Posted on 10/13/2009 10:33:31 AM PDT by presidio9
Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe broke with her party Tuesday and said she will vote for a Democratic health care bill, handing President Barack Obama a much-sought boost in his quest to expand access to medical coverage to all Americans.
Approval of the legislation by the Senate Finance Committee was a foregone conclusion going into Tuesday's vote, since Democrats outnumber Republicans 13-10 on the panel. But Snowe's decision gave the vote a significance that transcends partisan divisions. For months, congressional Republicans have been virtually unanimous in denouncing the Democratic bills as an unwarranted expansion of government influence.
The Maine senator kept virtually all of Washington guessing about how she would vote until she announced it late in the Senate Finance Committee debate Tuesday. She told her colleagues she has misgivings about the bill, but "when history calls, history calls."
Democrats, aware that Snowe could be the only Republican in Congress to vote for their health care overhaul, have spent months addressing her concerns about making health care affordable and how to pay for it.
"Ours is a balanced plan that can pass the Senate," declared Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont. Health care legislation is expected to be on the Senate floor the week after next, said a spokesman for Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, who must combine the Finance version with a more liberal proposal from the health committee.
The expected approval by Baucus' committee would push a remake of the U.S. health care system closer to reality than it has been in decades. Four other congressional committees finished their work before August and for months all eyes
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Of course she is. Why is she even a Republican?
This chick would sign the Communist Manifesto if it was set in front of her. You know, out of bipartisanship.
Need to freep here office now........
Impeach her.
ping
She has a brain the size of a pea.
Get rid of her, kick her out of the GOP. Tell her to go join the totalitarian/democrat party.
Down with traitors!!
geez, and I thought that Obama was an attention whore...
She didn’t break with her party; she voted with her party, the party of Specter.
Thank God Obama won or we'd have McAssh#le shoving this bipartisan cr#p down our throat.
It's on in the next election. No money for RINO's.... she's a traitor that Maine can be proud of. Enjoy the moment.
wooo.Shock.
Move along,nothing to see here....just make sure she sees the door in 2010.
Riding the GOP of Rinos is step one towards the rebirth of conservatism within the political arena.
This sort of thing is just a bad joke. I've heard today the penalties for an individual not buying insurance will now be around $200 to $400. That won't motivate anyone to spend several thousand on a policy.
Not approving any part of this nonsense, but now they begin compromising and cutting away the features they claimed would help bring about cost savings. Compromising their own "principals" underlying the plan just to get something passed.
The recipe for even greater disasters.
What did Obama promise her?
Thelma & Louise..
just a couple of stinky old beavers.
She didn’t break with her party; she voted with her party, the party of Specter.
What brilliant 'logic' the Senator from Maine is using.
Bill Nelson (D) in Florida is also voting yes. I can definitely say I am not surprised. He votes against America 24/7.
Oympia Snow Job
Paging Gomer Pyle, paging Private Gomer Pyle, please pick up the nearest white courtesy phone.
A mandate to compel poeple to buy insurance is a tax for being alive. The last time I checked, life was A RIGHT!!!!!!!! The violates the 13th Amendment. It makes us Indentured Servants to the Insurance Business which will be run by the government. F*ing Facists.
Collins at least had the grace to say no.
Snowe? Whats her freakin problem???
How can she think this is anything except a train wtreck on the American people??????
As if this were the first time the rest of the country was seriously pissed off with her. Snowe was the reason Bill Clinton was aquitted of perjury charges and not removed from office. People from Maine are weird.
BTW, Time Magazine named Snowe one of America's "10 Best Senators" in 2006.
She has it made. The people in Maine like her, at least most of them do.
Well, and why shouldn’t she?
1. Her constituents are liberal and will like this. Never mind the rest of the country; they don’t vote for her.
2. She has done this before, voting for the Porkulus bill, and she was not punished the least little bit by the Republican Senate leadership. So they have as good as toldl her that she has nothing to lose now. In fact, they probably HAVE told her.
3. Obama will doubtless give her a nice helping of pork as her reward.
The loose link here ought to be #2. But the Republican leadership is totally spineless and stupid. They have no principles and no understanding of basic politics.
Either they need to go, or we need a new party to replace them. And we can’t afford to wait around beyond the next election.
THROW..........HER........OUT........DO IT NOW!!!! BEFORE THE VOTE....DENY THESE BASTADS THEIR PARTISAN VICTORY...MAKE IT ALL THEIRS AND ONLY THEIRS ( cap lock to emphisize my rage )
Here is the Letter I am sending Senators today.
Health Care Reform Attacks Constitutional Rights
Only the most vacuous arguments and legislative devices support the concept Obama’s and Congress’ health care initiatives are fiscally credible or sustainable. Yet abundant evidence supports questioning this spending initiative. Obama grew Bush’s $2 trillion in bailouts to over $20 trillion. He dwarfed Bush’s seven page $168 billion stimulus bill with 657 pages and $787 billion of printed money the Congressional Budget Office found singularly un-stimulating. Congress has underwritten every initiative without a question or even reading the legislation. Why would any federal elected official or bureaucrat now demonstrate the willingness or capacity to act responsibly?
However, the most treacherous part of these initiatives is the explosion of Federal administrative law, which confiscates authority over 16% of our GDP. Administrative law attacks the soft underbelly of our Constitution. Health care legislation incrementally forfeits speech and religious freedoms, personal life without access to courts and trial, and rights protected but undefined by the Constitution.
