Free Republic

The Ohio Hypo: GOP State Legislature Voids Election, Appoints Electors "The most shocking Electoral College result, however, would be for a state legislature to take the selection of the state's electors away from the voters. Swing state Ohio, with its 18 electors, makes for a good, worst-case hypothetical: assume that on the night of November 6, President Obama narrowly wins the popular vote in Ohio, which in turn gives him a small victory in the Electoral College tabulation (also assume all Obama-pledged electors remain faithful). By high noon on Wednesday, November 7, the GOP majority in the Ohio House of...

Jesse Jackson isn't the only activist that can use corporate boycotts for political purposes. Starting next year, the huge Tea Party organizer FreedomWorks will urge supporters to punish huge corporations like General Electric and Johnson and Johnson for backing President Obama's progressive agenda. FreedomWorks president Matt Kibbe says: "Tea Party activists are willing to tackle progressive CEOs just as they tackled progressive politicians. Judging by the results of the midterm elections, progressive CEOs should buckle up, because Tea Party activists are going to give them a very bumpy ride." His project partner, Tom Borelli, director of the National Center for...

...the Yeas and Nays of the Members of either House on any question shall, at the Desire of one fifth of those Present, be entered on the Journal.

For Democrats, the medicine cabinet is mostly empty, save for “a poisonous pill called reconciliation,” says Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), the ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee, to National Review Online. That’s the Senate budget procedure enabling a bill to pass with 51 votes. As Democrats plot to keep Obamacare alive, they seem ready to pop that pill and “swallow the consequences,” says Gregg. Before they try, Gregg cautions that such a maneuver is, “procedurally, an extremely heavy lift in the Senate” and “unrealistic.” Democrats, he says, should “learn the lessons of Massachusetts, and stop playing by the...

Struggling to salvage health reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have begun considering a list of changes to the Senate bill in hopes of making it acceptable to liberal House members, according to sources familiar with the situation. The changes could be included in separate legislation that, if passed, would pave the way for House approval of the Senate bill — a move that would preserve President Barack Obama's vision of a sweeping health reform plan. But the move comes with political risk, because it would open Democrats up to charges that they pressed ahead...

December 9, 2009 In Tuesday's primary election, Massachusetts Democrats chose as their Senate nominee a woman who kept a clearly innocent man in prison in order to advance her political career. Martha Coakley isn't even fit for the late Teddy Kennedy's old seat. (What is it about this particular Senate seat?) During the daycare/child molestation hysteria of the '80s, Gerald Amirault, his mother, Violet, and sister, Cheryl, were accused of raping children at the family's preschool in Malden, Mass., in what came to be known as the second-most notorious witch trial in Massachusetts history. The allegations against the Amiraults were...

As the Senate gets close to the end of the first week of debate on Obamacare, a controversy swirled today around a letter and memo drafted by Senator Judd Gregg (R-NH), as linked by Politico, titled “Foundation for Minority Party’s Rights in the Senate.” The memo explains the rules of the Senate and how the minority party can use the rules to insure that a “full, complete, and fully informed debate on all measures and issues coming before the Senate.” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took to the Senate floor this morning to complain about the document, but the...

Democrats are touting the American Medical Association's endorsement of President Obama's health plan. But there's an important reason why the American College of Surgeons and 18 other specialty groups are opposed. The plan's most tangible efforts to restrain medical costs are through its controls on specialist physicians. Based on the government's premise that they often make wasteful treatment decisions, the health-care legislation in Congress will subject doctors to a mix of financial penalties and regulations to constrain their use of the most costly clinical options. The penalties and regulations are aimed first and foremost at surgeons and the medical devices...

-snip- ...begin by considering the narrowness of the vote by which the House passed its version of the bill in November: 220–215. ... on January 3, Florida Democratic congressman Bob Wexler will resign — and ...Republican Joseph Cao, the one GOP member who voted for the House bill, has reportedly said he won’t be the deciding vote... That means the effective baseline Pelosi is working with is 218–216. .-snip- 60 representatives stated they would not support a health-care bill (like the Senate’s) with no public option; 41 pledged to vote against any bill “that contains language that restricts women’s right...

Earlier in the week, the American Medical Association (AMA), the nation’s largest physician organization, declared its backing for the most recent version of Obamacare. Doctors are notoriously bad businessman and, judging from the AMA’s haste to support pretty much any bill Congress proposes, it seems that negotiating is not the strong suit of physicians, either. During the prolonged health-care debate, the AMA sought two sensible reforms: an abolishment of the SGR and tort reform. The Sustainable Growth Rate (SGR) is a formula utilized by Medicare to determine Medicare physician reimbursement rates for the following year. Every year since 2002, the...

