supposed to get Nebraska’s special Medicaid costs treatment and think that’s a good thing, or that Senator Harry Reid is an even bigger liar than already proven by analysis of his bill.
We’ll have to flip a coin on this one.
The article goes on to say that:
…the goal of the GOP attorneys general was to remove the Nebraska Medicaid provision from the bill and that “he saw no way that he—nor any of the state attorneys general—will support extension of the Cornhusker Kickback to every state nor be a part of a deal like that.”
At least those busy flying pigs get a rest this time.