Legislative impact on end of life decisions and directions for health care rationing provide confirmation of diminished human rights. To discover Congressional intentions, legislation must be evaluated after metastasizing throughout the U.S. Code. The bills profoundly impact diverse bureaucracies including the IRS, but an analysis covering HHS will be sufficient.
The stimulus bill created the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology and the Health Information Technology Research Centers. These bureaucracies duplicate private sector information bases that utilize computer technologies for coordination and flow of recommendations and policies for medical knowledge. The HHS Secretary will use these bureaucracies to implement Congressional intent.
Decisions will be guided by a panel exceeding 20 members allowing the dominate political regime over 90% of appointments, while requiring only one physician. Among three separate reports, one evaluation must include health technologies meeting senior and disabled individual needs. Health care provider participation becomes mandatory under Section 13112 of the HITACT Act, if one participates in any government program, including Medicare serving seniors and disabled.
Regulations developed reflect the momentum of congressional intent; not the will of the people. The regulations would utilize disquieting legislative provisions to incorporate ideas politicians articulate in Congress, but consider too sensitive for public debate. Medical professionals would join other private sector professionals such as education financial aid directors and CPA’s I know, who often serve as federal agents instead of client advocates.
Princeton bioethics professor Peter Singer recently presented in the New York Times Congressional intent without equivocation. “Rationing health care means getting value for the billions spent by setting limits on which treatments should be paid for from the public purse….There’s no doubt that it’s tough – politically, emotionally, and ethically - to make a decision that means that someone will die sooner than they would have if the decision had gone the other way….If the U.S. system spent less on expensive treatments for those who, with or without drugs, have at most a few months to live, it would be better able to save lives of more people who, if they get the treatment they need, might live for several decades….The task of health care bureaucrats is then to get the best value for resources they have been allocated….If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving that life gains 70 years, whereas a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds”.
Physicians currently discuss end of life issues when explaining proposed procedures and drugs, so legislation only confiscates privacy and freedom. Worthwhile initiatives would locate dialogue and diagnosis with families, nurses, and doctors; not with lawyers, insurance companies, academics, and bureaucrats. However, such suggestions are neither contemplated nor appreciated.
I really wonder if we the people are ready to embrace government rationed health care in order to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. I for one do not take Congress’, Obama’s, and other’s assurances about voluntary end of life counseling at face value. Instead I choose my rights under the Constitution, even though they involve only the opportunity to succeed, with uncertainties and hardships along the way.
There is no good outcome for any of this. The loss of rights mushroomimg national debt might cause could dwarf the rights lost by being required people to buy insurance. It's all a disaster, but my point is, if passed like this, their plan will create even bigger deficits and debt, and even greater threats to our rights and national sovereignty. And they are weakening the provisions the "claimed" would cut overall costs. Prostitutes on a street corner.
The good outcome is for this to be defeated. It's all just degrees of
Who does that surprise?
If the GOP had any stones, she would already have been gone. They don’t and she isn’t.
I will NEVER, NEVER vote for another RINO as long as I live. I voted for McCain only because of Palin, but I won’t do it again no matter who a RINO puts on his/her ticket.
The blood suckers of this society - the non-producers, welfare scum, union thugs, bureaucrats, know-nothing academics, and other assorted vermin are in charge now. They’ll do their best, which will include law breaking wherever necessary, to keep themselves there. For a while they will eat up the fruits of our labor, demanding more and more as poverty increases, until those who produce, who build up and maintain the structure of society, are so weak and emaciated that it all comes crashing down.
When the sh@t hits the fan, become predator, not prey.
I hope I am wrong but the connection doesn’t look good!
Did we just see a payoff for Snowe’s vote by appointing John R. McKernan, husband of Sen. Olympia Snowe, (R) Maine to the board of Directors to Chicago based Borg Warner Corp.?
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?id=33390&seenIt=1
:...Chicago-based BorgWarner Inc., which makes most of its sales to the Detroit Three, has been cutting hourly staff just about every month. Kay Manufacturing Co. of Calumet City was nearly paralyzed in December due to a lack of orders...”
Search ResultsBorgWarner Appoints John R. McKernan Jr. to Board of Directors ...
29 Jul 2009 ... AUBURN HILLS, Mich., July 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — BorgWarner (NYSE: BWA) announced today that John McKernan, 61, has been named to its ...
www.reuters.com/.../idUS240750+29-Jul-2009+PRN20090729 - Cached - Similar
Lets hope global warming deploys a glacier over the entire state of Maine destroying every living thing in it. Just as a token of our appreciation for their gift of the not lovely and not gracious Sen. Snow
Worthless skank. Send her packing.
She wants to see her face hear her voice on tv. She is a poster child for term limits.
I do not support the denigration of peas
It’ll be interesting to see what she got for selling her butthole to the Dems *this* time.
If you want to punish Senator Snowe and pull her back to the right, there are two priorities:
1. help elect GOP governors in Virginia and New Jersey in three weeks
2. help defeat Blanche Lincoln and Harry Reid in 2010
She'll be the new HERO for the RAT party!
HEAR, HEAR!!
Health care stock getting shellacked now. Down 3-8% across the board. 5-year lows in some of them by year’s end.
Ugly people vote with OTHER UGLY PEOPLE!
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