WASHINGTON — The Nevada Cancer Institute, in Las Vegas, may not have a national reputation as a clinic or a research facility. But it does have the ear of its state’s senior senator, Harry Reid, the Democratic leader. And that is why the four-year-old institute could reap a big gain in federal reimbursements as part of the health care overhaul. Thanks to Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Cancer Institute could benefit from the health bill. After months of noisy public debates over big policy ideas like universal coverage and a public insurance option, the health care legislation is getting down...

The likely victors are insurance giants such as UnitedHealth Group (UNH), Aetna (AET), and WellPoint (WLP). The carriers have succeeded in redefining the terms of the reform debate to such a degree that no matter what specifics emerge in the voluminous bill Congress may send to President Obama this fall, the insurance industry will emerge more profitable. Executives from UnitedHealth certainly showed no signs of worry when Senate Democrats proposed to help pay for reform with a new tax on the insurance industry. Instead, UnitedHealth parked a shiny 18-wheeler outfitted with high-tech medical gear near the Capitol and invited members...

President Obama has promised to pay for health care reform mostly by ridding the system of wasteful spending. The message is that reform will be painless: We're cutting the fat, not the meat. But what if your paycheck is part of the fat? More to the point: Does cutting back on wasteful health care spending mean that doctors will make less money? Actually, let's split that question in two. The first is whether U.S. doctors are overpaid. The second is whether paying them less would save all that much. The answers, respectively: yes and no. There's no question that doctors...

Former Kansas Democrat Governor Kathleen Sebelius won Senate confirmation as Health and Human Services Secretary. But the real power lies with with newly-created health czar Nancy-Ann Min DeParle. Her official title: Director of the White House Office for Health Reform. DeParle ran the behemoth Medicare and Medicaid programs under Bill Clinton. She parlayed her government experience into a lucrative private-sector stint. Over the past three years, she made nearly $6 million from her work in the health care industry. Despite President Obama’s loud denunciations of the revolving-door lobbyist culture in Washington, DeParle’s industry ties didn’t bother the White House. She...

AMA endorses House healthcare bill House Democrats got some good news on health reform in the form of a key endorsement from an influential interest group: the American Medical Association (AMA). The AMA endorsed the measure in a letter to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) on Thursday. “On behalf of the Board of Trustees of the American Medical Association, I am writing to express our appreciation and support” for the House bill, wrote Michael Maves, the AMA’s executive vice president and CEO. “We urge members of the House Education and Labor, Energy and Commerce, and Ways and...

House Health Care Bill Taxes Millionaires House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other leaders from the House of Representatives on Tuesday unveiled the House version of health care reform legislation. The measure, among other things, would impose a new income tax on the wealthiest Americans and mandate all Americans get health insurance. Pelosi and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who is responsible for health care reform in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, stood under a banner today that read "Quality affordable health care for the middle class," while promising the bill would pass before Congress breaks for its August recess, the...

In light of recent reports that Vice President Cheney had ordered the CIA to withhold information about a counterrorism program that was being planned during the Bush administration, on Sunday ABCÂ’s George Stephanopoulos on both Good Morning America and on This Week suggested that the revelations may be "vindication" for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, or that they at least "bolster" her claims about the CIA lying to her. Stephanopoulos even seemed to be pushing Pelosi to claim "vindication" even while the SpeakerÂ’s office was reluctant to do so. Stephanopoulos, from Good Morning America: "I spoke with Speaker Pelosi's office about...

I am constantly seeing examples of Freepers getting "flamed" for "duplicate posting". Sermo.com has some sort of filter that automatically checks your post for duplicates. Mods please take note maybe this will help

Seniors may think they save money when they buy AARP insurance, but if they take the trouble to compare competing products, they may be paying twice as much. AARP brought in nearly half a billion dollars in 2007 from fees insurers pay for AARP endorsement. It also gained about $40 million from holding the clients’ premiums for a month and investing them. The revenue helps pay down the $200 million bond debt that funded the organization’s brass and marble headquarters in Washington, D.C.—which is closed to visitors, purportedly so staff can work. Royalties and fees now constitute about 43% of...

The fringe group also includes a list of heroes. Their heroes consist of Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army (BLA), cop killers, and terrorists. One such hero is Joanne Chesimard aka Assata Shakur, the aunt of dead rapper Tupac Shakur. Chesimard-Shakur was convicted as an accomplice in the 1973 execution style murder of NJ State Trooper Foerster and the wounding of Trooper Harper. She escaped from prison, eluded capture for many years and fled to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum by Fidel Castro. When Chesimard participated in the murder of Trooper Foerster, she was a member of the...